HYPO-CRITIC OATH

Doctors Faulted in Torture

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 20, 2004 ONDON -
Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, Dr. Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota School of Medicine calls for reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found."The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet."Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread medical complicity was, aspects Miles said he is investigating. Miles is a doctor at the medical school's Center for Bioethics.A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon's own investigation."Many of these cases remain under investigation and charges will be brought against any individual where there is evidence of abuse," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, Army spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq.Photographs of prisoners being abused and humiliated by U.S. troops in Iraq have sparked worldwide condemnation. Although the conduct of soldiers has been scrutinized, the role of medical staff in the scandal has received relatively little attention."The detaining power's health personnel are the first and often the last line of defense against human rights abuses. Their failure to assume that role emphasizes to the prisoner how utterly beyond humane appeal they are," Miles said in an interview.Miles gathered evidence from congressional hearings, sworn statements of detainees and soldiers, medical journal accounts and media reports to build a picture of physician complicity, and in isolated cases, participation by medical personnel in abuse at the Baghdad prison, as well as in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.In one example, cited in a sworn statement from an Abu Ghraib detainee, a prisoner collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating. Medical staff revived the detainee and left, allowing the abuse to continue, Miles reported.A military police officer reported a medic inserted an intravenous tube into a detainee's corpse after torture to create evidence he was alive at the hospital, Miles said.At prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heatstroke or natural causes without noting the unnatural [cause] of the death," Miles wrote.He cites an example from a Human Rights Watch report in which a beaten detainee was tied to his cell door and gagged.The death certificate indicated "natural causes ... during his sleep." However, after media coverage, the Pentagon changed the cause of death to homicide by blunt force injuries and suffocation.
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