Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program | Democracy Now!
Physicians for Human Rights is calling for a federal commission
to investigate, document and hold accountable all health professionals
who took part in CIA torture. Last week, the group released a report titled "Doing Harm: Health Professionals’ Central Role in the CIA
Torture Program." The report finds medical personnel connected to the
torture program may have committed war crimes by conducting human
experimentation on prisoners in violation of the Nuremberg Code that
grew out of the trial of Nazi officials and doctors after World War II.
We speak with Nathaniel Raymond, a research ethics adviser for
Physicians for Human Rights, who co-wrote the new report. "We now see
clear evidence of the essential, integral role that health professionals
played as the legal heat shield for the Bush administration — their
get-out-of-jail-free card," Raymond says.
"There has often been this narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were
the lone gunmen of torture, that they were doing this out of their
garage," Raymond explains. "They were operating inside a superstructure
of medicalized torture. It was not just them alone. It includes
physicians’ assistants, doctors and it may include other professionals.
What they were doing was everything from 'care' to actual monitoring,
calibration and design of the tactics."
