Without conscience: Medical experimentation and torture

BY SUSAN BROOKS THISTLETHWAITE

The moral slippery slope down which Americans have been sliding in the use and justification of the torture of detainees in the so-called "war on terror" just got steeper. Physicians for Human Rights has just released a report that documents new evidence they have uncovered indicating that after 9/11, during the Bush Administration, illegal experimentation on detainees was conducted. Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the "Enhanced" Interrogation Program details the role of health professionals in research and experimentation on the torture of detainees. The report calls for an investigation by the Department of Justice into these alleged activities.

Physicians for Human Rights is a Nobel Prize-winning organization that "mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to life of all." The group has issued this white paper to draw attention to the fact that the role of health professionals in the CIA "enhanced interrogations programs, i.e. the torture of prisoners, was not limited to "monitoring" but extended to collecting comparative data that was used to draw conclusions about the comparative efficacy of different kinds torture. It was research. Medical personnel engaged in this research to help "improve" these methods and assess "susceptibility to severe pain." In addition, human research and experimentation was applied directly to waterboarding to measure its effects and try to adapt it to avoid fatalities.

These alleged experiments violate the professional standards of medical personnel on human subject research and experimentation. The American Medical Associations' Code of Ethics directly prohibits health professionals from using their skills and expertise in any form of interrogation. In addition to professional violations, however, if medical personnel participated in these ways in the torture of detainees, they broke the law. In the U.S., the "Common Rule" governs all people subject to medical research and experimentation, including research conducted b the CIA and the Department of Defense. They may also be guilty of war crimes.

(According to the Times, the C.I.A. denied the group's charges. "The report is just wrong," said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.")

The principles that should guide medical experimentation are "respect, beneficence, and justice." We require that human subject research be conducted on volunteers who are informed and who consent. Detainees were obviously not "volunteers," the pain to which they were subjected was not for a beneficial purpose, and had no relationship to justice or respect.

An additional shocking allegation in the report is that one of the reasons for the medical experimentation was to give legal cover to those conducting the torture. The Bush Administration, through its lawyers, attempted to "re-brand" torture as "enhanced interrogation" and establish "acceptable" levels of harm. The presence of medical professionals gives cover to this idea, and to the idea that it is possible to cause harm and not call it torture. This is a deeply corrupting idea, for it permits those involved in torturing to delude themselves into thinking that they are not committing crimes against humanity.

Torture is wrong; it is always wrong and there is no "acceptable" level of torturing someone. Torture assaults human dignity in a profound way, both for the tortured and also for the torturer. Pain becomes an end in itself. Torture has never been shown to be effective in obtaining information. It does not "keep us safe," it is the very thing that continues to cause the United States to lose respect around the world, and thus it makes us less safe.

The "medical cover" for torture takes us further down the slippery slope where Americans conclude that the standards of acceptable human decency do not, somehow, apply to us. If these charges in the report of Physicians for Human Rights are investigated and proved by the Department of Justice, the conduct of health professionals in doing research on how to make torture more effective is truly horrible.

And why do I even have to ask if the charges will be investigated? I have to ask, because I, at least, am not sure anybody at the Department of Justice will think it is necessary to investigate these allegations from an internationally respected organization. That's how far down the slope we've slid.