Last week, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released its long awaited report describing the techniques the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used to interrogate suspected terrorists and other combatants captured during our long running War on Terror.
The so-called Torture Report, the product of a five-year investigation by the Democrat-led Senate, described in harrowing detail the methods used by CIA agents to extract information from detainees, including: waterboarding; sleep deprivation; light deprivation; threats to physically harm or sexually assault individuals, their children or their adult relatives; and "rectal feeding". Many of these techniques blatantly violated the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements on humanitarian treatment of prisoners of war.
Not surprisingly, the political firestorm that release of this 6,700-page report ignited has been fierce. Many Republican politicians and conservative pundits have condemned the report as flawed, biased, and potentially damaging to US interests.
Others, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and other key architects of the War on Terror, have defended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, claiming that countless lives were saved and disputing allegations that any US laws or international treaties were violated. Only a few politicians and pundits on the right, most notably Arizona Senator John McCain (himself a former POW who was tortured), have stood up to defend the report.
On the other side of the political aisle, the response has been fairly muted. While progressive organizations and advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch have called for criminal investigation of senior Bush Administration officials and CIA operatives involved in the interrogation of prisoners, Democratic politicians and the Obama Administration have largely rejected calls to prosecute those involved. This is, I believe, a rather shrewd and calculated political move.
For this commentary, however, I don't want dwell on the issue of whether or not the activities described in the Senate's report question long-standing notions of American exceptionalism: the idea our country stands as a moral exemplar to the rest of the world. Instead, I want to focus on a more practical question: what does the fact that hundreds of doctors, nurses, and psychologists participated in the interrogation of CIA prisoners say about the healthcare profession as a whole?
We now know that CIA staff physicians and psychologists were involved in almost every interrogation session. This is in direct violation of all known codes of medical ethics, including the Hippocratic Oath, the American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics, the American Psychological Association's (APA) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, and the World Medical Association's Declaration of Tokyo. Despite a primary duty to "do no harm" (primum non nocere), a number of medical professionals have been directly involved in helping the US government, the CIA, and other military and intelligence agencies come up with new and creative ways of torturing prisoners.
For some healthcare professionals, torture is also a lucrative business. Two psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, helped the CIA develop its interrogation program. In exchange, they received more than $80 million from the US government.
Consider a few examples of physician involvement in torture outlined in the Senate report: Clinicians with the CIA's Office of Medical Services, the agency that provides healthcare to Agency employees, decided when detainees' injuries were sufficiently healed such that agents could again interrogating them. A team of physicians determined which prisoners should be waterboarded, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
At one detention site, even though a prisoner's feet were badly broken, the examining doctor nevertheless recommended that he be forced to stand for nearly 52 hours in order to extract information. Nurses and doctors also used rectal feeding and hydration -- forcible injection of water, saline and even a pureed mix of hummus, nuts and pasta through the anus -- despite the fact there is no physiological benefit to rectal feeding.
Few of these healthcare professionals are likely to face any consequences. To date, only one clinician has ever been sanctioned for their involvement in torture: a Navy nurse who refused to force-feed prisoners who were on an extended hunger strike at Guantanamo. He will probably be discharged from the military. He may also face criminal prosecution for failing to obey orders.
He will likely be the only medical professional prosecuted. The Obama Administration has largely given a "Get Out of Jail Free" card to everyone involved. In a briefing given by the White House following the release of the Senate's torture report, for example, a senior official with the US Department of concluding that the CIA's enhanced interrogation activities were "authorized" and "reviewed as legal" at the time they occurred.
While the AMA and the APA have condemned the actions of the clinicians and psychologists mentioned in the report, as professional organizations with no legal or licensing authority, there is little they can do to punish those involved. State medical licensing boards could suspect or revoke permission to practice, they probably won't.
It is sad that the perpetrators of these crimes will face no sanction. It is sadder still that politicians, policymakers and the general public will largely ignore the Senate’s report. I can only hope that outrage in the medical community over these and other acts (such as physician involvement in state-sanctioned executions) leads to a change in the way healthcare workers treat suspected terrorists and other prisoners.
A public health researcher and ethicist by training, Dr. Sean Philpott-Jones is Director of the Bioethics Program at Union Graduate College-Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Schenectady, New York. He is also Director of Union Graduate College's Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership, and Project Director of its two NIH-funded research ethics training programs in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Caribbean Basin.
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