Originally published on the CGS blog on May 8, 2007.
As the issue of “aggressive” interrogation has become increasingly prevalent on the public radar since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, the words of one commentator that torture reflects a problem with the barrel rather than merely a few bad apples (in reference to officially sanctioned U.S. interrogation policy), seems clear.
Reports abound about the methods used against suspected enemy combatants by military and CIA interrogators at notorious facilities such as Bagram Airbase and so-called “black sites” across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But now a new book entitled “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror” by Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, takes a look specifically at the complicity of the medical profession in abusive interrogation.
Miles concludes that:
“In U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, medical personnel helped determine the nature and severity of torture. They ignored abuse. And they covered up the most heinous cases.”
These assertions, although not the first time they?ve been made, offer a chilling insight into the situation.
He sums up by qualifying one of the key facets of the End Torture Campaign , saying that “we need to go back to the framework of international law that we would be proud to uphold.”
