WASHINGTON – U.S. Army doctors violated the Geneva Conventions by helping intelligence officers carry out abusive interrogations at military detention centers, and perhaps participating in torture, according to a report in today’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Medical personnel helped tailor interrogations to the physical and mental conditions of individual detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the report claims. It says medical workers gave interrogators access to patient medical files and that psychiatrists and other physicians collaborated with interrogators and guards, who in turn deprived detainees of sleep, restricted them to diets of bread and water, and exposed them to extremes of heat and cold.
“Clearly, the medical personnel who helped to develop and execute aggressive counterresistance plans thereby breached the laws of war,” says the four-page article. “The conclusion that doctors participated in torture is premature, but there is probable cause for suspecting it.”
The report was written by Gregg Bloche, a law professor at Georgetown University and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and by Jonathan Marks, a London barrister who is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and Johns Hopkins. It was based on interviews with more than two dozen military personnel and on a review of documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act.
Pentagon officials said Wednesday that the report was inaccurate and misrepresented the positions and acts of military officials. Doctors did not violate the Geneva Conventions, said William Winkenwerder, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. Some functioned as consultants to intelligence officers, but never acted unethically, he said.
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