Oath Betrayed:
Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror
by Steven Miles
From The Washington Post — Peter D. Kramer
Vulnerable in body and mind, we look to our physicians for compassion – which makes torture that’s abetted by the medical profession especially horrific. Jacobo Timerman, a victim of Argentina’s “dirty war,” wrote of the special pain of seeing a doctor present in the interrogation room, of the sense of abandonment that lay in knowing that a person of science “is with you when you are tortured by the beasts.”
... A 1999 ruling of the American Medical Association’s judicial council ... prohibits U.S. physicians from “providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture” and obliges doctors to support victims and to “strive to change situations in which torture is practiced.”
... In August 2004, Steven H. Miles, a bioethicist and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, reported in the British medical journal the Lancet that the United States had, in effect, returned to the era of the torture doctor. In Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Miles wrote, “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations.” Miles’s charges were detailed: Death certificates had been falsified, he wrote, and military health personnel had reported incidences of torture belatedly, if at all.
Oath Betrayed is Miles’s expansion of his Lancet article. It is rich in examples. Miles describes the work of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (known as BSCTs, or “biscuits”) active in Iraq and Guantanamo: groups of psychiatrists and psychologists who used detainees’ medical charts and test data to devise “physically and psychologically coercive interrogation plans” ... . ...
Expanding on his 2004 charge that medical personnel were rigging death certificates, Miles writes of an Afghan prisoner named Dilawar, an innocent 22-year-old who drove his taxi to “the wrong place at the wrong time.” At the U.S. airfield detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan, in December 2002, Miles reports, Dilawar was suffocated with a sandbag and then shackled, suspended by his arms and beaten until his legs were (in the words of the coroner) “pulpified.” He was then chained to the ceiling of his cell, where he died. Although a Dec. 13 autopsy called Dilawar’s death a homicide, Miles writes, Gen. Daniel McNeil told reporters in February that Dilawar had died of natural causes on the grounds that one of his coronary arteries was partly occluded. The words “coronary artery disease” were typed in a different font on the prisoner’s death certificate.
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Miles’s book lends strong support to the absolutist foes of torture, on humane and practical grounds alike. His numerous examples of heedless cruelty make the case that authorizing torture creates a subculture that knows nothing of proportionality; if torture is permitted in the rare crisis, it will be put to use routinely. He also argues convincingly that confessions elicited under torture are of dubious reliability. In July 2004, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan protested the Uzbek intelligence service’s interrogation practices: “Tortured dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the U.S. and UK to believe. . . . This material is useless – we are selling our souls for dross.”
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From a review by Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command
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The graphic photographs of U.S. military personnel grinning over abused Arab and Muslim prisoners shocked the world community. That the United States was systematically torturing inmates at prisons run by its military and civilian leaders divided the nation and brought deep shame to many. When Steven H. Miles, an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights, learned of the neglect, mistreatment, and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, one of his first thoughts was: “Where were the prison doctors while the abuses were taking place?”
In Oath Betrayed, Miles explains the answer to this question. Not only were doctors, nurses, and medics silent while prisoners were abused; physicians and psychologists provided information that helped determine how much and what kind of mistreatment could be delivered to detainees during interrogation. Additionally, these harsh examinations were monitored by health professionals operating under the purview of the U.S. military.
Miles has based this book on meticulous research and a wealth of resources, including unprecedented eyewitness accounts from actual victims of prison abuse, and more than thirty-five thousand pages of documentation acquired through provisions of the Freedom of Information Act: army criminal investigations, FBI notes on debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports, and prisoners’ medical records. These documents tell a story markedly different from the official version of the truth, revealing involvement at every level of government, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon’s senior health officials to prison health-care personnel.
Oath Betrayed is not a denunciation of American military policy or of war in general, but of a profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the United States armed forces and of America’s abdication of its leadership role in international human rights. This book is a vital document that will both open minds and reinvigorate Americans’ understanding of why human rights matter, so that we can reaffirm and fortify the rules for international civil society.
“This, quite simply, is the most devastating and detailed investigation into a question that has remained a no-no in the current debate on American torture in George Bush’s war on terror: the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel. Dr. Miles writes in a white rage, with great justification–but he lets the facts tell the story.”
“What Have We Become?” by Edwin C. Pauzer
In less than 170 pages you will come away with unassailable facts about our treatment of prisoners or detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay: 1) American servicemen and women tortured and murdered detainees. 2) Many of our doctors, psychologists, nurses, medics and other health practitioners were complicit in these murders and tortures. 3) These tortures and murders were not the acts of a “few bad apples” as some have claimed. 4) The highest levels of our administration sanctioned these tortures.
American servicemen and women beat, tortured, maimed, humiliated, neglected and murdered detainees. One Afghan taxi driver caught in a sweep was beaten so badly about his legs, the doctor said they were “pulpified.” Had he survived, both legs would have had to be amputated. He was found to be innocent two days after his death in detention. Men and women were made to pose or crawl naked, sit naked in extreme air conditioning or heat up to 130 degrees. The first execution of an American citizen in Iraq came twelve days after the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib had been released.
Doctors, nurses and other health care providers covered up murders by guards. And this is the question that brought the author Oath Betrayed. He asks where were the doctors when all this was going on. Why weren’t they reporting it, and why weren’t they stopping it?
There were a number of detainee deaths due to heart attacks brought on by positional asphyxia from being forced to wear sacks over their heads. The cause of such heart attacks is easy to detect. These were homicides, yet the doctors simply listed them as heart attack victims. Psychiatrists and psychologists developed strategies for breaking the will of detainees, and made their medical records available to their interrogators, if they maintained medical records at all. Doctors examined and manipulated dietary consumption and medication to ensure detainees could sustain interrogation.
These tortures and murders were not the acts of a few bad apples ... . Such interrogations, and inhumane treatment were commonplace. Some detainees known as “ghosts” were sent to countries were they would be beaten and tortured. These acts were sanctioned by battalion commanders and base commanders, from division commanders to theater commanders. The lower ranks take their cues from their commanders. Had they made it clear they would be court-martialed for such behavior at the very least, it would not have happened.
The highest levels of our administration sanctioned these tortures. ... Donald Rumsfeld wrote or even approved of interrogation policy in direct contravention to the Geneva Conventions, Attorneys general John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, and the President of the United States, George W. Bush were complicit in this. It was the attorney generals who got our Justice Department to declare that Afghanistan was a “failed state” which meant the Geneva Conventions did not apply. They rewrote a definition of torture stating it was torture only if it caused permanent effects, organ failure, or death. ...
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(And people like Dick Clark had the nerve to send an open email to everyone asking us to boycott CBS because 60 Minutes broke the Abu Ghraib story wide open. Isn’t there something wrong with where our shock and ire are being directed?) ...