Report claims doctors aided alleged CIA torture

Medical professionals supervising detainees of the United States' war on terror aided the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of Defense (DOD) in the alleged torturing and harming of patients in their care, claims a report released Monday by Columbia University's Institute on Medicine as a Profession and the Open Society Foundations.

The report, based on two years of research by a 20-member task force, is called Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror (PDF).

It details how since September 11, 2001, the DOD and CIA established interventions by military and intelligence agency doctors and psychologists that breached ethical standards of the medical profession, inflicting severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody.

These interventions included: aiding cruel and degrading interrogations; helping devise and implement practices designed to maximize disorientation and anxiety so as to make detainees more malleable for interrogation; and participating in the application of excruciatingly painful methods of force-feeding of mentally competent detainees carrying out hunger strikes.

Last summer, more than 100 detainees at the U.S. Navy base of Guantanamo in Cuba went on hunger strike; many were forced-fed through tubes shoved down their noses and into their stomachs, a practice condemned by human rights groups.

"It's clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice. We have a responsibility to make sure this never happens again," said Task Force member Dr. Gerald Thomson, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Columbia University.

The report pushes for the DOD and CIA to follow professional standards of conduct to allow medics to adhere to their ethical principles so that they are able to aid and not injure the detainees they encounter.