The report alleges that the violations occurred in military detention centers like Guantanamo Bay, where procedures like forcefeeding have been called torture and detainees were reportedly forcibly injected with “mind altering drugs.”
The Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers concluded that medical professionals working with the government “designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees.”
The report is based on two years of reviewing public domain records by a 19-member panel made up of experts in the military, medical, ethics, public health and legal sectors.
Medical professionals were told by the CIA and Department of Defense that the classic ethical commitment of “first do no harm” essentially did not apply because “they were not treating people who were ill,”
according to the Guardian.
Some of the interventions used by doctors associated with military and intelligence agencies include “involvement in abusive interrogation, consulting on conditions of confinement to increase the disorientation and anxiety of detainees, using medical information for interrogation purposes and force-feeding of hunger strikers,” according to the press release.
A great deal of blame is placed on the Department of Defense. The task force alleged that the department “failed to uphold recommendations by the Army Surgeon General to adopt international standards for medical reporting of abuse against detainees,” among other ethical breaches.
The doctors also broke doctor-patient confidentiality in order to use medical and psychological information against detainees during interrogations.
“Putting on a uniform does not and should not abrogate the fundamental principles of medical professionalism,” said David Rothman, the president of the Institute on Medicine As a Profession (IMAP), the group that co-sponsored the report with the Open Society Institute.
IMAP is based out of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, while the Open Society Institute is part of the George Soros-founded Open Society Foundations.
“‘Do no harm’ and ‘put patient interest first’ must apply to all physicians regardless of where they practice,” Rothman said.
Spokesmen for the CIA and Pentagon both disputed some of the task force’s findings, saying that the allegations are not new.
“They have been subject to numerous investigations over the years, and those investigations — which had access to more information than the authors of this report — have never substantiated these claims,” said Lt. Col. J Todd Breasseale, a Defense Department spokesman, according to The Los Angeles Times.
Breasseale also apparently defended the practice of “force feeding,” which some entities consider to be torture. He said the Pentagon “will not knowingly allow a detainee to commit suicide — not by means of a weapon, medication, nor self- or peer-imposed starvation.”
Of Guantanamo’s 164 prisoners, 14 continue to regularly refuse to eat food and are approved for “enteral feeding,” Breasseale said.
Dean Boyd, a CIA spokesman, said the report contains “serious inaccuracies and erroneous conclusions,” the Times reports.
Boyd said that the CIA has no detainees in its custody at this time and the “rendition, detention and interrogation program” ceased with a 2009 executive order issued by President Obama.
However, one apparent rendition occurred in early October in Libya.
The report concludes that most of the worst of the alleged abuses took place before 2006 and some of the practices no longer occur.
“Abuse of detainees, and health professional participation in this practice, is not behind us as a country,” said Leonard Rubenstein, a legal scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Public Health at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Berman Institute of Bioethics and member of the task force. “Force-feeding by physicians in violation of ethical standards is illustrative of a much broader legacy in which medical professionalism has been undermined.”
The report calls on a full investigation of the medical practice in U.S. detention facilities along with the public release of the review of CIA practices conducted by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It also calls on the Defense Department and CIA to follow the international medical standards on the treatment of detainees.
The task force calls on the government to make it clear that medical professionals will be disciplined if they support interrogation and participate in torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees.
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