In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.
He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.
‘The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations,’ Miles said in this week’s edition of Lancet. ‘Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib.'” (Associated Press )
One of my readers alluded to this study in a comment on another post on medical ethics, but it certainly deserves to be put out front. The medical profession has always considered such breaches as failures of individual ethical responsibility, and taken individual disciplinary action. This is consistent with the official whitewash of the Abu Ghraib scandal, where I predict (and have predicted) that official ‘soulsearching’ will ignore systemic permissiveness and facilitation of abuse in the military command structure and Pentagon/administration culture, blaming only the ‘morally depraved’ perpetrators. The evidence of medical and psychiatric participation in the abuses calls for an examination of broader issues of the corruption of inherent medical standards when used to support an immoral war machine.
