Once again The Talking Dog is offering an original blog interview on an aspect of the war against terror and the controversy of detainees. We’ve run links to many of the interviews, because the quality of the questions are so good (TTD is an attorney). TTD’s interviews can be quite controversial…and he doesn’t disappoint this time.
Once again, we don’t want to quote from a lot of it because it’ll take too much out of context and it needs to be read in full. We’ll give you the intro and an excerpt:
Dr. Steven Miles is the author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror, a scathing examination of the failings of members of the medical profession serving in the military with respect to treatment of prisoners held by American forces in the war on terror, demonstrating such abuses as medical personnel participating in coercive interrogations if not outright torture (including using prisoners’ own medical records against them), preparing misleading, if not outright falsifying, medical records including death certificates, and failing to advocate for prisoners being placed in dangerous situations (e.g., such as under weapons fire, or in dangerously unsanitary conditions). Dr. Miles expanded on an article on this subject he published in the Lancet in 2004, relying on an examination of declassified, publicly available documents from our government and military.
Dr. Miles is a practicing physician, bioethicist, and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. He has served as a chief medical officer in a Cambodian refugee camp, worked on AIDS prevention in Sudan, tsunami relief in Indonesia, worked with the research committee of the Center for Victims of Torture, and has been honored wth the Distinguished Service Award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, and was named the 2004 “Minnesotan of the Year.”
On September 15, 2006, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Miles by e-mail exchange.
An excerpt:
The Talking Dog: Since your book was published, three Guantanamo detainees have committed suicide. Do you have a view on medical personnel complicity in that, to wit, do you believe that medical personnel at Guantanamo are complicit in those suicides, and if so how? Do you have a view on the ethics of forcefeeding hunger striking prisoners at Guantanamo (or elsewhere)?
Steven Miles:On June 11, three men at Guantanamo hung themselves to death with bits of cloth. Guantanamo did what it was designed to do, break prisoners down. In February 2003, the US government declined to answer Amnesty International’s request for an evaluation of why many prisoners were attempting suicide at Guantanamo. The Defense Department concealed those efforts under the euphemisms of “hanging gestures” and “manipulative self injurious behavior.”The policy of breaking prisoners down was run from the top down. In April 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld directed, “Interrogations must always be planned, deliberate actions that take into account . . . a detainee’s emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses. Interrogation approaches are designed to manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation.” This translated into a policy of integrating the treatment of prisons in the interrogation rooms and the cellblocks under a single interrogation plan.
Breaking prisoners down became a medical specialty. Mental illness was ignored. Signs of beatings went unrecorded in medical charts. Medical interviews and records were culled for clues on prisoners’ vulnerabilities. Mental health personnel monitored interrogations and reported to interrogators. When the prisoners, most of whom know nothing of terrorism, protested or despaired by refusing to eat, clinicians strapped them into chairs and force fed them so that their indeterminate sentences could continue.
Five days before the prisoner’s suicides, the Defense Department issued a document entitled, “Medical Program Support for Detainee Operations.” It endorses the old abuses. It does not say that clinicians must obey the Geneva Conventions for Prisoners of War or the US War Crimes Act. It says that clinicians “shall not certify the fitness of detainees for any form of treatment or punishment that is not in accordance with applicable law.” But, this wording allows doctors to certify prisoners for harsh interrogation in accord with our Orwellian interpretation of International law.
It makes the prisoners’ hunger strike protests illegal without abolishing the unlawful prison procedures that have engendered those strikes. When a prison is designed to make war on disarmed captives, it is easy to understand how a Rear Admiral Harry Harris could lose his bearings and claim that these suicides were “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.”
There’s a ton more. Read it in its entirety.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.