Medical Experimentation on Detainees
In a review of The Torture Papers—a collection of investigations by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)—Professor Steven Vladeck says that medical personnel’s involvement in the interrogation of CIA detainees might have been of the nature of experimentation.
The report purports that doctors could have been used as a legal shield—that the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel reasoned that medical personnel could ensure that so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques did not cross the threshold of “severe physical and mental pain.”
However, the PHR report says that physicians were doing more than simply observing, they were collecting data from interrogations, then analyzing that and “sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations.” Such action, Vladeck says, could rise to the level of war crimes or crimes against humanity, regardless of whether the interrogation techniques themselves were legal or illegal. That is, regardless of whether the interrogations rose to the level of torture, both domestic and international law prohibits medical experimentation on prisoners or detainees.
The Common Rule prohibits research without the consent of the subject. And the Nuremberg Code—the genesis of which was the U.S.-led Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors—makes medical experimentation that has no “fruitful results for the good of society,” and is conducted without “the voluntary consent of the human subject” a war crime.
Since almost all information surrounding the CIA interrogation program remains classified, “it would be imprudent to speculate on what specifically happened, or who may actually be liable,” Vladeck’s post says. He continues, “The larger point, though, is that these charges only reinvigorate a point that I’m neither the first nor last to make: We still don’t know what we don’t know about the EITs, about who was behind them, and about how they were implemented. Thus, this Report is not about the well-worn debate over whether or not torture was committed, or, alternatively, whether individual techniques constituted ‘torture.’ Regardless of the legality of the individual interrogation techniques, any non-consensual medical experimentation would have been against both federal and international law.”
Read more at Paging Dr. Mengele: Medical Experimentation and the CIA Detainees
I’m glad that there are those who demand responsibility on the part of those sectors of the government and academia involved in non consensual experimentation at US prisons abroad. A further question would be – when are they going to demand the human and civil rights of citizenry exposed to and victimized by non consensual experimentation here? If it’s not goverment sponsored, it certainly appears government sanctioned as we can get no justice for this problem. I believe a lot of this experimentation rises from MK Ultra subprojects and investigation into behavior modification, personality studies, and interrogation along with various forms of created trauma and trauma conditioning. In addition, it looks like we are placed on other types of experimentation lists.
Complaining about this problem serves to discredit us if we are in academia. FInding resources on the internet is limited by the fact that at least I am constantly hacked and the groups set up to help us are mostly cointelproed. The susceptibility of persons undergoing extreme trauma as well as whatever brain damage that trauma might incur leads to faulty thinking about the origins of the problem.
Surely some people within the system are aware that there is some truth to this yet I don’t see anyone getting anything done to stop it. If people are horrified at how “terror suspects” have been treated, how should they feel about the treatment of persons who don’t have any reason to be victimized by this harassment? Can’t anyone step up to the plate, or should we continue living in the republic of hypocrisy?