Physicians and Lawyers Collaborated to Enable CIA Torture, Professors Say.

The CIA’s torture of prisoners at “black sites” was enabled by a dangerous collaboration between physicians and lawyers that led them to overcome professional ethics and “rationalize” acts of violence and sexual abuse, two School of Public Health medical ethicists argue.

Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, George Annas and Sondra Crosby say the role of medical professionals in torturing prisoners was enabled by CIA and US Justice Department attorneys, who assured the physicians that they would not be held legally responsible for violating laws against torture, as long as they used techniques approved in legal memos crafted by the Justice Department to justify their actions. Lawyers, meanwhile, agreed to provide immunity assurances only if the physicians assured them that they would be present to monitor the torture.

But Annas and Crosby argue that torture is always wrong, and that “confining torture to legally defined methods” is impossible. In reality, they say, physicians and lawyers “consistently gave themselves permission to do whatever they agreed among themselves was important to do (to ‘save lives’).” That potentially deadly dynamic has also played out in military prisons, including Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and even in some US prisons, they say.

“Beyond the elimination of black sites, attorneys will have to stand with physicians who want to maintain their ethics, . . . support health professionals in their refusals to torture, and refuse to give CIA agents and contractors prospective legal immunity for violating human rights laws,” Annas and Crosby write. Annas is chair and professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights; Crosby is an associate professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights, as well as of medicine.

Referencing the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, released in December, the two professors write that there are indications that the physicians involved initially had “mixed feelings about direct involvement in torture” but evolved into active participants. Among the unapproved techniques used on prisoners was “rectal feeding”—which Annas and Crosby describe as “a technique of sexual assault.”

“Seen in the context of the constant state of nudity of most black-site prisoners, it seems reasonable to conclude that the goal of rectal feeding is dominance and punishment—that it is about vengeance, not medicine,” they write.

They add that, in US prisons, medicine also has been used “to justify demonstrating dominance by forced nudity of prisoners, in the form of routine mandatory strip searches.” They say political debate about whether such techniques were successful in eliciting information is irrelevant.

“Whether torture ‘works’—like whether slavery ‘works’—is simply the wrong question,” Annas and Crosby conclude. “Both are internationally recognized as crimes against humanity that have no justification,” and lawyers and physicians should always oppose them.

Submitted by: Lisa Chedekel