Medical Workers' Role in Torture

A 2007 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded that medical professionals helped the CIA torture detainees held at Guantánamo Bay prison and other "black sites" overseas, and said their participation in the abuse amounted to a "gross breach of medical ethics.

The report was kept secret until recently.

From New York Times:

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers' intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals' role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had "condoned and participated in ill treatment."

At times, according to the detainees' accounts, medical workers "gave instructions to interrogators to continue, to adjust or to stop particular methods."

The Red Cross report was completed in 2007. It was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about torture, and posted Monday night with an article by Mr. Danner on the Web site of The New York Review of Books. Much of its contents were revealed in a March article by Mr. Danner and in a 2008 book, "The Dark Side," by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, but the reporting of the Red Cross investigators' conclusions on medical ethics and other issues are new.

Report Outlines Medical Workers' Role in Torture