It is a sick culture that would think nothing of medical personnel who would design, implement and enable torture, especially in a country we were ostensibly liberating from exactly that kind of treatment. That not one came forward to report any of it says something very troubling about how we define morality and ethics in this country. Let’s not forget that these people are from the same nation that spent more than a year and tens of millions of dollars in the pursuit of a leader who allegedly lied about an extramarital affair.
I don’t want to hear another word from the religious zealots on the right, including their mascot, our God anointed president, about good and evil until they stand up and explain why they aren’t screaming bloody murder about American doctors reviving prisoners who’ve been beaten unconscious so that they can be beaten again.
I have a good idea what Jesus would think of such a disguisting act, but I’m not so sure about our self-appointed morality police here in the US of A.
Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.
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.”
The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.
A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon’s own investigation of the abuses.
It’s clear that nobody but the grunts in the pictures will suffer any consequences, not even for the systematic depraved indifference to the suffering of those prisoners. We’re giving a fine lesson in western justice to the Iraqis. No wonder they are so happy to have us there.