theatlantic | The role of doctors in torture during the War on Terror has been
pretty well excavated on the Defense Department side, but the CIA [has some exemptions]
from Freedom of Information Act requests, so that’s remained hidden.
Essentially the doctors and psychologists were built in to the entire
torture system. They weren’t simply bystanders who were called in to
respond when the system went off the rails. Some doctors apparently
protested this. But they kept their protests inside [the CIA], they
never went outside, which they should have done when they saw these
types of abuses.
In general, doctors in torture have a couple roles. Number one, they
design methods of torture that do not leave scars. For example, the
so-called “rectal feeding” which is actually a medieval technique in
which the intestines are inflated with a viscous material to cause
intestinal pain. The docs are also involved in making sure that the
prisoners who weren’t supposed to die didn’t die. The third thing
doctors do is they falsify medical records and death certificates to
conceal the injuries of torture. [Ed.: Miles has written on this in the context of Abu Ghraib.]
Doctors play a critical role in torture in regimes that don’t want to leave scars, and that includes the United States.
Beck: Why would people use medical knowledge and expertise learned to heal people for the opposite purpose?
Miles: It’s pretty interesting, I’m writing a book
on just that question. The docs who get involved in this, number one,
are careerists. They get involved for rank and career, and the regimes
never coerce them, or extremely rarely coerce them. Instead what happens
is the regimes treat them as some kind of elite.
