Global Pulse Blog

There are a couple excellent entries on the PHR’s Health Rights Advocate blog regarding recent evidence about the participation of American medical professionals in torture.  Scott Allen, MD, writes:

Health professional supervision of torture is one of the gravest affronts to medical ethics and is illegal under both domestic and international anti-torture law. Danner’s disclosure of the ICRC report on detainee treatment in CIA custody is shocking but not suprising. For years evidence has been mounting through news articles, government investigations, and even the statements of Bush Administration officials that health professionals were centrally complicit in the breaking of bodies and minds at the black sites, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere.

All of this was in the bad old days of WMDs, flag-waving, and Blackwater. . . right?  Not so fast, writes Sara Greenberg.

Something about this really gets under my skin.

As student doctors, we are given so much.  We are given amazing knowledge, the product of an entire history of human civilization and learning about the human body and mind; the time and experience of our mentors; and the unbounded kindness of our patients, who allow us to touch them and to learn from them, even at the risk of harming them by our inexperience or error.  We are given all these things in trust, to use in the remainder of our professional lives to heal and to help.  A medical professional who knowingly uses his or her knowledge to help violate another person’s body and autonomy has broken that trust, and broken it for all of us: past and present and future.

As evidence of medical participation in war crimes continues to accumulate, American medical professionals need to do some serious soul-searching.  I believe this applies to all of us — including those who have never seen the inside of a black site, voted for the Democrats every time, or are still in training — because somehow, our medical system obviously had produced a significant number of physicians who had no problem assisting in torture.  What kind of professional climate was it, that made that possible?  We need to make sure that the next generation of physicians, psychologists, and allied health professionals, are absolutely 100% positively sure, that it is not okay to do this.  We need to talk about it clearly and transparently, so that we may begin to rehabilitate some of that trust.

I leave all you fellow future physicians with this excerpt from a 2006 editorial from Time by Andrew Sullivan:

After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

From a couple of days ago, but definitely worth posting. Via the Washington Post:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

[...]The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials, who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

Mark Danner has been all over this – the excerpts are a must-read for all human rights advocates. Here is an interview of him with Rachel Maddow:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdsMwpIDH_I]

By all means, this is not breaking news for human rights advocates. Salon thoroughly documented a harrowing 3 months of detainee abuse in the Abu Ghraib files. All of us had to fight with the mainstream media and the loyal Bushies, the latter’s ferocity reaching Holocaust-denial levels, even when shown pictures of actual people being tortured. What is significant about the IRCC describing torture, besides the obvious? By international law, anything documented by the IRCC cannot be used in court. Its findings are not available to the general public, and they prefer to engage states directly by engaging in low-key, direct negotiations to both document treatment to prisoners of war and lobby for their improvement. That’s how they obtain such high-level access.

In other words: we’ve got the evidence, who will be brave enough to pursue justice through the legal system?

Today is World Refugee Day – but I’ll bet anything that it was barely, if at all, announced in the mainstream media. Many countries have had their own “Refugee Days”, and one of the most widespread is Africa Refugee Day, celebrated on June 20 on most countries:

As an expression of solidarity with Africa, which hosts the most refugees, and which traditionally has shown them great generosity, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 55/76 on 4 December 2000. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June. The Assembly therefore decided that, from 2001, 20 June would be celebrated as World Refugee Day.

Indeed, though celebrated worldwide there is one country that needs obvious mention, and that is Iraq. The Iraqi refugee crisis is untenable, with an increasing number of young refugees left without a future, and adding insult to injury, oftentimes thrust into the world of child trafficking and prostitution.

According to Human Rights First, almost five million Iraqis have been displaced by war – more than 2 million refugees have fled the country, and 2.77 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. There are more than 750,000 fleeing towards Jordan, and more than 2 million settled in Syria. Want to guess how many of those Iraqi refugees were accepted by the United States in 2007? 190 people. Unbe-freaking-lieveable.

There are fantastic organizations working with refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq, like the Iraqi Red Crescent, but with a global food crisis, and the rising price of oil, the cost of a meal has doubled in Syria and Jordan, pushing Iraqi refugees even further into poverty.

The U.S. has a particular moral obligation to help the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, and given that this is Refugee Day, the least we can do is urge the current administration to substantially increase the number of Iraqi refugees into the U.S. Visit the “Lifeline for Iraqi Refugees” of Human Rights Watch and send a message to president Bush to increase the number of Iraqi refugees to safety in the U.S.

Now, about that war…