This month’s issue of Academic Medicine includes a series of essays addressing the question, “How should academic medicine contribute to peace-building efforts around the world?” This timely question is especially compelling in the United States, as national discourse continues about troop levels in Afghanistan, military strategy in Iraq, and whether and how the US should help stop the genocide in Darfur. Read the rest of this entry →
Following up on a previous post, the Guardian newspaper, in an explosive article, has compiled “detailed evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Israel during the 23-day offensive in the Gaza Strip earlier this year, involving the use of Palestinian children as human shields and the targeting of medics and hospitals”.
It also has produced 3 documentaries detailing their investigation. Be sure to watch them all:
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy6-FZz69lE]
Part 1 deals with deals with the allegations of using children as human shields by the Israeli army.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2UuQ8V5DvY&feature=channel]
Part 2 deals with the targeting of medics and medical facilities. According to the World Health Organization, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 clinics were damaged by Israeli bombs.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToZTtGOr0k&feature=channel]
Part 3 deals with drones targeting civilians.
In a report from March 23, Physicians for Human Rights Israel mentions:
there was “certainty” that Israel violated international humanitarian law during the three-week war in January, with attacks on medics, damage to medical buildings, indiscriminate attacks on civilians and delays in medical treatment for the injured.
“We have noticed a stark decline in IDF morals concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza, which in reality amounts to a contempt for Palestinian lives,” said Dani Filc, chairman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. The Guardian gathered testimony on missile attacks by Israeli drones against clearly distinguishable civilian targets. In one case a family of six was killed when a missile hit the courtyard of their house. Israel has not admitted using drones but experts say their optical equipment is good enough to identify individual items of clothing worn by targets. The Geneva convention makes it clear medical staff and hospitals are not legitimate targets and forbids involuntary human shields.“
The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights released the names of 1,417 Gazans that it says were killed in the war, saying that 926 were civilians. The Israeli Government contends that most of those killed were combatants or legitimate targets.
According the article:
The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.
The BBC has covered this as well.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rPO1v3Uc1c]
To some, “collateral damage” is just a by-product of war, or at least what we tell ourselves in order to somehow justify the loss of innocent civilians. However, what if there is another reason for this violence? What if harming others, in this case Palestinians, is indirectly encouraged? Some Israeli soldiers spoke to Haaretz about their experiences. Even more troubling is an article published 4 days ago, which documents how graduating Israeli soldiers design special shirts to commemorate the occasion.
From the article:
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.“
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?