Medical workers may have aided CIA interrogations
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WASHINGTON - Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the CIA, including torture, and their participation was a "gross breach of medical ethics," a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross has concluded.
Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, who were moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the CIA 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.
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, but it was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist, and posted last night with an article by Danner on the website of The New York Review of Books.
