Front-line medics and psychologists monitored and advised on abusive tactics, even as they sometimes complained about the ethical dilemmas gnawing at them, according to this week’s Senate intelligence committee report.
The report describes rare moments when CIA health professionals openly balked and objected. But for four years, until President George W. Bush shuttered the CIA prison program in 2006, medical teams at each “black site” observed almost every step of procedures that President Barack Obama now calls torture.
Medical ethicists, already familiar with debate on the issue, say that both the Senate report and a CIA response fail to comprehensively tackle questions of medical morality and offer reforms.
“The Senate report is quite an indictment, but it leaves the American people, whatever their political views, uncertain about how medical ethics should be upheld,” said Dr. Arthur Caplan, head of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. “The behavior we’re reading about is flat-out unethical for any health professional.”
The Senate committee’s report includes an entire section about how two former Air Force psychologists devised the harsh techniques under a CIA contract and played conflicting roles as interrogators and health professionals.
It paints a highly critical portrait through case studies of the interrogations of al-Qaida suspects, showing how doctors and technicians tended to each detainee and what they privately told colleagues and superiors in emails and memos.
The CIA’s official rebuttal says the agency “took seriously its responsibility to provide for the welfare of CIA’s detainee population, including being able to address emergency and long-term medical and psychological needs.”
Medical ethicists say the blurry lines between CIA service and the medical profession’s oath to “do no harm” constitute a core problem.
“These doctors were co-opted when they knew better,” said Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a retired brigadier general with the U.S. Army’s medical corps who co-authored a 2010 critique in the Journal of the American Medical Association that accused the CIA’s medical service of institutional failure “to uphold medical ethical values.”
One former CIA psychologist, Kirk Hubbard, wrote in the Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy in 2007 that he opposed torture but insisted that psychologists should be able to “assist in developing effective, lawful ways to obtain actionable intelligence in fighting terrorism.”
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