Exclusive: Senate Intel Committee to Consider PHR Findings on Torture Experiments
FireDogLake
By Jeff Kaye
June 9, 2010Senator Dianne Feinstein’s press office kindly returned my phone query the other day about her response to the revelations in the new Physicians for Human Rights [PHR] report, “Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” [PDF]. Sen. Feinstein’s response indicated that the Senate Intelligence Committee would examine PHR’s findings.
PHR’s investigation showed that doctors and psychologists involved in the Bush Administration’s CIA “enhanced interrogation” torture program apparently used high-value detainees as guinea pigs in experiments to determine how they could refine the torture techniques to get by the law. Of course, they were assisted in this by the lawyers of the Office of Legal Counsel, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, and later Steven Bradbury. Then, in 2006, the Bush Administration had Congress rewrite the War Crimes Act to soften the restrictions against “biological experimentation.” I’ve been following this story actively [see here and here].
I was especially curious to see what, if anything, Sen. Feinstein had to say, because she is the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As Jason Leopold reported in April, the Committee has begun an investigation into the torture and detention policies surrounding the high-value detainees, particularly the treatment of Abu Zubaydah, who “the Bush administration wrongly claimed was one of the planners of 9/11 and a top al-Qaeda operative.” Zubaydah was famously the subject of the second August 2002 OLC Bybee memo approving the use of torture techniques like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, putting insects in a confinement box, stress positions and other techniques meant to break down the mind and body of prisoners.
This was the e-mail response from Sen. Feinstein’s office (emphasis added): …
“The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting a review of the CIA detention and interrogation program,” Senator Feinstein said. “This review includes both the use of CIA medical personnel in administering coercive interrogation techniques and the effects of prolonged detention on the individuals in CIA custody. This is the most detailed and comprehensive review of the CIA detention and interrogation program ever conducted. The findings of the new report from Physicians for Human Rights will be considered in our review, and I will have further comment on this when the report is completed.”This is promising news for those of us–and I believe that constitutes the majority of the country–who wish to see justice done about torture and other crimes, like illegal human experimentation and unethical research, conducted by officials and medical professionals on behalf of the United States government…
Disturbing new questions have been raised about the role of doctors and other medical professionals in helping the Central Intelligence Agency subject terrorism suspects to harsh treatment, abuse and torture. The Red Cross previously documented, from interviews with “high-value” prisoners, that medical personnel helped facilitate abuses in the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation program” during the Bush administration. Now Physicians for Human Rights has suggested that the medical professionals may also have violated national and international laws setting limits on what research can be performed on humans…
The group’s report focused particularly on a few issues where medical personnel played an important role — determining how far a harsh interrogation could go, providing legal cover against prosecution and designing future interrogation procedures. The actual monitoring data are not publicly available, but the group was able to deduce from the guidelines governing the program what role the health professionals played, assuming they followed the rules…
The group concludes that health professionals who facilitated these practices were in essence conducting research and experimentation on human subjects. The main purposes of such research, the group says, were to determine how to use various techniques, to calibrate the levels of pain and to create a legal basis for defending interrogators from potential prosecution under anti-torture laws. The interrogators could claim that they had acted in good faith in accord with medical judgments of safety and had not intended to inflict extreme suffering.
The report from the physicians’ group does not prove its case beyond doubt — how could it when so much is still hidden? — but it rightly calls on the White House and Congress to investigate the potentially illegal human experimentation and whether those who authorized or conducted it should be punished. Those are just two of the many unresolved issues from the Bush administration that President Obama and Congressional leaders have swept under the carpet.
… What sharply underscored their concern was a disturbing report issued the same day by Physicians for Human Rights, charging that doctors who observed “enhanced interrogation” sessions for the CIA may have participated in illegal medical experimentation on detainees. By gathering data to assess the effects of waterboarding, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, humiliating nudity, extreme temperatures and other abusive techniques, those doctors and other medical personnel risked violating both U.S. and international laws that prohibit such research on any human beings without their informed consent.
The CIA immediately and predictably denied the report, insisting that the officers who oversaw its “past detention program” conducted no such experimentation “on any detainee or group of detainees.” An agency spokesman assured reporters that its practices have passed careful scrutiny in multiple reviews by the government, including one by the Justice Department. But the Physicians for Human Rights report is based on information found by the group’s researchers in thousands of pages of partially redacted documents released by the government in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Those documents suggest that doctors helped to enable “the routine practice of torture” by closely monitoring the physical state of prisoners undergoing interrogation—supposedly to protect them from the severe damage that would, in the opinion of Bush administration lawyers, skirt the edge of legality. Most legal experts believe that the practices condoned by those lawyers were indeed grossly illegal under both U.S. and international law.
The same documents also indicate that CIA medical personnel recorded every aspect of each simulated drowning session and collected detailed medical information that was then used to “design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures,” according to the PHR report. The doctors prescribed the addition of salt to the water because they believed that higher salinity solutions would reduce the risk of illness, coma or death. They also sought to determine whether simultaneous or sequential application of various torments worked best, and analyzed other evidence of the “susceptibility” of prisoners to pain and suffering such as that caused by sleep deprivation.
“Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law,” the report says. “These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Should the PHR report’s accusations prove true, then the United States took yet another step toward the criminality that our government once prosecuted at Nuremberg. That is a truth we must face forthrightly, as a nation, if we want to hold our heads up and look forward again.
Joe Conason at truthdig.com has an article about the same subject titled “Why We Can’t Just ‘look Forward'”
Thanks!