© AFP Photo / Paul J. RichardsA US Navy doctor shows the feeding tubes and cans of Ensure nutritional liquid given to detainees on hunger strikes or not eating inside Camp Delta in the Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
An independent report has charged that medical personnel, working under the direction of the Department of Defense and CIA in military defense facilities, violated medical ethics by participating in the torture of detainees.
The services provided by American doctors and psychologists included
"designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment
" of detainees, according to the
report.
The 19-member task force
concluded that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA ordered medical professionals to assist in intelligence gathering, as well as forced-feeding of hunger strikers, in a way that inflicted "severe harm" on detainees in US custody.
The authors of the 269-page report, entitled
Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the 'War on Terror' is based on information from unclassified, publicly available information.
The task force revealed that a "theory of interrogation" emerged in US detention facilities, including Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that was based on "personality disintegration" as a means of breaking down the resistance of the detainees in an effort to extract confessions and information.
Over time, new interrogation methods were developed by interrogators and psychologists from techniques used in the pre-9/11 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program that was designed for training US troops to withstand interrogation and mistreatment techniques in the event they were captured.
The interrogators and medical professionals transformed torture-resistant tactics into abusive methods of interrogation, which they employed on detainees. This included so-called 'enhanced interrogation' techniques, such as waterboarding, which involves covering a restrained detainee's face with a towel and then soaking it with water. The technique is said to induce a feeling of drowning and complete helplessness.