Looking forward is one of those clichés that alwayssounds positive and sensible, and certainly serves the president's politicalinterests. But the years of detainee abuse and constitutional violations cannotbe dismissed so easily, because the past is still with usand so are thedangers that drew America'sleaders toward the dark side.
That is why Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the retiredcommander of U.S. and alliedforces in Iraq, repeated hiscall for a "truth commission" in a New York Universityauditorium on the evening of June 7. He joined a group of prominent writers,lawyers and actors in staging an extraordinary event titled "Blueprint forAccountability," which sought to revive pressure on the Obamaadministration to fulfill its early promises to restore the Constitution, theGeneva Convention and the rule of law. The house was packed, and there was asense that the president's supporters are deeply disappointedand determined todemand that he live up to his word.
Disturbing Report About Doctors andDetainees
What sharply underscored their concern was adisturbing report issued the same day by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR),charging that doctors who observed "enhanced interrogation" sessionsfor the CIA may have participated in illegal medical experimentation ondetainees.
By gathering data to assess the effects of"waterboarding," painful stress positions, sleep deprivation,humiliating nudity, extreme temperatures and other abusive techniques, thosedoctors and other medical personnel risked violating both U.S. andinternational laws that prohibit such research on any human beings withouttheir informed consent.
The CIA immediately and predictably denied thereport, insisting that the officers who oversaw its "past detentionprogram" conducted no such experimentation "on any detainee or groupof detainees." An agency spokesman assured reporters that its practiceshave passed careful scrutiny in multiple reviews by the government, includingone by the Justice Department.
But the PHR report is based on information found bythe group's researchers in thousands of pages of partially redacted documentsreleased by the government in response to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.Those documents suggest that doctors helped to enable "the routinepractice of torture" by closely monitoring the physical state of prisonersundergoing interrogationsupposedly to protect them from the severe damage thatwould, in the opinion of Bush administration lawyers, skirt the edge oflegality. Most legal experts believe that the practices condoned by thoselawyers were indeed grossly illegal under both U.S. and international law.
The same documents also indicate that CIA medicalpersonnel recorded every aspect of each simulated drowning session andcollected detailed medical information that was then used to "design,develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures," according to thePHR report. The doctors prescribed the addition of salt to the water becausethey believed that higher salinity solutions would reduce the risk of illness,coma or death. They also sought to determine whether simultaneous or sequentialapplication of various torments worked best, and analyzed other evidence of the"susceptibility" of prisoners to pain and suffering such as thatcaused by sleep deprivation.
"Such acts may be seen as the conduct ofresearch and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which couldviolate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic andinternational law," the report says. "These practices could, in somecases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Should the PHR report's accusations prove true, thenthe United States took yetanother step toward the criminality that our government once prosecuted at Nuremberg. That is atruth we must face forthrightly, as a nation, if we want to hold our heads upand look forward again.
© 2010Creators.com
