Army Doctors Aided Abuse, Report Says

U.S. Army doctors violated the Geneva Convention by helping intelligence officers carry out abusive interrogations at military detention centers, perhaps participating in torture, according to a report in today’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Medical personnel helped tailor interrogations to the physical and mental conditions of individual detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the report claims.

“Clearly, the medical personnel who helped to develop and execute aggressive counter-resistance plans thereby breached the laws of war,” says the four-page article. “The conclusion that doctors participated in torture is premature, but there is probable cause for suspecting it.”

The report was written by M. Gregg Bloche, a law professor at Georgetown University and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and by Jonathan H. Marks, a London barrister who is a bioethics fellow at Georgetown University Law Center and Johns Hopkins.

William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, said that the report was inaccurate and misrepresented the positions and acts of military officials.

“We have no evidence of maltreatment by physicians or physicians participating in torture or torturous activity,” Winkenwerder said. “We just do not have evidence of that.”