Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Guantanamo. Medici complici

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9256.htm
U.S. doctors linked to POW ` torture'
Guantanamo medical records misused - Basis of interrogators' strategy:
Report
Tanya Talaga And Karen Palmer
06/23/05 "Toronto Star" - - Medical records compiled by doctors caring for
prisoners at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay are being tapped to
design more effective interrogation techniques, says an explosive new
report.
Doctors, nurses and medics caring for the approximately 600 prisoners at the
U.S. naval base in Cuba are required to provide health information to
military and CIA interrogators, according to the report in the respected New
England Journal of Medicine.
"Since late 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists (at Guantanamo) have been
part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with
behaviour-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant
captives," it states.
Such tactics are considered torture by many authorities, the authors note.
Medical personnel belonging to the U.S. military's Southern Command have
also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be
valuable, the report adds.
The report was published ahead of schedule last night on the journal's
website "because of current public interest in this topic," the journal
says.
The report's authors - Dr. Gregg Bloche, a physician who is also a law
professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and Jonathan Marks, a
London lawyer who is currently a fellow in bioethics at Georgetown's law
centre - say that while Guantanamo veterans are ordered not to discuss what
goes on there, making it difficult to know how, exactly, military
intelligence personnel have used medical information for interrogation,
they've been able to assemble part of the picture.
They suggest that interrogators at the camp, set up in 2001 to detain
prisoners captured in Afghanistan and later Iraq, have had access to
prisoners' medical records since early 2003.
That contradicts Pentagon statements that there is a separation between
intelligence-gathering and patient care.
William Winkenwerder, U.S. assistant secretary of defence for health
affairs, said in a memo made public in May that Guantanamo prisoners'
medical records are considered private - as are American citizens'.
However, "this claim, our inquiry has determined, is sharply at odds with
orders given to military medical personnel and with actual practice at
Guantanamo," the authors write.
Using medical records to devise interrogation protocols crosses an ethical
line, said Peter Singer, director of the University of Toronto's Joint
Centre for Bioethics.
"The goal for the physician is to care for the sick, not to aid an
interrogation," he said. "Patients are patients and prisoners are prisoners
and mixing those two things on the part of physicians who work in prisons is
actually quite dangerous. Physicians are there for the benefit of patients
and if they are seen to be there for some other purpose, it really blurs
what they're doing."
An Amnesty International Canada spokesman said the report gives serious
pause to anyone who is following what happens at Guantanamo.
"This reinforces the necessity for a full, independent commission of inquiry
into the detentions. What is going on and what rules are being violated,"
John Tackaberry said from Ottawa.
"The American government needs to accept its responsibility to expose what
is actually happening and show the world they are following standards that
are acceptable in terms of international law," he said.
According to the authors, a previously unreported U.S. Southern Command
policy statement dated Aug. 6, 2002, instructs health-care providers that
communications from "enemy persons under U.S. control" at Guantanamo "are
not confidential and are not subject to the assertion of privileges" by
detainees.
That policy memorandum also tells medical personnel they should "convey any
information concerning ... the accomplishment of a military or national
security mission ... obtained from detainees in the course of treatment to
non-medical military or other U.S. personnel who have an apparent need to
know the information," the authors found. The only limit on the policy is
that caregivers cannot themselves act as interrogators, the authors say. But
since the policy calls on caregivers to hand over information they think
might be valuable, they are, in effect, part of Guantanamo's surveillance
network and "dissolving the Pentagon's purported separation between
intelligence gathering and patient care," they write.
"An internal, May 24, 2005, memo from the Army Medical Command, offering
guidance to caregivers responsible for detainees, refers to the
`interpretation of relevant excerpts from medical records' for the purpose
of `assistance with the interrogation process.'"
The authors obtained the memo from a military source.
The article states that at Guantanamo, the "fear-and-anxiety" approach to
interrogation was often favoured.
"The cruel and degrading measures taken by some, in violation of
international human rights law and the laws of war, have become a matter of
national shame," Bloche and Marks observe.
"The global political fallout from such abuse may pose more of a threat to
U.S. security than any secrets still closely held by shackled internees at
Guantanamo Bay," they add.
Canada's only known detainee in Guantanamo Bay is 18-year-old Omar Khadr.
Documents filed in a Canadian court this week included two psychiatric
assessments that concluded the teenager has a serious mental disorder and is
at a high risk for suicide.
Khadr is the second youngest son of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was considered
before his death in 2003 to be Canada's highest-ranking Al Qaeda financier
with close ties to Osama bin Laden.
Omar Khadr was 15 when he was shot three times and captured at a suspected
Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in July 2002, following a gun battle with
U.S. troops.
In February, his U.S. lawyer told reporters the teenager had been used as a
human mop to clean urine on the floor and had been beaten, threatened with
rape and tied up for hours in painful positions at Guantanamo Bay.
Khadr's Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney said yesterday he has regularly raised
concerns with Ottawa about the teen's treatment at Guantanamo and use of his
client's medical records.
"This conduct is a blatant disregard by both Canada and the U.S. to
recognize the special status international treaties and human rights law
accords children and youths," Edney said yesterday.
On Tuesday, the Bush administration rejected a proposal to create an
independent commission to investigate abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said the Pentagon has already
launched 10 major investigations into allegations of abuse and the system
was working well.
Mulugeta Abai, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Victims of
Torture in Toronto, wasn't surprised by the journal report. "This is
practised globally," he said. "This is very frustrating. A superpower that
is considered a leader in many ways is losing its moral authority now,
completely."
The New England Journal of Medicine is the second respected journal to
criticize U.S. interrogation techniques.
The British medical journal The Lancet reported in August, 2004, that U.S.
military doctors violated medical ethics as part of the interrogation regime
at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
"Not only were (they) aware of human rights abuses, they were actually
complicit in them," University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles, who
wrote the report, told the Toronto Star's Sandro Contenta. A Lancet
editorial urged health-care workers to "now break their silence."

the picture.
Cioe' hanno sparato la solita serie di puttanate senza avere nulla a
sostegno e senza aver mai lavorato prima sul luogo ne avere
testimonianze dirette di chi vi lavora/ha lavorato :)
Niente di nuovo sotto il sole :)
-Stefano

 -Stefano
e niente di nuovo neanche all'interno del tuo cranio

 e niente di nuovo neanche all'interno del tuo cranio
...disse il bue all'asino... :)
*LOL*
-Stefano