After a doctor X-rayed one prisoner’s feet and determined they were badly broken, another physician recommended that he could be made to stand for 52 hours. Only when one detainee stopped being able to see out of one of his eyes did a doctor suggest stopping the physical torture affecting that area. A team of doctors decided that prisoners could be waterboarded — which simulates drowning — up to three times per day. These are just a few of the ways scientists and medical doctors were directly involved in the CIA’s torture program, as revealed in the Senate Select Comittee on Intelligence report released Tuesday. “The torture could not proceed [without] medical supervision,” Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author, wrote on Twitter. “The medical profession was deeply embedded in this inhumanity.”Those who watched as prisoners were cut, bruised, and subjected to anal feeding usually made recommendations that led to people being harmed as much as possible, intervening only to prevent them from dying.The two psychologists who developed the CIA’s torture program — Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — formed a company called Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and got more than $80 million from the government for their services. Mitchell did not respond to a previous attempt by Business Insider to contact him, and Jessen could not be reached. (“Everyone is assuming it is me, but I can’t confirm or deny it,” Mitchell told Bloomberg News.).The revelations came after decades of denials and has now led to the possibility of a number of key personnel being fired and even charged for aiding torture. The APA has officially maintained that it has a strict code of ethics which prohibits its over 130,000 members from aiding torture, but also simultaneously permits involvement in military and intelligence interrogations. This blurring of lines, where APA doctors can interrogate but not torture captives, has led to the more damning revelation that its members were in fact directly involved in aiding torture. The important thing is that the dissent came from within the organisations, with a number of psychologists opposing the use of torture.he organisation has now announced a new code of ethics; and the APA has issued new guidelines asking psychologists to no longer be a part of interrogations at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere. The decision to no longer aid the US military effort is a good one, but it will take time before trust in the APA’s neutrality is restored. The APA held contradictory positions for over a decade, insisting that participating in detention and interrogation was responsible and ethical. The collaboration with the US Department of Defence had come on the basis of substantial financial benefits. A public apology is being demanded with the actual proposals for structural reform set to be discussed at the organisation’s annual meeting on August 6 in Toronto. The revelations have reopened the debate on the purported neutrality of the academic and medical fields in times of war. Already, a number of American anthropologists have been recruited – colonial style – on ground data collection before and after the war machinery moves in. The involvement of psychologists in torture, including water boarding, at a time when CIA reports themselves indicate that the practice fails to yield credible information, puts the role of medical professionals in war in the spotlight.
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