United States of America
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights' When Healers Harm campaign, health professionals were complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees during U.S. President George W. Bush's "war on terror". Health professionals, including medical doctors, psychiatrists, medical examiners, psychologists, and nurses, have been implicated in the torture and abuse of prisoners in CIA secret prisons and military detention centers, such as those in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Health professionals are accused of:
- crafting abusive tactics and falsely legitimizing their use;
- advised interrogators on methods of abuse that would exploit prisoners’ vulnerabilities;
- using medical procedures to harm prisoners;
- gauging pain and monitoring interrogations that risked leaving prisoners in need of treatment;
- checking prisoners to certify that they were capable of surviving additional abuse;
- conditioning medical or mental health treatment on cooperation with interrogation;
- sharing confidential patient information that was used to harm patients;
- covering up evidence of torture and abuse; and
- turning a blind eye to cruel treatment.
To date, no state licensing boards or professional associations have investigated – or recognized, in some cases – abusive conduct by individual members of their professions. In 2009, after years of denial, the American Psychological Association finally recognized that psychologists had engaged in torture. However, the American Psychological Association has not recognized that psychologists were involved in the Bush Administration’s torture policy. Some criticize the APA for failing to respond to allegations of “collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse." [7]
Although the American Medical Association has made clear that physicians should not be involved in interrogations of any kind, it continues to insist that it has “no specific knowledge of doctors being involved in abuse or torture,” despite evidence to the contrary, including government documents and Office of Legal Counsel memos, a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross and multiple accounts by survivors. [8] [9]
Israel
British doctors and medical journals have repeatedly accused and documented Israeli medical personnel of participating in torture. The first accusations surfaced in 1993 where doctors in military employ as well as in hospitals were implicated. [10] Gulland's accusation that Israeli doctors were "involved in torture, either directly or indirectly" [11] were echoed in 2013 by Forrest [12] and Devi. [13]
In 2024, the director of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, the paediatrician Mohammed Abu Salmiya reported that Israeli doctors and nurses participated in beatings and torture of prisoners at the notorious Sde Teiman camp. [14]
The documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack featured an Israeli medical professional who witnessed Israeli medical personnel performing a painful procedure without anesthesia as a form of vengeance, and "recognized it as international torture". [15]
