Via The Independent, a doctor who works at Gitmo and spoke anonymously to reporters at the newspaper blames Red Cross protocols for not allowing the prompt discovery of the recent suicide victims at the facility:
He said medical personnel examined the detainees some 10 minutes after they were found and “did everything we could” to revive them. He suggested that American guards might have noticed the detainees sooner had the prison not been following International Red Cross recommendations, including how dark their cells should be at night. “If we did everything the Red Cross wanted, there would be very little that we could do to keep detainees alive short of putting them in a strait-jacket,” he said.
“Every time we give them something to make their lives easier, they use it against us by trying to harm themselves.” Since the deaths, the military is guarding against future suicides by only giving out bed sheets and blankets during sleeping hours and monitoring detainees in their cells every three minutes.
Despite the obvious need to change the guards’ monitoring techniques, the same doctor also said that he agreed with Admiral Harry Harris’s assertion that the suicides were politically motivated – an act of ‘asymmetrical warfare’ – because the doctor says he has determined that the detainees were not depressed prior to the incidents.
The doctor suggested the examinations, performed one to two weeks before the suicides on 10 June, supported assertions by military officials that the prisoners killed themselves as a political act – not because they were despondent about their prolonged detention.
A lot can change in ‘one to two weeks’, especially in an environment like Gitmo where detainees are held indefinitely and have no idea what the future holds for them.
The doctor said there have been no suicide attempts since the deaths on 10 June, but there have been several incidents of detainees harming themselves, such as cutting themselves with paint chips or beating their heads against walls.
One can only conclude, according to the doctor’s logic, that those detainees were also just making political statements.
Sidebar: Yes, I’ve actually posted two diaries here today – a very unusual move – but this story must be seen far and wide.
(crossposted from liberal catnip.)
I cannot even begin to tell you how angry this story has made me and I try very hard not to give into my anger. But this propaganda is so incredibly inhumane that it is almost beyond belief.
How about giving them their freedom or their day in court?
That doctor should have his license revoked.
Nah… they’d just get up there and talk and talk and then they wouldn’t be able to breathe….
Clever, these orientals…
Methinks
imagine the daily life of a “doctor” at gitmo. Supervising torture and force-feedings. This fucker is a disgrace to his profession.
I had better explain my title, of course.
In the 1930s and 40s, the German Nazis found they could not carry out their various programs of extermination without medical advice and assistance. The question was, how did they manage to recruit doctors for this job? The answer is that, regrettably, they had no difficulty.
Then as now, people grew up on fantasies of “General Hospital” (or the early 20th century equivalent) and the Hypocratic Oath (named after the famous ancient Greek physicician Hypocrates), and could not imagine how doctors could be induced to willingly torture and kill.
Then as now, the process of selecting medical candidates for training did not screen for benign intentions, and a significant portion of doctors were trained who had no qualms about commiting indecent acts.
We are seeing such doctors now, at Guantanamo and throughout the American gulag: America’s Nazi doctors.
One difference: The German Nazis had their doctors work in secret, not making pronouncements in the news.
America has already fallen farther.
Bingo. This was my first thought as well — that this doctor would not have been out of place at Dachau.
At least everyone knew Mengele’s name, unlike these doctors who hide behind their anonymity. If they were truly doing their jobs according to their oath of ‘do no harm’, why would they have to be anonymous?
Exactly. That was why I was suggesting a name. I think to use the term ‘doctor’ is a tad insulting to all those true professionals doing a great job.
The AMA recently had to set policies for its doctors roles in interrogations and Andrew Sullivan reviewed a book for Time last week titled ‘Oath Betrayed – Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror’.
Some lessons from history are never learned.
Here’s a new article by the author of that book, Steven H Miles, titled ‘All Too Quiet: Where were the doctors and nurses at Abu Ghraib and Bagram?’
It just makes you want to scream.
“Even the fact that these assholes are still here is the fault of the Red Cross. If those stupid do-gooders hadn’t been here always being such a pain in the butt and constantly poking their noses in our business, we could have tortured the fuck out these guys long ago, found out who they were and everything they knew, and disappeared them in any way we wanted.”
Next up, the Bush Administration’s scientists explain how global warming is just an act of asymmetrical warfare and would go away if the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and all those other pesky human rights groups would just disband.
Thankfully, Raw Story has now picked up this story and has linked to the post on my blog so more people will now become aware of this propaganda.
If you’d like to leave a comment over there for the many Raw Story readers to see, come on over.
Does it matter whether these guys killed themselves out of despondency or as a political act? Is the waste, the tragedy, any less real whether one or the other was the motiovation?
I think we need to be careful not to be drawn into these clever argumentative traps devised by the GOP propagandists. They want to trick us into accepting that its OK for detainees to suicide for political reasons. They want to divert our attention from the fact that the vast majority of people being held at Guantanamo are merely victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when they had no connections to terrorist stuff at all. They want us to believe that it’s OK to incarcerate people indefinitely, claim they’re dangerous terrorists, and yet never indict and proceed to a real trial with any of them.
I say if they have terrorists detained in Guantanamo, let them bring them to trial in a court oflaw and present evidence. All the rest is bullshit, including this manipulative argument asserting political suicide somehow absolves the whole scheme from blame. It’s ludicrous.
from democracy now, an interview of a dr and ethics
Good diary cat…
biscit’s