Doctors decry force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo
 
U.S. military medical personnel are force-feeding the prisoners of war in the Guantanamo prison camp. Today’s Lancet published a letter from a group of 260 doctors asking the “US government to ensure that detainees are assessed by independent physicians and that techniques such as forcefeeding and restraint chairs are abandoned forthwith in accordance with internationally agreed standards.” A fundamental responsibility of a doctor attending to a hunger striker is to allow the prisoner to refuse treatment. This principle of medical ethics is laid out in the Declarations of Tokyo and Malta of the World Medical Association. The American Medical Association is a signatory of these declarations. The US military is also screening medical personnel who will be assigned to Guantanamo and is apparently only assigning them to serve there if they agree to force-feed the prisoners. To make matters worse, the hospital administrator at Guantanamo who initiated the practice says he did it because he was ordered to. The letter in Lancet points out that this is a “Nuremberg defense.” “I did something unethical because I was ordered to do it.” That defense hasn’t worked for any of the low-ranking soldiers brought to military trial for atrocities at Abu Ghraib. In fact, the Nuremberg defense hasn’t even led up the chain of command. But the docs now assigned to Guantanamo have all agreed to intubate the hunger strikers. I wonder what other kind of orders they’ve agreed to follow?
    As a U.S. citizen thoroughly outraged by the human rights violations being committed by my government, I would like to know exactly who is responsible. Where does the chain of evidence created by the Nuremberg defense end?
    Some think torture is acceptable because there have been terrorist attacks on the U.S., and so if information gotten by torture would save American lives, then it is justified. There are two problems. First, torture usually yields unreliable information. Second, people who really believe in their causes would rather die than give in, whether or not they have any information to give. Literature written by Blacks about the struggle for freedom in South Africa illustrates this. See yesterday’s blog for some books on torture.  
    
Friday, March 10, 2006