From San Diego Union-Tribune :
Military medicine, torture examined
By Peter Rowe
STAFF WRITER
April 21, 2007
What was Dr. Steven H. Miles thinking?
Not about blockbuster sales, that's clear. Best sellers require race-against-the-clock “24”-style thrills, Olympian sex or, at least, a 10-day plan for washboard abs.
Dr. Steven H. Miles, a physician and bioethicist, is appalled that so many doctors, nurses and medics condoned torture in the war on terror.While writing his latest book, the University of Minnesota Medical School professor focused elsewhere. He mined a mountain range of government documents. He unearthed accounts of deaths and maimings. He issued a grisly indictment of his own profession. Then he wrapped the whole package in the feel-bad title of the year, “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror.”
“This has been a tough sell,” said his agent, Sandra Dijkstra.
What was Miles thinking?
“When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib,” he said, “I wondered where the doctors and nurses were.”
The answer: They were present or nearby. In U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, medical personnel helped determine the nature and severity of torture. They ignored abuse. And they covered up the most heinous cases.
That, in a blood-stained nutshell, is what Miles found. What is he thinking?
“Where these things occurred, they occurred in the context of a general command breakdown,” he said. “Nobody was stopping abuses, period.”
The shame, then, doesn't belong to the medical profession alone. In the military, though, they are the only parties who have taken an oath to protect and heal patients, even if these patients are prisoners of war or “enemy combatants.”
Off the battlefield
Military medical ethics is rich territory for civilian second-guessers, or so many in uniform believe. (Miles, it should be noted, is not a veteran.) “The certainty of opinion,” said Col. Basil Pruitt, a physician, in a 1992 lecture on this topic, “is directly proportional to the square of the distance from the site of combat.”
But Miles notes that his book is about noncombat actions of the military medical profession. “This is not about battlefield ethics. This is about the treatment of unarmed prisoners.”
Neither, he insists, is this a matter of a squeamish civilian suddenly coming face to face with the harsh realities of war. “In World War II, we really set the standard for the treatment of prisoners.” Miles notes that President Bush's former secretary of state, Colin Powell, called the use of torture by U.S. forces an “innovation.”
This innovation, Miles said, can be used against us: “This prevents us from appealing to the world for the same norms of civilized behavior for our soldiers.”
The Bush administration, though, has maintained that terrorists – even those captured by the military, during military operations, in the midst of a war – are not soldiers, and are thus exempt from the Geneva Convention. But that's not the only convention barring medical professionals from taking part in torture. Similar declarations have been adopted by the United Nations, the World Medical Association, the International Council of Nurses, the World Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians and others.
This White House has waved all that aside. “We have said to the world that a chief executive can invoke national emergency or national sovereignty and can step outside” international agreements, Miles said.
Again, such a precedent could be used against the United States, a nation that often holds itself up as a model to the world.
“This is not a matter of war-making,” Miles insisted. “It is a matter of international law.”
[click this link to continue: www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070421/news_1c21oath.html
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