Guntanámo CIA Physicians Supported Torture

A report of the International Red Cross on the US military prison in Guantánamo exceeds even the worst fears: Prisoners were tortured under the expert instructions of physicians. According to the report, the Bush administration already became aware of these procedures two years ago.

The report of the International Red Cross (IRC) on the methods applied in the US military prison Guantánamo which were kept secret for a long time makes headlines worldwide. According to the report, the CIA appointed physicians for the supervision of questionings under application of torture-like methods and even for supporting those. Further, the physicians watched and partly became involved with violent and intentionally degrading methods such as beats, water boarding, sleep deprivation, under cooling, and sexual harassment.

The Red Cross said it gave the report over to the US government already in February 2007 - without getting a response from the former Bush administration. Now the US magazine New York Review of Books has published the report in full length.

If the allegations of the Red Cross are true, severe breaches of the medical ethos that obliges physicians to protect health, and to heel from illnesses are concerned. Frightening is the step over the taboo threshold: If physicians use their knowledge in order to facilitate the effectiveness of causing pain and harm, regardless of whether physical or psychological, then the decline of civilised society has reached a tipping point.

That is also true when the victims of those acts are dangerous top terrorists. A democratic country that breaches humanitarian minimum standards in the fight against its worst enemies eventually undermines itself and its legal order.

The tightened questioning methods that had been legalised under the Bush administration - whether you call them torture or a serious assault of prisoners is rather a play of words - meanwhile have been stopped by President Obama. Whether it will come to a prosecution of those people who are responsible for the methods, maybe up to the highest levels, has to be doubted. Even if Obama does not want to be identified with those people and correctly wants to close down Guantánamo and that preferably within one year -- he can and will not let himself put on statutory ties that are too tight; that would probably disrupt the fight against terrorism that will, according to Obama, in fact be intensified.