Democracy Now! | Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror: "DR. STEVEN MILES: Yeah, when I first saw these pictures from Abu Ghraib, the question was, “Well, where were the docs?” because docs and nurses are frontline human rights monitors. They're there when the Red Cross isn't. They can get into any part of the prison, and furthermore, even if they don't see the abuse, they see the signs of the abuse, and we are trained to find abuse when it’s crafted to be indiscernible, okay, as a lot of abuse is.
And so I'm reading along, I’m just trying to understand why there was a failure of reporting, and all of sudden what I'm seeing is that the medical system is entirely integrated into the abuse, that there was a structure, there was an actual policy mechanism that can be seen for the delayed release of torture-related homicides, that there was an entire structure for culling patients medical records for information on their vulnerabilities, incorporating that into harsh, incursive interrogation plans, monitoring those plans, designing those plans with psychological insights to exploit the particular characteristics of Islamic men, and then monitoring the disintegration of these men, and feeding that back into the torture plans. It’s an amazing story. It was very discouraging to read. But in every country that’s fought torture, and Chile’s a good example, the docs have played a key role in stopping it."
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