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Gitmo, Nazi concentration camps and complicit medicos

At the end of WW2 the world was shocked - although news had already gotten out much, much earlier, but being ignored - to learn that Nazi doctors had undertaken medical experiments on inmates of concentration camps. Given the Hippocratic oath taken by medicos the not unnatural question asked was how doctors could have allowed themselves to become complicit, and active, participants in the often ghastly experiments being undertaken.

Fast forward to 2010 - and medicos are again in the firing-line. This time it relates to Gitmo. Scott Horton, writing on Harper's Magazine, reports:

"In a comprehensive recent study, Physicians for Human Rights alleges that healthcare professionals experimented on human subjects in order to hone the torture techniques authorized by the Bush Administration. The Department of Justice’s retracted torture memoranda advise that doctors should be involved at every stage in the application of torture techniques—to provide a defense against criminal prosecution. And anecdotal evidence suggests that healthcare professionals were regularly present, sometimes in the torture room and sometimes offsite observing remotely. But the involvement of healthcare professionals in such practices is a violation of rules of medical ethics, and the Bush and Obama Administrations have kept the identities of those involved rigorously secret.

Now, however, two doctors who stood in the forefront of Guantánamo torture accusations are the subject of detailed, well-documented challenges filed by law students and professors at Stanford and Harvard Universities, backed by medical ethicists. In the crosshairs are two leaders of the celebrated Guantánamo “biscuit” teams that helped guide the harsh treatment of prisoners there."

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