Published 15 June 2010, doi:10.1136/bmj.c3182
Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c3182

News

Bush administration should be investigated for torture of prisoners, says human rights group

¹ New York

A human rights group has called on Barack Obama to start immediate criminal investigation of alleged experimentation and research on terrorist suspects detained after the attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001.

Physicians for Human Rights, a US organisation of health professionals, alleges that doctors and other health professionals working for the Central Intelligence Agency monitored and refined "enhanced" interrogation techniques to make sure they stayed within the boundaries drawn up by the Bush administration.

It charges that the administration "apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody."

Seven other organisations signed the complaint, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Center for Victims of Torture.

The change in status from detainees to research subjects means that the doctors’ role "could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law," says the group’s report. "These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."

The group filed its complaint with the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Human Research Protections and called for an investigation into possible misconduct by lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, part of the Justice Department.

It says that President Obama should suspend any federally funded human research occurring in secret and that states should ban torture and improper treatment of prisoners by healthcare professionals.

The United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture is also being called on to investigate allegations that the US violated international human rights law.

A CIA spokesman rejected the report. He told the New York Times: "The report is just wrong. The CIA did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including the Department of Justice."

Physicians for Human Rights says that its charges are based on documents in the public record. The group says, "The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques."

The groups says that after the 11 September attacks the Bush administration redefined acts such as "waterboarding, forced nudity, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, stress positions and prolonged isolation, that had previously been recognized as illegal, to be ‘safe, legal and effective’ ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques." In waterboarding a detainee is strapped down while water is poured onto his or her face to simulate drowning.

Medical personnel collected information on the simultaneous versus sequential application of interrogation techniques, the group says, which was used to establish a policy on using the techniques in combination. Their studies also led to the use of saline solution instead of water in waterboarding to reduce the risk of prisoners’ contracting pneumonia or hyponatraemia. They also studied sleep deprivation up to 180 hours to establish the enhanced interrogation programme.

Physicians for Human Rights says that the Bush administration violated the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Code, the US War Crimes Act, and the Common Rule (US federal regulations regarding research on human subjects carried out by government agencies).

In the US, people participating in experiments are required to sign detailed informed consent forms, and the experiments must be approved by institutional review boards.

The group says, "Subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with the dignity befitting human beings, and not simply as experimental guinea pigs . . . No official, explicit review and authorization by an institutional review board for research on detainees who were designated as enemy combatants during the period in question exists in the public record."

Its report notes that members of the US armed forces volunteered and gave their informed consent to test waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other procedures as part of survival, evasion, resistance, escape (SERE) training, which aims to inform US service personnel of what to expect if they are captured and tortured. Those who participated in the programme were exposed to limited application of the interrogation techniques and were allowed to withdraw at any time if they wanted to.

Those participating in the programme showed "marked stress responses, as indicated by significant hormone spikes and troughs, and significant adverse psychological effects," the report says. There was no long term follow-up, it says.

Cite this as: BMJ 2010;340:c3182

Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program is at www.phrtorturepapers.org