Doctors working for the US military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a US bioethicist charges.
In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.
He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured.
No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.
"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of The Lancet medical journal.
"Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib," he said.
The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.
A US military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pen-tagon's own investigation of the abuses.
"Many of these cases remain under investigation and charges will be brought against any individual where there is evidence of abuse," said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, US Army spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq.
Photographs of prisoners being abused and humiliated by US troops in Iraq have sparked worldwide condemnation.
Although the conduct of soldiers has been scrutinized, the role of the military's medical staff in the scandal has received relatively little attention.
"The detaining power's health personnel are the first and often the last line of defense against human rights abuses," Miles said in a telephone interview.
"Their failure to assume that role emphasizes to the prisoner how utterly beyond humane appeal they are," he said.
He said military medicine reform needs to be enshrined in international law and include more clout for military medical staff in the defense of human rights.
Miles gathered evidence from US congressional hearings, sworn statements of detainees and sol-
diers, medical journal accounts and press reports to build a picture of physician complicity, and in isolated cases active participation by medical personnel in abuse at the Baghdad prison, as well as in Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.
In one example, cited in a sworn statement from an Abu Ghraib detainee, a prisoner collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating.
Medical staff revived the detainee and left, allowing the abuse to continue, Miles reported.
Depositions from two detainees at Abu Ghraib described an incident in which a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to sew up a prisoner's wound.
A military police officer reported a medic inserted an intravenous tube into the corpse of a detainee who died while being tortured to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital, Miles said.
At prisons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, "Physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke or natural causes without noting the unnatural [cause] of the death," Miles wrote.
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