Doctors employed by the US Central Intelligence Agency may have used detainees as “human subjects” to try to improve the effectiveness of waterboarding and other forms of torture, alleges the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). The group has rifled through the heavily-redacted copy (pdf) of the CIA’s report on detention and interrogation practices, and this week released a report (pdf) of apparent health professionals’ ethical and human rights violations.

It’s no surprise that doctors have been involved in “enhanced” interrogations — they needed to make sure the detainee wasn’t about to die or suffer from organ failure or long-term psychological damage. This has already irked PHR, the Red Cross (who called it “a gross breach of medical ethics”), and other human rights groups, who assert the monitoring doctors are essentially complicit in torture.

But the new report alleges the doctors were more than just safety monitors. PHR says health professionals “participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret ‘torture programme’.”

The most severe accusation is that doctors gathered data to try to improve the technique’s effectiveness, “essentially using the detainees as human subjects, a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation.”

Speaking on Democracy NOW, report co-author Steven Reisner:

“The Office of Medical Services of the CIA didn’t have any data to go on to assess how dangerous to the life of the prisoner waterboarding actually was. So what they decided to do, according to the report, is to gather data through each session of the waterboarding in order to better assess how you implement waterboarding in the future. They asked for data on the amount of water that was issued, how frequently the sessions were, whether there was a nasal seal making sure the water entered the cavity or didn’t, et cetera.”

PHR is calling for an official investigation into this alleged “human experimentation”.

Other Coverage:

CIA doctors face human experimentation claims – Guardian

CIA torture doctors flouted Hippocratic oath – Tehran Times

Doctors who oversaw CIA waterboarding ‘guilty of war crimes’ – Telegraph

Doctors had ‘central role’ in CIA abuse: rights group – AFP

Image: aclu.org