A Dream for a Better World

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a gross breach of medical ethics, a long-secret report by the Red Cross concluded. Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.  Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the CIA’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.  The International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the CIA last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were categorically torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. It was reported that Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box so small he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position and was one of several prisoners to be slammed against the walls, according to the Red Cross report. The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded.

According to documents that a Senate committee released, the U.S. military hid the locations of detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  In the documents, a military lawyer said during a meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison that they may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around and that it is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.  Another person at the meeting, the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.