Leading Health Professionals Join Together To Call for US to Stop Participating in Torture, Call for Independent Bipartisan Commission
In recognition of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on June 26, a group of leading US health professionals has called today on their colleagues throughout the United States to join them in urging steps to end torture and cruel treatment by US forces and to assure the protection of medical personnel from complicity in abuse. The group has asked all US health professionals to join the US Health Professionals’ Call to Prevent Torture and Abuse of Detainees in US Custody – initiated by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) – as an expression of their professional ethical commitment to prevent torture wherever it is inflicted.
Participating health professionals include, in their individual capacities, a former United States Surgeon General, the White House Physician to President George Herbert Walker Bush, a former Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, a retired US Army brigadier general and medical officer, the President of the Association of American Medical Colleges, former presidents of the American College of Physicians and the American Public Health Association, and past editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.
A wide range of sources, including military and other government documents, have exposed a systematic pattern of torture and ill-treatment by US interrogators, including physical torture, such as beatings and shackling in stress positions, and psychological torture, such as mock executions, sleep and sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, forced nudity, cultural and sexual humiliation, use of dogs to instill terror, threats of violence or death against detainees or their loved ones, and more. The US Army has identified the deaths of at least 28 detainees as confirmed or suspected homicides.
Noting that the American Medical Association's Code of Medical Ethics provides that "Physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason," the US Health Professionals' Call conveys the "grave concern over the mounting evidence of both physical and psychological torture and ill-treatment inflicted by United States forces on prisoners and detainees in Afghanistan; Iraq; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and elsewhere." <snip>
http://www.phrusa.org/research/torture/news_2005-06-23.html
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