Doctors Involved in Torture

Despite taking the Hippocratic Oath and pledging “never to do harm,” some doctors working for the U.S. government were involved in interrogation programs that involved torture, resulting in the psychological and physical injury and even death of detainees, according to Scott Allen M.D., a professor at Brown University’s medical school and cofounder of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Rhode Island.

Allen spoke at Colby Oct. 7. As he set out to investigate the Enhanced Interrogation Program run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Allen said he asked, "What were the doctors doing?"

The doctors, Allen said, designed, implemented, monitored, and provided the foundation for a legal rationalization for torture. “And it is now obvious that you could not have launched this torture program without the doctors,” he said. Conversely, he added, “The doctors could have stopped this in its tracks.”

The Obama administration released the Justice Department memos that were written by lawyers and used by the Bush administration. These documents sought to legitimize the use of torture on U.S. detainees overseas. The lawyers who drafted these memos called the interrogation techniques humane and cited the presence of doctors as a reason the techniques to be permissible, said Allen.

The enhanced interrogation program used psychological techniques like diapering (in which interrogators put the detainees in diapers and would not let them go to the bathroom), sexual humiliation, prolonged isolation, and more. Walling, for example, is when “a towel is put around the neck and the detainee's head is slammed into a flexible wall” while blindfolded, Allen said.

“But how could good doctors do bad things?” he asked.

Doctors, Allen said, can get caught between their professional duty to their patients and their duty to their employers. This is especially true for doctors in the military. The institutions, he said, use seductive arguments to lure doctors into this program, like arguing for the presence of doctors because they wanted to ensure that detainees were ‘safe.’ Many good doctors were thus swayed into participating in something that Allen maintains was wrong. The lack of an independent institution they could appeal to also played a role in their silence, he said.

Although he understands the doctors’ predicament, Allen believes. “A physician should use the human dignity standard,” he said. “Torture is dehumanizing to everyone… those being tortured and those being asked to do it.”

Allen is a clinical associate professor of medicine the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and cofounder and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I.

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