CIA health professionals may have committed war crimes by collecting and analysing data on brutally interrogated detainees in potential violation of U.S. and international bans on research on human subjects without their consent, a human rights organisation said on 16 December.
Physicians for Human Rights called on President Barack Obama and Congress to establish a commission of inquiry to examine the participation of CIA and private medical personnel in the interrogation programme, including possible breaches of domestic and international laws.
“The CIA relied upon health professionals at every step to commit and conceal the brutal and systematic torture of national security detainees,” the organization said in an analysis of a four-year study of the agency’s interrogation program released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee. “While most of the acts detailed . . . violate international human rights and domestic laws prohibiting torture, several of these alleged violations can also constitute war crimes.”
In raising possible war crimes by medical personnel, the analysis cited bans on experimentation on prisoners that grew out of the trials of Nazi officials and doctors held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.
CIA spokesman Christopher White denied that CIA medical personnel violated any laws, saying that officers of the agency’s Office of Medical Services monitored the health of detainees and “did so consistent with their professional obligations.”
“The men and women who participated in this program did so at the direction of the president and with the approval of the Department of Justice,” White said. “Sadly, the (Senate) study makes a number of unsubstantiated allegations, mainly a result of the report’s many investigative and methodological flaws. Anyone making allegations based solely on the (Senate) study does so at their own peril.”
The Senate report found that the CIA’s use of waterboarding, which simulates drowning, sleep deprivation and other brutal interrogation methods on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons produced no significant intelligence. The agency also misrepresented the programme’s effectiveness to the White House, Congress and the public, said the report written by the committee’s Democratic majority.
The CIA admitted that mistakes were made while the programme ran under the Bush administration from 2002 until 2007. The agency and the committee’s Republican minority, which dropped out of the investigation after it began in 2009, found that the program gained life-saving information and disrupted terrorist plots. They however denied that the techniques constituted torture.
CIA’s Torture Experts Got Millions,
Face New Scrutiny
The well-paid psychologists had a plan and a contract to make terrorists talk. And when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resisted, a CIA officer confided in 2003 that one of the psychologists promised he was “going to go to school on this guy,” according to a new Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Private contractors James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen then unleashed the harsh interrogation techniques they had helped design. Coercive interrogation tools like waterboarding, slapping and sleep deprivation proved lucrative to Mitchell and Jessen even as they triggered alarms among intelligence professionals over the brutal handling of detainees such as the suspected mastermind of 9/11, the report shows.
“Although these guys believe that their way is the only way, there should be an effort to define roles and responsibilities before their arrogance and narcissism evolve into unproductive conflict in the field,” a CIA medical professional warned in a June 16, 2003, email.
The two psychologists, who collected millions of dollars from the CIA, are among the few identifiable major players whose actions are spotlighted in the report made public. That could put them at the centre of a growing call for legal consequences.
“If the allegations are true, their behaviour was a clear violation of the profession’s ethical standards, clear violations of human rights, and probably violations of U.S. and international laws,” Rhea Farberman, the spokeswoman for the American Psychological Association, said in an interview Wednesday. “They should be held accountable.”
The resulting fallout from the now-defunct programme set up to detain and interrogate terror suspects overseas already has proven costly to taxpayers, as the CIA remains on the hook for covering legal expenses for the men through 2021.