Things I Didn’t Know About Abu Ghraib
This past week in the joint-degree seminar we heard from med-school prof Steven Miles, who presented his research on the role of medical personnel during abuses of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. The full-text Lancet article is available here [pdf], but I thought I would transcribe some of the things I’d jotted down that I hadn’t known before:
1. Generally, that the medical personnel were not only present during tortures, in a few instances they actually took part themselves (and also used knowledge of patients’ medical records to make tortures more effectively tailored to detainees’ vulnerabilities). They also helped fake medical reports so that death certificates would not accurately reflect the role that torture played. Most medical personnel did not report abuses, and the very few who did were promptly dismissed or reassigned.
2. Further, there was widespread medical neglect– patients in need of medication often did not receive it, and those with chronic health problems were not monitored. According to Professor Miles, the US hasn’t been involved in a comparably-severe degree of medical neglect in a time of conflict since the Civil War.
3. Another interesting thing I learned is just how upset the FBI was with the Army’s approach to interrogation (which shut out experienced interrogators from setting up or overseeing the operations). Indeed, it was high-ranking professional interrogators in the FBI who played the most significant role in putting the abuses in the public spotlight.
4. Relatedly, one of the structural reasons Abu Ghraib interrogations devolved into torture was that, whereas in “normal” expert-conducted interrogations the “softening-up” [physical and psychological intimidation] and the interrogation take place in separate rooms, in Abu Ghraib that divide broke down, such that both steps were inflicted on prisoners at the same time.
5. Professor Miles also made reference to 20th century stories of torture methods: In response to fears that the enemy was developing “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing techniques, the CIA conducted a comprehensice series of studies on torture from 1953-1974. Among other things, they concluded that making death threats was “less than useless” because it generally only yielded false confessions.
The Israelis conducted similar studies, and found that for torturees (in their case, Palistinians), torture functioned as a sort of “rite of passage” for radical groups and only _increased_ allegiance to the group.
