Medical ethics at Guantanamo Bay detention centre and in the US military: a time for reform.

摘要

President Obama has pledged to close the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Jan 23, 2010. Physicians have a special interest in how this pledge is going to be accomplished since the use of brutal interrogation and force-feeding of prisoners as sanctioned by George Bush's administration has damaged the integrity of the physicians working for the military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These physicians had a conflict of loyalty because of their ethical obligations to their imprisoned patients and the Bush administration's demands to further the goals and interests of military commanders and intelligence officials.1 A declassified congressional report shows that military physicians developed and implemented interrogation methods, including sleep deprivation, isolation, threats, nakedness, and stress positions. The release of previously secret memoranda from the US Justice Department shows the involvement of physicians working for the CIA in designing, using, and monitoring interrogation methods, including water boarding. The International Committee of the Red Cross has established that these methods amount to torture.