The CIA's torture of suspected terrorists may have included unlawful medical experimentation, according to Physicians for Human Rights. Their new report, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 CIA Inspector General’s Report [PDF], details the CIA's use of doctors and psychologists to enable and sanitise their torture programme (which included threats to sexually abuse family members, beatings, confinement in a small box, mock executions, and waterboarding). But in addition to ensuring that the techniques were conducted "safely" - a gross violation of medical and professional ethics which should see everyone involved disbarred as well as prosecuted - the CIA's doctors and psychologists
were directed to meticulously monitor the waterboarding of detainees to try to improve the technique’s effectiveness, essentially using the detainees as human subjects, a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation.Experimenting on prisoners is a war crime under both the Third Geneva Convention (Art 130) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 8). Experimenting on people to find out how to better torture them is simply monstrous. Those responsible need to be held to account for it. And if the US does not, then the international community will have to.
