| Today's Feature Decorated Ta Ta
Holder Contest
The Carthage chapter of the
American Cancer Society Relay for Life will be
sponsoring a bra decorating contest to raise
money to help with the fight against cancer.
Anyone interested is asked to decorate a bra in
whatever way their creative juices may take them,
and then bring the decorated bra to Block by
Block Quilt shop in Carthage to be displayed. The
cost to enter is $5.00 which will go to the
American Cancer Society. People will be able to
come by the shop to vote for their favorite Ta Ta
Holder by putting $1.00 per vote towards the bra
of their choice. Prizes will be awarded to the
top 3 vote getters. The Deadline to enter your
decorated Ta Ta is May 3, 2009. Voting will take
place at Block by Block Quilt Shop from May 4,
2009 to June 6, 2009. The bras will be displayed
at the Relay for Life event on June 6th at
Central Park in Carthage. The winners will be
announced at 6 p.m. on the day of the Relay for
Life event. To get more information on the
details of this event please contact Theresa
Block at 417-358-6427. The Relay for Life is a
family event and reserves the right to censor
inappropriate entries.
Bush Memos
Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture
If a Doctor
Is There.
by Sheri Fink, www.ProPublica.org
Former CIA Director Michael V.
Hayden was fond of saying that when it came to
handling high-value terror suspects, he would
play in fair territory, but with "chalk dust
on my cleats." Four legal memos released by
the Obama administration make it clear that the
referee role in CIA interrogations was played by
its medical and psychological personnel.
According to the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Office of Legal
Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval
to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other
abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a
"system of medical and psychological
monitoring" of interrogations. Medical and
psychological personnel were assigned to monitor
interrogations and intervene to ensure that
interrogators didn’t cause "serious or
permanent harm" and thus violate the U.S.
federal statute against torture.
The reasoning sounds almost
circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it:
"The close monitoring of each detainee for
any signs that he is at risk of experiencing
severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion
that the combined use of interrogation techniques
is not intended to inflict such pain."
In other words, as long as
medically trained personnel were present and
approved of the techniques being used, it was not
torture.
The memos provide official
confirmation of both much-reported and previously
unknown roles of doctors, psychologists,
physician assistants and other medical personnel
with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services
(OMS). The government’s lawyers
characterized these medical roles as
"safeguards" for detainees.
Medical oversight was present
from the beginning of the special interrogation
program following the 9/11 attacks and appears to
have grown more formalized over the
program’s existence. The earliest of the
four memos, from August 2002, states that a
medical expert with experience in the
military’s Survival Evasion Resistance,
Escape (SERE) training would be present during
waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah and would
put a stop to procedures "if deemed
medically necessary to prevent severe medical or
physical harm to Zubaydah." (All
interrogation techniques, the memos said, were
"imported" from SERE.)
Later, OMS personnel were
involved in "designing safeguards for, and
in monitoring implementation of, the
procedures" used on other high-value
detainees. In December 2004, the OMS produced a
set of "Guidelines on Medical and
Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition,
Interrogation and Detention," a still-secret
document that is heavily quoted from in three
legal memos that were written the following year.
The CIA declined our request to
comment further on the OMS’ role in detainee
treatment. The OMS employs physicians,
psychologists and other medical professionals to
care for CIA employees and their families.
Perhaps the most chilling
aspect of the memos is their intimation that
medical professionals conducted a form of
research on the detainees, clearly without their
consent. "In order to best inform future
medical judgments and recommendations, it is
important that every application of the
waterboard be thoroughly documented," one
memo reads. The documentation included not only
how long the procedure lasted, how much water was
used and how it was poured, but also "if the
naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of
volume was expelled… and how the subject
looked between each treatment." Special
instructions were also issued with regard to
documenting experience with sleep deprivation,
and "regular reporting on medical and
psychological experiences with the use of these
techniques on detainees" was required.
The Nuremberg Code, adopted
after the horrors of "medical research"
during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other
things, the consent of subjects and their ability
to call a halt to their participation.
The memos also draw heavily on
the advice of psychologists that interrogation
techniques would not be expected to cause lasting
harm. At times this advice sounds contradictory.
While calling waterboarding "medically
acceptable," the OMS also deemed it
"the most traumatic of the enhanced
interrogation techniques."
The fact that traumatic events
have the potential to cause long-lasting
post-traumatic stress syndrome has been well
documented. Physicians for Human Rights, in
interviews with eleven former detainees held in
Iraq and Afghanistan, found "severe,
long-term physical and psychological
consequences." "All the individuals we
evaluated were ultimately released without ever
being charged," said Dr. Allen Keller,
medical director of the Bellevue/New York
University School of Medicine Program for
Survivors of Torture.
The memos describe the
techniques in highly precise and clinical detail,
befitting a medical textbook. During
waterboarding, in which a physician and
psychologist were to be present at all times,
"the detainee is monitored to ensure that he
does not develop respiratory distress. If the
detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth
is removed from his face, he is immediately moved
to a vertical position in order to clear the
water from his mouth, nose and nasopharynx."
Side effects including vomiting, aspiration and
throat spasm that could cut off breathing were
each addressed: "In the event of such
spasms…if necessary, the intervening
physician would perform a tracheotomy."
While physician assistants
could be present when most "enhanced"
techniques were applied, "use of the
waterboard requires the presence of a
physician," one memo said, quoting the OMS
guidelines.
Doctors were also described as
having vetted the practices for safety. Certain
limits on waterboarding were created "with
extensive input from OMS." One memo states
that OMS "doctors and psychologists"
confirmed that combining the various techniques
"would not operate in a different manner
from the way they do individually, so as to cause
severe pain."
Medical and psychological
personnel were required to observe whenever
interrogators came into physical contact with
detainees, including slapping them and pushing
them into flexible walls ("walling").
Whenever a detainee was doused with cold water, a
medical officer had to be on hand to monitor for
signs of hypothermia. Confining prisoners to
cramped boxes required "continuing
consultation between the interrogators and OMS
officers." Prisoners made to stand for long
periods to prevent sleep were to carefully
monitor detainees for swelling of the legs and
other dangerous conditions, and at least three
times early in the program were switched, on
medical advice, to "horizontal sleep
deprivation."
This was one example of how
medical personnel could, according to the CIA,
help prevent "severe physical or mental pain
or suffering" on the part of the detainees.
However, the memos show that the OMS’ role
was not merely to limit the medical impact of
interrogations, but also to consult on the
effectiveness of interrogations. A May 30, 2005,
memo quotes the OMS suggesting that cramped
confinement was "not…particularly
effective" because it provides "a safe
haven offering respite from interrogation."
Monitoring interrogations is a
role that the American Medical Association, among
others, has rejected, pointing out that the
presence of physicians or other medical personnel
could paradoxically make interrogations more
dangerous. As Keller explains it: "The
interrogator may think well, the health
professional will stop me if I go too far. The
health professional is thinking I’m really
here at the behest of the CIA. There’s a
tension of dual loyalty."
Just as officials in the
Justice Dept. now condemn waterboarding as
torture, so, too, did opinion change at another
organization, the American Psychological
Association. In the frightening days following
the 9/11 attacks, "there were two schools of
thoughts in the psychological community. One was
if you were there on the ground you could do some
good," said APA spokesperson Rhea Farberman,
whose organization was criticized for originally
taking that position. The group’s current
stance is to forbid psychologists from
participating, she said. "If you are there
on the ground, you may be seen as condoning the
behavior."
Some medical professionals are
calling for colleagues to be investigated and
sanctioned. But finding out which professionals
were involved in designing, monitoring and
implementing the interrogation techniques may be
difficult. The four memos were released almost in
their entirety. The few redactions concerned
mainly the names of the personnel involved.
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