In connection with the Red Cross report on interrogation methods used by the CIA at 'black site' prisons, Scott Allen writes of the disturbing fact that 'the ICRC report contains critical new information about health professionals, described by the detainees interviewed for the report as "doctors," closely monitoring the torture of individuals in CIA custody'. Allen goes on to say:
Health professional supervision of torture is one of the gravest affronts to medical ethics and is illegal under both domestic and international anti-torture law. [Mark] Danner's disclosure of the ICRC report on detainee treatment in CIA custody is shocking but not suprising.
He explains that it isn't surprising because the evidence of torture, including of the complicity of health professionals, has been steadily mounting.
That this information is shocking there can be no question. It is shocking for the reason Allen says it is: that it is an outrage against the ethical code by which doctors and other medical professionals are bound (as well as against the elementary code of humanity). There should, accordingly, be follow-up to discover who these medical professionals are and to have them excluded from their profession.
It is not, however, surprising for another reason than the one Allen gives. We know enough now about the politics and the social psychology of warfare, of repression, of genocide even, to know that there is no kind of profession with a membership totally immune to practices of grave wrongdoing of one kind and another. Doctors are no exception. It is often said that the perpetrators of (whatever) terrible evil are also human, that they could be you or me or anyone, only placed in certain circumstances. I have protested against what I take to be the falsehood in this: no, not anyone. However, the truth in it applies across the board, including to doctors: some will cross the moral line that should not be crossed. Wherever there is a regime - or just a set of routines and practices - of torture, there will be doctors willing to service it. We should be shocked and outraged by this, do what we can to stop it. But we shouldn't be surprised by it; we should expect it.