I have but one wish. Santa Claus should read the following report. Then have a serious talk with God. After having heard God's advice, he should hurry up and push his reindeer to gallop straight into President Obama's living room to put the report under President Obama's Christmas Tree. On time. Before opening other gifts and eating the Christmas dinner. Putting a petition on top of it, nicely framed and decorated for Christmas. It's that kind of a gift. It needs embellishment to make a mark and be recognized as something special.
Here is the report:
Physicians for Human Rights -December 2014 -
Doing Harm: Health Professionals’ Central Role in the CIA Torture Program - Medical and Psychological Analysis of the 2014 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report’s Executive Summary
Excerpts from the report:
The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) publicly released the 500-page executive summary (“summary”) of its 6,700 -page Committee Report of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program (“report”) on December 9, 2014. ...
The summary confirms that the United States systematically tortured Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detainees after September 11, 2001, and that the
practices were far more brutal than previously acknowledged. Even more disturbingly, the summary reveals the extent to which U.S. health professionals were involved in developing, implementing, and attempting to justify the CIA’s illegal torture program in violation of U.S. and international law and fundamental principles of medical ethics....
PHR finds that without the participation of health professionals, this illegal program might have been prevented.
PHR also concludes that the violations committed by health professionals represent not only a gross breach of medical and professional ethics, but also violations of domestic and international law. (See section III. “Health Professionals May Have Committed War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity.”) Given the seriousness of this crime, torture is subject to universal jurisdiction and obligates the state to prosecute those responsible. Some of the crimes detailed in the summary may reach the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which are also subject to universal jurisdiction. PHR calls on the current U.S. administration to hold those responsible for torture - including physicians, psychologists, and other health professionals - legally and ethically accountable for their actions.
The summary provides critical new information about the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) and how its health professionals participated in and otherwise facilitated CIA torture. ...
Based on a detailed review conducted by PHR, the health professionals who participated in the CIA torture program violated core ethical principles common to the healing professions, including the following obligations:
- To do no harm;
- To protect the lives and health of patients under their care from harm and brutality;
- To prevent and report torture;
- To uphold standards of professionalism, be honest in professional interactions, and report incompetence, fraud, and deception;
- To never engage in unethical research on human subjects;
- To receive the informed consent of the patient before providing medical treatment;
- To only perform roles consistent with their ethics and professional competencies; and
- To find an ethical resolution when health professionals’ obligations to persons under their care and to society conflict with the agenda of state institutions.
The SSCI summary details a range of activities by health professionals that violate numerous international treaties, laws, and ethical codes, including:
- International human rights and humanitarian treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
- the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment
- and the Geneva Conventions;
- U.S. state and federal law, including the War Crimes Act of 1996, Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, the federal anti-torture statute, and the U.S. Constitution;
- Ethical codes of the American Medical Association, American Psychological
Association, and American Psychiatric Association;
- International research and medical ethics codes, including the Nuremberg Code
- and the World Medical Association’s Declarations of Helsinki, Tokyo, and Malta.
Based on the available evidence, as well as the extreme seriousness of the alleged crimes and ethical violations committed by CIA health professionals, PHR encourages U.S. President Barack Obama, in cooperation with the incoming U.S. Congress, to authorize a federal commission of inquiry specifically into the role of health professionals in designing, directing, monitoring, and attempting to provide legal justifications for the CIA torture program. Such a commission must have subpoena powers and the authority to refer individuals for criminal investigation and prosecution to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), as warranted by the evidence.
The report goes into lots of details. As you may not want to read it, at least listen to these three videos and it should convince you that ... it's necessary to push for a federal commission.
Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program
AMY GOODMAN: —was resisting for years any kind moratorium or ban on psychologists’ involvement in these so-called enhanced interrogations, but that the AMA and the little APA—
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —the American Psychiatric Association, did pass bans, moratoriums.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: In 2006, the AMA and the little APA, American Psychiatric, passed clear bans on participation. And those bans on participation are now being echoed by The New York Times. The American Psychological Association is, of the big three, the only association that still permits involvement in interrogations.
Where we have to go in the next step is to a ban encoded in U.S. law. It’s time for it no longer to be about the associations, but to be about U.S. code. Health professionals have no role in interrogations. There’s the line from the famous Diane Beaver email out of Guantánamo: "If a detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong." If you have a health professional in an interrogation, I would invert that and say, "Then you’re doing it wrong." Right now is the time for leadership for the associations to step up and go, in the case of the AMA and American Psychiatric, one step further and say this needs to be encoded in U.S. federal statute.
and
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I think it suggests—let me make a clear, declarative statement: I think the information I reviewed for the FBI in 2012 suggests that the APA potentially was engaged in racketeering related to its relationship with CIA and White House officials in the construction of the 2005 PENS, President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain that. "PENS" stands for?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: PENS is the President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which basically encoded in APA policy the observation, the monitoring, the direct involvement role for psychologists in national security interrogations, that we now know at that time involved torture. What we see from Jim Risen’s reporting based on the emails I also reviewed is clear concealed contacts between officials who were directly in the policy chain of command and the operational chain of command at CIA related to this program—were helping, in one case, to literally write the PENS report. It wasn’t just that they were passing Post-it notes. They were literally writing the text of the document.
and
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: ... Now it’s time to really see it as the central story. If you didn’t have the health professionals, you wouldn’t have had the Office of Legal Counsel memos. It was the spark plug in that engine.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Because the OLC memos were based on a good-faith interpretation of U.S. anti-torture law, saying that if we, the United States, did not cause a certain level of severe, long-lasting pain, physical and mental pain and suffering, then we had not violated torture. Well, how are you going to assess that in a good-faith defense? You need to have health professionals involved to say that this limbo stick of harm was not crossed. Well, the fact is, that’s inherently an experimental role. There’s no clinical precedent. Doctors are not trained in assessing the prospective harm of a torture technique. So, the fact of the matter is, if you did not have the psychologists, the doctors in the room, OLC, as we see in the Bradbury memorandum, wouldn’t have had the data to say we hadn’t crossed the threshold of harm. In other words, the health professionals were the get-out-of-jail-free card, the legal indemnification for the White House.
Ex-Bush Official: U.S. Tortured Prisoners to Produce False Intel that Built Case for Iraq War
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes. I think that, you know, James Mitchell said it better than I can say it. This was a multiple-department chain of command-authorized operation. And we have a responsibility, underneath the precedents of Nuremberg, under the precedents of the Tokyo trials, to hold the chain of command accountable. To date, we have basically violated the bedrock principle of command accountability, which is the basis of international and domestic war crimes law. It’s been about two contract psychologists. Who brought them in? Who was their commander? Who gave them the order? We still don’t know that. And thank you, Senator Feinstein and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but we need to understand the chain of command, about who gave the order to weaponize health professionals to inflict harm and to study it.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Senator Udall—what Senator Mike Gravel is calling for—should have the whole report put into the record? It doesn’t just have to be Udall, the outgoing senator from Colorado; it could be any senator. But are you calling for this? Do you think some of that information will be in those thousands of pages that are still secret?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Based on people that I have talked to over the 13 years I’ve been working on detainee abuse, there is a lot that appears to have happened that we don’t know. You know, the president has said we should look forward and not backwards. Well, we shouldn’t look forward in blindness. Until we have the full accounting, that only a federal commission can provide, including the release of the full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, we don’t actually know fully what we’re talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: Should President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet—do you think these men should be charged with crimes against humanity?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I believe that the challenge of now, the challenge of the past decade, is to resuscitate our institutions for them to be able to do the accountability functions required by the law. Until we restore the rule of law by holding those who gave the order accountable—not the people, the burger flippers at the bottom, not middle management, but the chain of command from the top—we have not done what the law requires.
and
NATHANIEL RAYMOND:This is a five-alarm fire in American medical ethics, up there with Tuskegee. This is not just about what was done before. It appears that there were changes to both the interpretation of the Code of Federal Regulations related to human subjects research—the Wolfowitz memorandum—and changes to U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Conventions related to biomedical experimentation during the Bush administration. We need to go back, find out what was done and literally fix our code.
Bush & Cheney Should Be Charged with War Crimes Says Col. Wilkerson, Former Aide to Colin Powell
In 2009, McClatchy reported, "The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and ... Saddam Hussein’s regime." A "former senior U.S. intelligence official" said, quote, "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder."
Colonel Wilkerson helped prepare that speech that General Powell gave at the U.N., only to later renounce it. He’s now a professor of government and public policy at William & Mary.
Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about the Libi case and how seminal it was.
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Amy, it’s probably the most seminal moment in my memory of those five days and nights out at Langley at the CIA headquarters with George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin. Powell had rarely, in the some eight years or so I had worked for him to that point, grown so angry with me that he, in this case, physically grabbed me and took me to the spaces that were empty in the room adjacent to the DCI conference room, sat me down in a chair and essentially lectured me on how he was dissatisfied with and very unhappy with the portions in his presentation that dealt with terrorism, particularly the connections with Baghdad and al-Qaeda. And I quickly apprised him of the fact that I was just as uneasy as he was. He calmed down a bit, and he said, "Well, let’s throw it out." We did. We threw it out.
Within about 30 to 45 minutes, we were back in the DCI conference room to resume that night’s rehearsal, and George Tenet himself laid a bombshell on the table. He essentially said—and these are almost direct quotes: "We have learned from the interrogation of a high-level al-Qaeda operative that not only were there substantial contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad, that those contacts included Baghdad Mukhabarat, secret police, Saddam’s special people, training al-Qaeda operatives in how to use chemical and biological weapons." That’s almost a direct quote, Amy. At that point, Powell turned to me and said, "Put it back in."
And from that point on, though I did take some of the stuff out as late as 2:00 a.m. in the morning in the Waldorf-Astoria prior to the morning of the presentation, and had Phil Mudd, George Tenet’s counterterrorism czar, standing behind me in the Waldorf, trying to prevent me from taking things out, until I finally told him I would physically remove him from the room if he didn’t leave of his own will, people were trying to get that portion back into the presentation. But the damage was done. The secretary, as you know, presented the information as if there were substantial contacts.
I have in mind to believe in Santa Claus for a day, that is tomorrow night. Let's have a prayer that Santa Claus succeeds in convincing President Obama to do the right thing.