Interrogations, Forced Feedings, and the Role of Health Professionals: New Perspectives on International Human Rights, Humanitarian Law, and Ethics (2009)
Eds. Ryan Goodman, Mindy Jane Roseman
The American public has been bombarded by news articles, memos, and reports about the horrors of torture committed by the U.S. government in their name. The tragic role of health professionals involved in human rights violations in detention centers has also been well documented. Although international human rights law, humanitarian law, and professional ethics codes prohibit the participation of health professionals in torture, such laws and codes are clearly insufficient in practice. What we need now is to reexamine the institutional and structural pressures that have allowed abuses to occur, and move forward from there.
This process has already begun. In January 2008, the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School held a workshop for scholars and practitioners from the military and civilian sectors, including World Medical Association president Yoram Blachar, career intelligence officer Steven M. Kleinman, Physicians for Human Rights president Leonard S. Rubenstein, and others. This book compiles the different perspectives of the workshop participants, providing interdisciplinary analysis and suggestions for institutional reform on two specific and important practices: forced feedings and coercive interrogation. The authors examine cultural frameworks and social situations that affect the faculty of health professionals, provide ethical and policy analysis, and offer practice guidelines. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned with the participation of doctors and psychologists in torture, and the changes that must be made to ensure that they are held accountable and that abuses do not happen again.
See links below the fold:
Other books on doctors and torture:
Physicians at War: The Dual-Loyalties Challenge (2008)
Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors (updated 2009)
Sources on forced feeding and interrogation:
Blog post on force-feeding by Prof. George J. Annas - Encyclopedia Brittanica Blog, Feb 2009
Guantanamo: Ethics, Interrogation, and Forced-feeding – Military Medicine, Jan 2009
Forcefeeding and restraint of Guantanamo Bay hunger strikers – The Lancet, Mar 2006
Tough US Steps in Hunger Strike at Camp in Cuba – NY Times, Feb 2006
This s very important and welcome material…. I would like to draw your attention to a parallel discussion in anthropology following two events – firstly the suggestion that cultural information supplied by an anthropologist’s research was used to assist interrogation and secondly the broader attempt by the military to recruit anthropologists to form “human terrain teams” that would assist in combat operations.
As a matter of comparative methodology the following article on Ethnography and Torture may be of interest – http://wisc.academia.edu/NeilWhitehead/Papers/85800/Ethnography–Torture-and-the-Human-Terrain—Terror-Systems