Amy Goodman
@DemocracyNow·3.2M subscribers·19.4K videos
Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program
Posted
December 23, 2014
Views
2,492
Likes
59
Comments
7
Engagement
December 23, 2014
2,492
59
7
2.65%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
See what was published immediately before and after this episode.
19:56Now PlayingPhysicians for Human Rights is calling for a federal commission to investigate, document and hold accountable all health professionals who took part in CIA torture. Last week, the group released a report titled "Doing HarmHealth Professionals' Central Role in the CIA Torture Program." The report finds medical personnel connected to the torture program may have committed war crimes by conducting human experimentation on prisoners in violation of the Nuremberg Code that grew out of the trial of Nazi officials and doctors after World War II. We speak with Nathaniel Raymond, a research ethics adviser for Physicians for Human Rights, who cowrote the new report. "We now see clear evidence of the essential, integral role that health professionals played as the legal heat shield for the Bush administration their getoutofjailfree card," Raymond says. “There has often been this narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were the lone gunmen of torture, that they were doing this out of their garage,” Raymond explains. “They were operating inside a superstructure of medicalized torture. It was not just them alone. It includes physicians’ assistants, doctors and it may include other professionals. What they were doing was everything from ‘care’ to actual monitoring, calibration and design of the tactics.”
Watch years of Democracy Now! coverage of the U.S. torture program in our archive:
Democracy Now!, is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,300+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 89am ET at
Please consider supporting independent media by making a donation to Democracy Now! today
FOLLOW DEMOCRACY NOW! ONLINE:
Daily Email
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
