The role of US army medical staff in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison should be investigated, according to an article in the journal The Lancet (vol 364, p 725).
Staff “failed to protect detainees’ human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings”, writes Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis in the same issue. After scouring available documents and reports on the abuse, Miles describes a number of disturbing incidents. In one case, a surgeon listed “natural causes” as the cause of death of a man whose head was put in a sleeping bag while guards sat on him. Six months later, the Pentagon ruled the death a homicide by asphyxiation. In another, a catheter was inserted into a corpse to make it look as though the victim was still alive when taken to hospital. In a third, medical staff left after reviving a beaten prisoner, allowing the abuse to continue.
“Where was their protest, where was their whistle-blowing?” asks Michael Grodin, director of the law, medicine and ethics programme at Boston University. And The Lancet’s editorial declares: “Doctors, even in military forces, must first and foremost be concerned about their patients and bound by principles of medical ethics.”
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