Pipol Power

In an article in this week's issue of The Lancet bioethicist Steven H. Miles condemns the complicity of U.S. military medical personnel in torture of prisoners and other human rights violations. Citing military documents, eyewitness accounts and news reports, Miles says medical personnel were involved in a range of violations including falsification of death certificates, tampering with Iraqi corpses and in one instance, reviving a man brutalized into unconsciousness so that soldiers could resume a torture regime.

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine, another medical journal, already carried an article citing evidence that U.S. doctors, nurses, and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

Both reports call for a wider investigation in the topic.

The Lancet's lead editorial argues that human rights have become a casualty in the desperate attempt to get results in the war against terrorism. The prestigious journal concludes:

Health-care workers should now break their silence. Those who were involved in or witnessed ill-treatment need to give a full and accurate account of events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Those who are still in positions where dual commitments prevent them from putting the rights of their patients above other interests, should protest loudly and refuse cooperation with authorities. The wider non-military medical community should unite in support of their colleagues and condemn torture and inhumane and degrading practices against detainees.

The Iraqi city of Fallujah was the scene of war crimes by U.S. troops last April. This time it is Najaf's turn. The city’s top health official talked about "a real catastrophe" for local health services. Ambulances are prevented from reaching the injured, US troops have turned the city’s best-equipped hospital into a base of operations and are indiscriminately firing machine guns and rockets into civilian neighborhoods according to reports. British activist Jo Wilding, who witnessed the siege of Fallujah, writes now:

It repeats itself: the main hospital has been closed down by US troops and is being used for military operations, ambulances are being prevented, again by US troops, from moving around the town, which is being pounded from the air while the US and the Iraqi militias, disparate armed groups, fight in the streets and
US soldiers drive around with loudspeakers, ordering civilians to leave or be killed.It could be Falluja in April; this time it’s Najaf. I hear that Kut has been bombed, the hospitals reporting massive casualties which the US says were fighters, the locals say were mostly civilians. I hear nothing about Nasariya, Samawa, although I know that when Najaf kicks off, my friends in the other southern towns just have to lock their doors and wait.

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