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(More customer reviews)In less than 170 pages you will come away with unassailable facts about our treatment of prisoners or detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay: 1) American servicemen and women tortured and murdered detainees. 2) Many of our doctors, psychologists, nurses, medics and other health practitioners were complicit in these murders and tortures. 3) These tortures and murders were not the acts of a "few bad apples" as some have claimed. 4) The highest levels of our administration sanctioned these tortures.
American servicemen and women beat, tortured, maimed, humiliated, neglected and murdered detainees. One Afghan taxi driver caught in a sweep was beaten so badly about his legs, the doctor said they were "pulpified." Had he survived, both legs would have had to be amputated. He was found to be innocent two days after his death in detention. Men and women were made to pose or crawl naked, sit naked in extreme air conditioning or heat up to 130 degrees. The first execution of an American citizen in Iraq came twelve days after the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib had been released.
Doctors, nurses and other health care providers covered up murders by guards. And this is the question that brought the author Oath Betrayed. He asks where were the doctors when all this was going on. Why weren't they reporting it, and why weren't they stopping it?
There were a number of detainee deaths due to heart attacks brought on by positional asphyxia from being forced to wear sacks over their heads. The cause of such heart attacks is easy to detect. These were homicides, yet the doctors simply listed them as heart attack victims. Psychiatrists and psychologists developed strategies for breaking the will of detainees, and made their medical records available to their interrogators, if they maintained medical records at all. Doctors examined and manipulated dietary consumption and medication to ensure detainees could sustain interrogation.
These tortures and murders were not the acts of a few bad apples or just a few guys blowing off steam as blowhard, Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk have suggested. Such interrogations, and inhumane treatment were commonplace. Some detainees known as "ghosts" were sent to countries were they would be beaten and tortured. These acts were sanctioned by battalion commanders and base commanders, from division commanders to theater commanders. The lower ranks take their cues from their commanders. Had they made it clear they would be court-martialed for such behavior at the very least, it would not have happened.
The highest levels of our administration sanctioned these tortures. His Arrogancy, Donald Rumsfeld wrote or even approved of interrogation policy in direct contravention to the Geneva Conventions, Attorneys general John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez, and the President of the United States, George W. Bush were complicit in this. It was the attorney generals who got our Justice Department to declare that Afghanistan was a "failed state" which meant the Geneva Conventions did not apply. They rewrote a definition of torture stating it was torture only if it caused permanent effects, organ failure, or death. It was our president who announced that the Geneva Conventions would be observed. It's what he left out that was critical. He did not say he would comply with its provisions.
I recommend this book highly and another, "Conservatives Without Conscience," not because the latter is about conservatives, but it does provide some explanation of authoritarianism. It explains how some people can lead others, and how some people will willingly follow them to commit acts they might never do on their own.
(And people like Dick Clark had the nerve to send an open email to everyone asking us to boycott CBS because 60 Minutes broke the Abu Ghraib story wide open. Isn't there something wrong with where our shock and ire are being directed?)
After reading this, I am, for the first time in my life, ashamed of having been a soldier, and being American.
This book is a powerful expose that should stir every American to stand up and demand accountability of our leaders and our policies.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
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Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror"If law be the bedrock of civil society, it can no more undergird torture than it could support slavery or genocide."–from the IntroductionThe graphic photographs of U.S. military personnel grinning over abused Arab and Muslim prisoners shocked the world community. That the United States was systematically torturing inmates at prisons run by its military and civilian leaders divided the nation and brought deep shame to many. When Steven H. Miles, an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights, learned of the neglect, mistreatment, and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, one of his first thoughts was: "Where were the prison doctors while the abuses were taking place?" In Oath Betrayed, Miles explains the answer to this question. Not only were doctors, nurses, and medics silent while prisoners were abused; physicians and psychologists provided information that helped determine how much and what kind of mistreatment could be delivered to detainees during interrogation. Additionally, these harsh examinations were monitored by health professionals operating under the purview of the U.S. military. Miles has based this book on meticulous research and a wealth of resources, including unprecedented eyewitness accounts from actual victims of prison abuse, and more than thirty-five thousand pages of documentation acquired through provisions of the Freedom of Information Act: army criminal investigations, FBI notes on debriefings of prisoners, autopsy reports, and prisoners' medical records. These documents tell a story markedly different from the official version of the truth, revealing involvement at every level of government, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to the Pentagon's senior health officials to prison health-care personnel.Oath Betrayed is not a denunciation of American military policy or of war in general, but of a profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the United States armed forces and of America's abdication of its leadership role in international human rights. This book is a vital document that will both open minds and reinvigorate Americans' understanding of why human rights matter, so that we can reaffirm and fortify the rules for international civil society. "This, quite simply, is the most devastating and detailed investigation into a question that has remained a no-no in the current debate on American torture in George Bush's war on terror: the role of military physicians, nurses, and other medical personnel. Dr. Miles writes in a white rage, with great justification–but he lets the facts tell the story."–Seymour M. Hersh, author of Chain of Command"Steven Miles has written exactly the book we require on medical complicity in torture. His admirable combination of scholarship and moral passion does great service to the medical profession and to our country."–Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, and co-editor of Crimes of War: Iraq
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