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Controversial CIA Torture Report

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A new congressional report was released last week detailing the controversial CIA torture program during the years following the September 11 attacks on the twin towers. The report detailed several despicable ways detainees were treated at various CIA black sites, detainees endured waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinements, rectal feeding and death from hypothermia. The most despicable aspect of the report was that psychiatrists, psychologist, and some physicians originated some of the torture techniques used by the CIA. After 9/11 there was tremendous fear in the country, this fear was soon replaced by anger, then this anger manifested in a ubiquitous urge, in everyone, to help in bringing those responsible to justice. This pervasive …show more content…

As a medical student the involvement of American doctors in torturing prisoners of war is troubling since it is reminiscence of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews in concentration camps during WWII. Also, as students we are taught to “do no harm,” but do no harm to whom? In this case, the prisoners or the American people. For example, if a physician perceives that helping the government derive ways to torture prisoners would prevent the next terrorist attack, as a citizen, is he obligated to help? In this instance, who is the physician responsible to: the American people or the Hippocrates oath? If the physician helps the government inflict harm on prisoners, innocent or not, he is breaking his oath; but if he declines to help and there is another terrorist attack, then he is betraying his fellow citizens. These questions would be easier to answer if physicians were not citizens of any state, but only healers and nothing more. But this sentiment is naïve and only feasible in an idealistic world. However, we don’t live in a perfect world, instead we live in a world confined by borders, marred by terrorism and imbued with nationalism and statist

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