WASHINGTON, 9 July 2005 — Releasing the results of a new Army study, the Pentagon on Thursday denied charges that military health workers complied in alleged widespread abuse of terrorism suspects jailed in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“We found no evidence of systemic problems in detainee medical care,” Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, the Army’s surgeon general, told reporters at a Defense Department briefing.
But Kiley conceded that the five-month study did not include interviews with the International Committee of the Red Cross or detainees, who have complained of abuse by interrogators and charged that doctors helped in pressure tactics at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.
He said an Army team questioned 1,000 medical personnel and found 32 cases of alleged failure to report interrogation abuse, or of actions by medical workers such as “dropping a stretcher a little too roughly, or withholding pain medication until the very last second.” But the study, which was completed in April, found that doctors, nurses and medical aides generally followed proper rules of conduct, Kiley added.
The charges first surfaced in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in an article last year by a University of Minnesota professor that said some US military doctors falsified death certificates to cover up killings and hid evidence of beatings.
It said US military medics revived a detainee who had collapsed after a beating so abuse could continue.
Rights groups have charged that military medical workers cooperated with interrogators by revealing physical or psychological problems of their patients.
Assistant Defense Secretary for Health Affairs William Winkenwerder in June issued updated guidelines for medical personnel growing out of Pentagon investigations into physical abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
The four-page Winkenwerder memorandum stressed that health care personnel charged with the medical care of prisoners “have a duty to protect their physical and mental health and provide appropriate treatment for disease.” But the guidelines do not prohibit military medical personnel from helping to shape interrogations by using knowledge of a prisoner’s medical or mental condition. Nor do they bar them from helping in interrogations defined by the government as illegal.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights group has charged that the Winkenwerder memo is riddled with loopholes that open the door to possible abuses. It called the guidelines, “a major affront” to the good role that military physicians historically have played.
