When Doctors and Psychologists Torture

Last week the U.S. Justice Department delivered a proverbial "Get Out of Jail" free card to lawyers who engaged in rather shady practices during the Bush/Cheney years of fighting the "War on Terror." Those lawyers include Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who twisted and misinterpreted laws in order to justify harsh interrogation techniques on U.S. detainees.

Yes, both lawyers abused the ethical principles of their profession to make waterboarding seem as legal as driving 55 m.p.h. on a highway. And both have been subsequently rewarded. Jay Bybee is a FEDERAL JUDGE, and John Yoo is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. That's kind of like rewarding John Edwards with his own Dr. Oz-style show.

Regardless, the Justice Department has come down on the two with the weight of a feather. They said that Yoo and Bybee exercised "professional misconduct." Yawn.

But just because these two lawyers got off relatively Scot-free doesn't mean that psychologists and doctors who helped institute torturous practices have to be given a pass. That point is made pretty clearly today by Len Rubenstein, a Visiting Scholar with Johns Hopkins and Stephen Xenakis, a retired Army brigadier general and a psychologist. They write in the New York Times that there's no arguing health professionals in the U.S. military engaged in practices that ran counter to their professional ethical codes.

And they should be held accountable for that.

Rubenstein and Xenakis write that no agency -- the CIA, the Defense Department, or state licensing boards, to name a few -- have investigated the role of medical professionals in "War on Terror" torture practices.

"Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, 'First do no harm,'" they write.

But that principle is sorely lacking from the work of some health professionals. Take Col. Larry James, now Dean of Wright State University's School of Psychology. He's currently being sued in a Louisiana court for participating in conduct during the "War on Terror" that violated his ethical duties as a psychologist.

"Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention at the prison camps," says the Web site When Healers Harm, a project of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Publicly-available information shows that while Dr. James was at Guantanamo, abuse in interrogations was widespread, and cruel and inhuman treatment was official policy."

Same issues go for Dr. John Leso, too. He not only oversaw the use of torture, but in the case of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed al Qahtani, he "advised the interrogators on how to increase Mr. al Qahtani’s suffering."

Now nobody wants alleged terrorists to be given pay-per-view television, spa treatments, and down comforters. But shouldn't we expect that the health professionals inside the military -- those same folks who go out into the real world and can call themselves "counselors" -- not advocate, oversee, or endorse torture? Ethical principles and codes are supposed to stand for something, and they're supposed to protect egregious abuses within the health profession.

These folks advocated or oversaw abusive conduct. There's no doubting that. Now the question becomes whether any institution, like the CIA or state licensing boards, has the courage to at least investigate these abuses, if not root them out of the U.S. military for good.

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