War on Terror Analysis: Was Bush Detention Programme "Human Experimentation"? (Leopold)

Jason Leopold write for Truthout:

High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration’s “war on terror” who were subjected to brutal torture techniques were part of a Nazi Germany-type program involving illegal human experimentation, the purpose of which was to collect research “data,” according to a disturbing new report that calls on President Barack Obama, Congress and other government agencies to immediately launch inquiries and Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the allegations.

"Experiments in Torture": Text of Physicians for Human Rights Report

The findings contained in the 27-page report, “Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” is based on extensive research of previously declassified government documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in in establishing and justifying the legality of the Bush administration’s torture program.


The report said the research and experimentation of detainees its authors have documented is not only a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but is a grave breach of international laws, such as the Nuremberg Code, established after atrocities committed by Nazis were exposed in the aftermath of World War II.

“Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations,” states an executive summary of the report, prepared by Physicians for Human Rights. “Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

For example, PHR said the drowning method known as waterboarding was monitored in early 2002 by medical personnel who collected data about how detainees responded to the torture technique. The data was then used by Steven Bradbury, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), to write a legal opinion in 2004 advising CIA interrogators on how to administer the technique, referred to in the PHR report as “Waterboarding 2.0.”

“According to the Bradbury memoranda, [CIA Office of Medical Services] teams, based on their observation of detainee responses to waterboarding, replaced water in the waterboarding procedure with saline solution ostensibly to reduce the detainees’ risk of contracting pneumonia and/or hyponatremia, a condition of low sodium levels in the blood caused by free water intoxication, which can lead to brain edema and herniation, coma, and death,” the report says. In Bradbury’s torture memo, he wrote that “based on advice of medical personnel, the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia (i.e. reduced concentration of sodium in the blood) if the detainee drinks the water.”

PHR noted that the presence of CIA medical personnel during the waterboarding sessions “could represent evidence of human experimentation” because it underscores “the danger and harm inherent in the practice of waterboarding and the enlistment of medical personnel in an effort to disguise a universally recognized tactic as a ‘safe, legal and effective’ interrogation tactic.”

CIA medical personnel also obtained experimental research data by subjecting more than 25 detainees to a combination of torture techniques, including sleep deprivation, according to the report, as a way of understanding “whether one type of of application over another would increase the subjects’ susceptibility to severe pain.” The information derived from the research informed “subsequent [torture] practices.”

“This investigation had no direct clinical health care application, nor was it in the detainees’ personal interest, nor part of their medical management,” the report says. “It appears to have been used primarily to enable the Bush administration to assess the legality of the tactics, and to inform medical monitoring policy and procedure for future application of the techniques.”

Frank Donaghue, PHR’s chief executive officer, said the report appears to demonstrate that the CIA violated “all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation.”

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