Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors

by Steven H. Miles

Book Overview

The news that the United States tortured prisoners in the war on terror has brought shame to the nation, yet little has been written about the doctors and psychologists at these prisons. In Oath Betrayed, medical ethics expert and physician Steven H. Miles tells how doctors, psychologists, and medics cleared prisoners for interrogation, advised and monitored abuse, falsified documents--including death certificates--and were largely silent as...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520259688
• ISBN13: 9780520259683
• Release Date: April 2009
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A cool eye on a chilling topic.

The book, "Oath Betrayed", is a concise tour of the plan and execution of coercive interrogation methods developed for the "war on terror." Dr. Miles reviewed thousands of documents and guides us through the maze of Orwellian doublespeak, with a focus on the silence of the medical community in allowing abuse to continue. The author informs us by explaining the statutory responsibility of physicians to report such abuses. The style is so direct and cautious, so dispassionate, that the impact is like an unexpected tsunami-the images came into my thoughts in this unassuming way and the horror implicit slowly engulfed me. Finally, the importance of the professions in shaping our culture and society becomes clear as Dr. Miles places the problem in the broader context of modern life. An excellent book, an important book, but not an easy topic.

WASN'T IT DR. MENGELE WHO BROKE THE OATH? AND NOW?

what have we become? Doctors on call to determine how much pain a person can endure for maximum intelligence milking? Or for sadistic purposes? Read Orwell's 1984 on the sadistic use of torture, for starters. And here we have doctors ASSISTING the administration of pain rather than relieving suffering and sickness. Here we have doctors FORCING harmful, unwanted and unnecessary procedures on innocent hostages rather than using medical science for increased health. Forcing feeding tubes into the stomachs of those tightly restrained on back boards, who see no other way out than a hunger strike, so that our evening news may not reveal who many we sacrifice, in the great name of national security, on Guantanamo Bay. We have now left the civilized world, people. This is no longer doctoring. This is torture. This does not increase my sense of national security. It reveals that we ourselves have destroyed our own security, when the one to whom we turn for physical relief from suffering has become our torturers and assistant to torturers. We have met the enemy and he is us. After years and years of confinement without charges, without evidentiary procedures, without due process and the other marks of a civilized nation, what do these innocent (until proven guilty) hostages (kidnapped and held for no transparent, clear legal purpose) have to offer in the way of intelligence or knowledge of the reality in the field, now, years later? Torture them to your hearts delight; they have nothing to offer in the way of information. Your torture tells more about you than about any threat to us as a nation and a people. Your torture destroys us as a people, and the seeds of your own senseless violence against these innocent boys gives fruit in the insane violence we now suffer within our own nation, by your example. When you make violence against innocents a good thing, it grows, and you have destroyed our nation and the positive unity of our once great and promising people. Stop the violence. Rebuild peace and non-violence in our world. Practice what you claim to believe. Beg for forgiveness for the harm you have done. Follow the physician's oath: First, to do NO HARM. No doctor has ANY ethical, legal or moral excuse he was just following orders. Gaudium et spes gives the specific admonition: "Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation." Thus must we Catholics condemn absolutely our war against Iraq which goes back though the long war of attrition to papa Bush in 1990, which has caused over a million Iraqi deaths, women and children in their bloodied beds, and carpet bombing wiping out the ancient city of Fallujah, etc. all for profiteering privateering petroleum piracy. Further Gaudium et spes states unequivocally: "If civil authorities legislate or allow anything that is contrary to the will of

Why we must speak out.

Toward the end of Oath Betrayed, after a comprehensive overview of the complicity of doctors, nurses and medics in torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Steven Miles observes: "The possibility of dissent makes the silence and complicity of senior and frontline medical personnel in the abuse and neglect of prisoners that much more inexplicable and inexcusable." Therein lies a compelling reason why Americans must speak out against the Bush Administration's embrace of state-sanctioned torture: We must speak out because we CAN speak out. Despite the dangerous direction in which our country is headed, under an Executive Branch that equates dissent with treason, we are still free to speak out for basic human rights. That's what Miles has done in Oath Betrayed. It's a very important book.

`Oath Betrayed' Describes Complicity of U.S. Military Medical Personnel in Torture of Prisoners in I

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen Huntington News Network Book Critic Hinton, WV (HNN) - When he saw the graphic photographs of U.S. military personnel - including West Virginia's Lynndie England - mugging it up over abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Dr. Steven H. Miles asked himself "Where were the prison doctors at Abu Ghraib?" when this abuse was going on. His book, "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror" (Random House, $23.95, 240 pages) is the Minneapolis, MN-based physician's attempt to answer that question, as well as to determine what went wrong with so many military medical providers taking part in and/or allowing torture and prisoner abuse to take place. Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, is also a practicing physician. He's also an expert in medical ethics, human rights, and international health care who has served as the chief medical officer for a Cambodian refugee camp and worked on AIDS prevention in Sudan and on tsunami relief in Indonesia with the American Refugee Committee. He has also worked with the research committee of the Center for Victims of Torture. Conventional wisdom is that Americans don't practice torture the way the Germans, Soviets and Japanese did during World War II and virtually everyone else did before that war and since. We're supposed to be inhabitants of that "Shining City on the Hill" - standing apart from abusers and torturers alike. As Miles demonstrates in a section comparing the abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba with the American Civil War, torture and abuse of prisoners is nothing new to Americans. Both the Union and Confederate prison camps were scenes of horrible treatment of prisoners that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in the South and North alike. "Oath Betrayed" is based on research of more than 35,000 pages of classified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act, as well as eyewitness accounts of abuse and torture. Many medical personnel took part in the abuse and its subsequent cover-up, but Miles and other investigators found quite a few military doctors and nurses who told them of their attempts to stop the torture. As anyone who has every served in the military knows, it takes a brave individual to do this. Miles notes that "silence about abuse has two general forms: failing to see abuse for what it is and failing to act when abuse is seen" (Page 120). "The silent parties do not acknowledge or document their silence. A witness may report that an abusive soldier and a doctor agreed not to record the fact or cause of a prisoner's injury, but such anecdotes do not reveal whether the arrangements were routine or exceptional." He quotes an Army psychiatrist, Dr. Henry Nelson, who assessed Abu Ghraib this way: "The worst human qualities and behaviors came to the fore and a pervasive dominance came to prevail...the sadistic and psyc

OATH BETRAYED

This book should be read by every member of the medical community as well as lay people concerned about the erosion of ethical standards by medical personnel facing the challenges of dual loyalty especially when serving in the armed forces. The author , the skill of a surgeon, has described in detail, the crisis of ethical behaviour on physicians and others caring for patients under warlike conditions.