...To what extent did interrogators draw on detainees' health information in designing and pursuing such approaches? The Pentagon has persistently denied this practice. After the ICRC charged last year that interrogators tapped clinical data to craft interrogation strategies, Defense Department officials issued a statement denying "the allegation that detainee medical files were used to harm detainees." This spring, an inquiry led by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the inspector general of the U.S. Navy, concluded: "While access to medical information was carefully controlled at GTMO [Guantanamo Bay], we found in Afghanistan and Iraq that interrogators sometimes had easy access to such information." The implication is that interrogators had no such access at Guantanamo and that medical confidentiality was shielded, albeit with exceptions. Other Pentagon officials have reinforced this message. In a memo made public last month, announcing "Principles . . . for the Protection and Treatment of Detainees," William Winkenwerder, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, said that limits on detainees' medical privacy are "analogous to legal standards applicable to U.S. citizens..."
They complain it violates provisions in the Geneva Conventions the US never signed, and that the US is just being a big meanie.I was going to jump on this -- came out in the print version last week -- but never got to it. Here's the key graf:
"Rather than being consistent with the presumption of confidentiality that applies to Americans even in prisons, the Guantanamo policy rejects this presumption. "
Now, Rantburgers will immediately see what the problem is with this assertion -- Gitmo isn't detaining Americans, and it isn't being run on the same basis that a Federal prison is run in the States. It's all downhill from there.
I have the PDF file if you can't get to the article. |
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