jrtom

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/06/scott-allen-md-lead.html

As a framing exercise: if you are an M.D. who is tasked with keeping torture safe, you have a practical problem. Set aside the ethical problem for a moment. How do you know how to do it?

...in order to do the job the medical monitors were given to do, it left them two choices, both of which were awful:

One, they could just wing it. You're talking about techniques that carry high risks of PTSD, but also high risks of physical injury and death...So I think it's certainly possible that while they weren't eagerly looking forward to setting up research they might have been backed into this by saying, let's take notes.

...Now, whether they considered it research or not is irrelevant. There are some crimes for which you must prove intent. Human subject protections have no such qualifier. Particularly when there's risk for injury to the subject, you've crossed that line.

For those concerned about triggering, the article does not discuss any specific techniques, although it does mention one or two.

http://www.unsubscribe-me.org/waitingfortheguards.php?

An Amnesty International-produced video produced as a sort of anti-torture propaganda.

Warning: while there is no explicit violence here, there's a lot of evidence of physical pain...which, if Amnesty International is to be believed, is not faked (that is, they actually got someone to hold that position for 6 hours).

I'd already decided that the hypothetical benefits of torture was not worth the cost (to our reputation or to our honor)...but this really drives home the anguish that involved in something as innocuous-sounding as a "stress position".

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/print?id=2628673

"A suspected terrorist who spent years in a secret CIA prison should not be allowed to speak to a civilian attorney, the Bush administration argues, because he could reveal the agency's closely guarded interrogation techniques."

Really, the Bush administration isn't taking this far enough. Based on this argument, why not just make sure that each detainee is given some useless piece of classified information when they come in? Then they've got an automatic "save versus habeas corpus" with no further work required.

Of course, this dovetails nicely with the Bush administration's tendency to classify anything that doesn't classify it first; this makes it easy to come up with useless classified information. (My personal favorite would be to classify the prisoner numbers.)

*seethe*