AMA Defines Doctors Roles in Interrogations

It's just incredibly sad that it's come to this.

The American Medical Association has had to create new policies regarding the role of doctors involved in interrogations.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The American Medical Association on Monday voted to refine its ethical guidelines that forbid doctors from participating in torture or "coercive" interrogations of prisoners.

The action was prompted by unconfirmed allegations that physicians or psychiatrists played roles in harsh interrogations conducted at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The 544-member house of delegates, which sets policy for the leading U.S. physicians group, voted at its annual meeting to approve a seven-page report that outlined a physician's duty "as healer" not to take any part in interrogating prisoners.

Other stipulations called for doctors to provide medical care to detainees as they would to any patient -- in strict confidence.

Similarly, doctors are not ethically permitted to participate in executions, or to heal an inmate to make him well enough to be put to death, the AMA said.

"Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician's role as healer," one of the report's recommendations said.

Step back for a moment.

This is 2006.

That such policies would even have to be formally declared in America is a symbol of the regressive nature of the country's human rights record. That doctors would ever have even thought they ought to participate in such hideous displays of harm to people they are supposed to serve as healers, at this time, in this century, after all of the horrific abuses of unscrupulous doctors in the past who were responsible for some of the most vile treatment of human beings one can only begin to imagine is just absolutely shocking.

When a simple oath of 'do no harm' has become so ambiguous that it has to be set out in explicit policy in order for its adeherents to understand acceptable limits, one can only conclude that these times we live in have to be included among the most barbaric and uncivilized.