Hunger strikers were strapped to a restraining chair and force-fed through a tube three times a day at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, a Kuwaiti detainee at the facility has claimed. in a rare interview to the BBC. Anybody familiar with the letter issued by 266 medical doctors, from 17 different countries, targeting the US medical establishment for its complicity in the torture and murder of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere. The open letter, published in the September issue of The Lancet, especially mentions the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo. It has demanded that all physicians who have thus violated the Hippocratic Oath, should be disciplined by their respective professional organisations.Of course their ire is directed especially against John Edmondson, the ex-director of a hospital at Guantanamo, who was a recipient of a medal by the US military for his ‘inspiring leadership’ at the medical facility. Any close watcher of Guantanamo would remember how the US authorities had resorted to force feeding about a hundred prisoners to break a mass protest in 2005, supposedly under Edmondson’s ‘leadership’. Interestingly Edmondson, in his own defence, had claimed in an affidavit that he was just following orders of a higher military authority. The open letter declared that this is the ‘Nuremberg defence’, where Nazi war criminals had argued they were merely following orders while exterminating the Jews.Of course, it is not for the first time that The Lancet had carried details of the depredations of American physicians in subjecting detainees to torture. An American doctor had shared his experiences about torture performed at Abu Ghraib with the complicity of medical personnel. Despite the fact that the World Medical Association, of which American Medical Association is a member, specifically prohibits torture, the AMA has refused to entertain any charges against its members who are involved in such acts.It is a different matter that the criminal silence maintained by the official machinery has not deterred departments of medical studies in various US colleges take a principled stand. Apart from the psychology departments at two Quaker colleges, Earlham College in Indiana and Guilford College in North Carolina, the psychology department at Smith College in Massachusetts has just passed a resolution urging the American Psychological Association to ban its members from designing or taking part in interrogations at Guantanamo or CIA black sites.The idea of the appeal by the 266 medical doctors arose on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the murder of Steve Biko, the legendary anti-apartheid leader, by the South African police on September 12, 1979. Two doctors were complicit in his killing, one of whom later repented.
