Separate facilities exist to provide for Guantanamo detainees' medical care.
A 2013 Institute on Medicine as a Profession report concluded that health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees". Medical professionals were ordered to ignore ethical standards during involvement in abusive interrogation, including monitoring of vital signs under stress-inducing procedures. They used medical information for interrogation purposes and participated in force-feeding of hunger strikers, in violation of World Medical Association and American Medical Association prohibitions.
A series of hospitals, dental clinics and psychiatric facilities have been prepared for Guantanamo detainees. On June 7, 2010, the Washington Post reported, after obtaining the first official figures for capital costs of the Guantanamo camps to be made public, that the current hospital building cost $18.2 million USD, and a companion psychiatric facility cost 2.9 million USD.
Military spokesmen have routinely asserted that the detainees receive excellent medical care. Documentary film director Michael Moore used these claims as a central meme in his film Sicko to argue that American citizens should receive better medical care. Former detainees on the other hand have described medical care being withheld at the command of interrogators, in order to coerce detainees to confess. Critics have described the use of the detainees' medical files by interrogators as a violation of medical ethics. Critics have expressed concern that medical personnel violated their professional ethics by aiding in or failing to report the wounds inflicted during interrogations that used prohibited techniques.
Over eighty of the detainees' weights have fallen to life-threatening levels. Many other detainees became obese on the camp's food.
Video Guantanamo detainees' medical care
Dental care
The existence and quality of the medical care and dental care, at Guantanamo, has been the subject of public disagreement. After viewing Andy Worthington's film, Witness to Guantanamo, which compiled interviews with former captives, law professor Peter Jan Honigsberg wrote that the captives said dental care was dispensed at the discretion of the captives' interrogators. He wrote "Some prisoners who expected to have cavities filled, had their teeth pulled instead." Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker quoted Rob Kirsch, who represented six Bosnians, who also said dental care was routinely withheld by their interrogators. After a visit to Guantanamo Congressional Representative William Lacy Clay asserted that many Guantanamo captives received dental care for the first time in Guantanamo. He asked "did Hitler and Pol Pot provide dental care to their prisoners before they killed them?" In her book, Kristine Huskey, one of the lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was coordinating the captives' habeas corpus petitions, quoted a motion the Center filed, that described the captives' dental care as inadequate.
In a July 2009 interview Commander Kenneth Bell said that it took several times longer to treat captives as it did to treat guards, for similar dental procedures, because captives didn't understand why the dental procedures were in the interest of their health. He said dental procedures were never performed on the captives, without their consent.
Maps Guantanamo detainees' medical care
See also
- Behavioral Science Consultation Team
References
External links
- Neglect of Medical Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series Published: April 26, 2011, Vincent Iacopino, Stephen N. Xenakis
- Report: Doctors ignored Guantanamo torture UPI, April 27, 2011
- Carol Rosenberg (2015-08-31). "Guantánamo tested prisoners' blood, vaccinated some after shingles, chickenpox cases". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 2015-09-01. Retrieved 2015-09-03.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
0 Comments