Psyche, Science, and Society

California legislative resolution targets health providers aiding torture

April 14th, 2008

One of the most exciting new developments in the fight against psychologist and other health provider collusion in torture are bills in several state legislatures on the issue. In California, Senate Joint Resolution 19 is scheduled to come to a vote any day. [See my earlier coverage here, here, and here.] The Sacramento Bee recently covered the issue. [Note: the vote has been delayed several times since this article on April 5.]:

State senator targets torture
By Aurelio Rojas - arojas@sacbee.com

The California Senate is preparing to weigh in on the hot-button topic of torture, with a twist that combines elements of the Hippocratic oath and the military oath.

Under a resolution that state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas plans to put to a vote Thursday, California regulators would notify physicians and other health professionals that they could lose their license and be prosecuted by the state if they are involved in the torture of suspected terrorists.

The Los Angeles Democrat chairs the Senate Committee on Business, Professions and Economic Development, which oversees boards that license health professionals in the state.

During a committee hearing in January, Ridley-Thomas said there is evidence that physicians, psychologists and nurses licensed by the state “have participated in torture or its coverup against detainees in U.S. custody.”

He cited “confirmed reports from the International Red Cross, New England Journal of Medicine, military records and first-person accounts.”

“California has the obligation, I believe, to notify its licensees of laws pertaining to torture that may result in prosecution,” Ridley-Thomas said.

The senator said physicians have reportedly advised interrogators whether prisoners were fit enough to survive “physical maltreatment, informed interrogators about prisoners’ phobias and other psychological vulnerabilities that could be exploited.”

Invoking the Hippocratic oath that physicians traditionally take, he said the state can “withdraw its consent to torture by demanding that its health professionals remember their oath to first do no harm.”

Dr. Vito Imbascini, state surgeon of the California National Guard, said “a few Californians were among the practitioners in the healing arts involved in torture” at U.S. military facilities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“But given the tiny number of renegade offenders, we think a more effective approach (than the resolution) would be to target those offenders,” said Imbascini, who represented the 35,000-physician California Medical Association at the hearing.

Neither Senate Republican leader Dick Ackerman nor incoming GOP leader Dave Cogdill was available for comment Friday. But Senate Joint Resolution 19 is likely to provoke spirited debate between Democrats and Republicans in the state Senate, similar to that seen in Congress since 2004 when accounts of abuse, torture, sexual exploitation and homicide at Abu Ghraib came to public attention.

President Bush – with an emphatic “We do not torture” – has defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of suspected terrorists lawful, despite similar reports of torture at U.S. facilities at Guantánamo and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Bush has repeatedly noted the world has changed dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and says the United States must defend itself with “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which critics contend is a euphemism for torture.

Over the years, the Legislature has weighed in on complicated national issues over which it has no jurisdiction, such as wars and international treaties. But in this instance, it does appear to have some legal standing.

Dr. Richard Fantozzi, president of the California Medical Board, which licenses physicians, cited a 2005 legal opinion by the state attorney general’s office that concluded the state has jurisdiction over licensees serving in the military or practicing in federal facilities.

Fantozzi said the state Supreme Court has also ruled that a state licensing agency may discipline a licensee for conduct occurring outside the state.

But Fantozzi cautioned the committee that under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, if the military does not cooperate, the state “would be prevented from conducting an effective and thorough investigation.”

Barbara Olshansky, a New York attorney, told the committee “all our military laws and regulations, from the field manual to the manuals on interrogation, prohibit torture.”

She said the U.S. Supreme Court also has affirmed that courts have the responsibility to stop torture.

But Olshansky, who filed the groundbreaking suit in which the Supreme Court ruled that U.S. courts have jurisdiction over claims brought by Guantánamo detainees, said there is ample evidence of torture at U.S. facilities.

“We can prove that medical personnel reviewed detainee medical treatment for serious conditions or allowed treatment only on the condition that they cooperate with interrogators,” said Olshansky, who has assembled a network of 750 attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees.

She alleged American medical personnel have also assisted in drugging detainees during interrogations.

But Imbascini, a colonel in the U.S. Medical Corps, said that during two decades of service he has been responsible for hundreds of detainees and has never witnessed “a single act that could construed as abuse.”

“In fact, I can say quite proudly that the care that I and other Californians rendered to detainees and POWs was identical to that provided our own sick and wounded soldiers,” Imbascini told the committee.

Entry Filed under: APA, Guantanamo, Interrogation, Law, Medicine, Psychology, Torture, War Crimes