Psyche, Science, and Society

Bill to ban health providers aiding abusive interrogations move in New York

In New York Assemblymember Richard N. Gottfried is sponsoring a bill to prohibit state licensed health providers from aiding torture or participating in interrogations. As Gottfried explains:

“Under the bill, health care professionals would be required to provide proper care and treatment to prisoners as best they can under the circumstances. Any evaluation or treatment they provide must be in the interest of the prisoner. Military or other governmental orders would not shield a person from the loss of their professional license in New York.” [emphasis added.]

The passage of this bill would constitute an enormous step toward restoring the health professions to their proper role of promoting human welfare.

Here is a Press Release from Assemblymember Gottfried about the bill:News from

Assemblymember
Richard N. Gottfried
75th Assembly District

Anti-Torture Bill Moves in Albany

June 10, 2008

Physicians and other health care professionals licensed by New York would be prohibited from participating in torture or improper treatment of a prisoner under a bill approved unanimously by the Assembly Higher Education Committee today.

“It is shocking that our government engages in torture and improper treatment of prisoners,” said the bill’s author, Assembly Health Committee chair Richard N. Gottfried. “It is even more shocking to see reports that physicians and other health care professionals are cooperating in it.”

In February 2008, the Washington Post reported on U.S. Attorney General Robert Mukasey’s argument that waterboarding was not torture because it was monitored and limited by someone with medical training. In 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine reported on violations of medical ethics against medical personnel at Guantanamo Bay for sharing prisoner’s health information with interrogators.

The bill has 27 co-sponsors in both parties and is the first of its kind in the nation, Gottfried said.

“It is never justifiable to torture another human being. It is wrong for a health care professional to use his or her education and training to participate in or facilitate torture or improper treatment of a prisoner,” said Gottfried. “I don’t think any New York patient would want to be treated by a health care professional who would do that to another human being.”

The bill would apply to conduct by any New York-licensed health care professional wherever it happens, and regardless of whether it is committed in connection with any government. The bill would follow international treaties and standards and professional standards by establishing the proper conduct of health care professionals in relation to the treatment of prisoners, Gottfried said.

“New York law ordinarily cannot reach beyond our borders, but the state can limit the professional behavior of a person to whom it grants a license,” Gottfried said. “We often revoke a license for out-of-state misconduct.”

Under the bill, health care professionals would be required to provide proper care and treatment to prisoners as best they can under the circumstances. Any evaluation or treatment they provide must be in the interest of the prisoner. Military or other governmental orders would not shield a person from the loss of their professional license in New York.

The bill is based on the UN Convention Against Torture, adopted in 1982, and the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, adopted in 1975.

If the bill (A.9891) is approved by the Higher Education Committee, which has jurisdiction over professional licensure, it will go to the Assembly Codes Committee, which will review the penalty provisions of the bill.

Prohibiting health professionals from cooperating with torture is advocated by the UN General Assembly, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the World Medical Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Association of Social Workers, among others. The bill was developed with the assistance of Physicians for Human Rights, and the New York Campaign Against Torture.

New York readers, please lobby your Assembly members to support this bill!

2 comments June 20th, 2008

Deaths in wars often greater than prior report: New study

As regular readers know, I have followed, and even been involved in, debates over the number of dead in the Iraq war and occupation. Estimates have ranged from the Iraq Body Count’s around 90,000 “documented civilian deaths” to the ORB survey’s estimate of over one million as of last August. While it is clear that the IBC estimate, based as it is on media reports, is an undercount, and likely a radical undercount, the magnitude of the true figure has remained a subject of controversy.

Reuters reports on a new study of prior wars which finds that mortality counts are almost always underestimates. While the new study did not examine Iraq, it lend support to the position that the true figures are in the several hundreds of thousands, and could easily be higher.

Parenthetically, the new study estimates that 3.8 million people died in the Vietnam war, much higher than previous estimates, reminding us yet again of the horrors of imperial wars.

Here is the Reuters article. [The full study can be accessed here.]:

Deaths in Vietnam, other wars undercounted - study

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New estimates of war deaths in 13 nations including Vietnam, Ethiopia and Bangladesh show that previous counts vastly understated the lives lost to war in the past half century, researchers said Thursday.

The new estimates relied on data from nationally representative population surveys done by the U.N. World Health Organization in these countries earlier this decade to calculate death tolls in wars waged from 1955 to 2002.

In most of the countries, this method pointed to much higher loss of life than broadly cited media estimates of the various war death counts had shown, the researchers said.

For example, the method indicated 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the protracted fighting in Vietnam, mostly from 1955 to 1975, compared to previous estimates cited by the researchers of 2.1 million.

Christopher Murray of the University of Washington said the findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggest standard ways of tracking war deaths using media, eyewitness and combatant accounts tend to underestimate deaths, particularly in smaller wars.

Murray, who heads the university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and colleagues designed a method of figuring violent war-related deaths using data on siblings of respondents in large household surveys conducted later in peacetime.

Random samples of people in the 13 countries were asked about their brothers and sisters, including whether they had died of wartime injuries. The researchers then extrapolated the data to come up with national death toll estimates.

In Ethiopia, the method indicated there have been 579,000 wartime deaths, higher than the previous estimate cited in the study of 275,000. In Bangladesh, the toll was put at 269,000, up from the previous estimate of 58,000.

Country by country, on average, the old estimates were about three times lower than the new ones.

In the 13 countries combined, the new method figured there were 5.4 million deaths from 1955 to 2002, topping the previous combined estimates of 2.8 million, the researchers said.

In Bosnia, the researchers figured 176,000 war deaths, up from the 55,000 previous estimate. In Sri Lanka, the new estimate was 215,000 deaths, compared the previous estimate of 61,000.

In Zimbabwe, the new estimate was 141,000 war deaths, compared to the previous estimate they cited of 28,000.

Other countries examined in the study were Myanmar (Burma), Georgia, Guatemala, Laos, Namibia, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The study did not look at war dead in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Ziad Obermeyer of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, another of the researchers, said accurate estimates of death tolls during wartime are extremely difficult to make.

He also said the findings undercut the idea that the advent of modern weapons like “smart bombs” had made war less lethal. (Editing by Todd Eastham)

Add comment June 20th, 2008