POW being tortured the American Way- when America tortures or abusing prisoners they say God Wills It ???
Detainees being Experimente upon By America's own Dr. MengeleFirst let's peruse relevant judgement on medical experimentation as decided at the Nurember Trials.
Nuremberg Code - Medical ethics - Experiments, Research, Therapeutic, Medical, Experimentation, and Consent
The Nuremberg Code was the first internationally recognized set of guidelines dealing specifically with non-therapeutic human experimentation. It originated under the special circumstances of the Nuremberg Medical Trial of 1946–7, where 23 defendants stood accused of participating in horrific experiments in Nazi concentration camps. Throughout the trial the judges tried to establish historical standards relating to human experimentation, which they found through multiple sources but principally through the testimony of two American physicians, Andrew Ivy and Leo Alexander.Now according to an Investigative Report from Truthout.org it has been revealed that not only was the Bush Regime CIA and Pentagon allowing their personnel to abuse and torture POWs but they were also experimenting using prisoners as guinea pigs. This is the upshot of the investigative report from Truth0ut.org in which a directive by Wolfowitz gave cover for such experimentation on detainees could take place.
The code stipulates several major provisions: the voluntary consent of the subjects is essential (and they should be competent to give it — not children, the mentally ill, or captive populations such as prisoners, where coercion might be used); the experiment must yield fruitful results for the good of society unprocurable by other means; the study should be based on the results of animal experiments; the experiment must be conducted to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering; no experiment should be conducted if there are good reasons for supposing that death or disabling injury will occur; the degree of risk should never exceed the humanitarian importance of the question; proper protective precautions should be taken; the experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified personnel; the subject should have the right to end the experiment, and the physician ought to end it if continuation is likely to cause injury or death.
During the Bush Cheney regime the American government its CIA and military committed acts of terror with impunity. It can be argued that America has become A rogue or terrorist nation . The rule of law and even common decency or international laws and agreements are tossed aside by American administrations to pursue its War on Terror using whatever methods they deem necessary. America has insisted that international law and the Geneva Conventions including such notions as War Crimes or Crimes against humanity or even pre-emptive war ie an unjustifiable attack on a sovereign nation may be applied to other nations but not to America.
Under the Bush/Cheney regime in order to pursue the War on Terror they not only sanctioned dropping bombs and white phosphorus on civilians and sanctioned the abuse, torture and even a bit of scientific experimentation ala Dr. Joseph Mengele on POWs . The Bush/Cheney Regime post 9/11 argued that these were unusual and desperate times which would mean the use of unusual policies and desperate and extreme measures needed to be taken . For instance they referred to the Geneva Conventions as "quaint". Anyway so much for America believing in the rule of law when they ignored it when it was seen as interfering with their War on Terror.
What we have seen recently is that the Pentagon and US military and its officers on the battlefield believe they do not have to obey the orders of President Obama. They treat his orders as mere suggestions without any legal or constitutional justification. If this is true then the US military and the Pentagon and the CIA etc. have gone rogue and are answerable to no one.
As I have argued before it is difficult for many Americans and those in its government or military to accept that their actions can be judged by other nations or by non-Americans.
In effect America they believe as such is beyond notions of Good and Evil as it acts upon God's will and not merely the will of mortal men. . If one takes seriously these erroneous self-serving myths of American Exceptionalism , Manifest Destiny and the notion that America was created as a Christian nation or even as the New Jerusalem is therefore fulfilling Divine Providence and its actions are all the result of God's revelation to America's leaders. .
And still the GOP and millions of their fellow travelers say so What and Who cares. After all these were mere detainees and not POWs and so they argued have no rights and can be abused kept in prison indefinitely and no one has the right to question their guilt. If we round em up they must be guilty of something. Perfect American logic.They think that their human rights abuses and crimes are legal and necessary.
But as we know these crimes were ignored or defended by the Republicans and Democrats.
Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program by: Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report Oct.14,2010
In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating "war on terror" detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz quietly loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.
Wolfowitz issued his directive on March 25, 2002, about a month after President George W. Bush stripped the detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Bush labeled them "unlawful enemy combatants" and authorized the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.
Despite its title - "Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research" - the Wolfowitz directive weakened protections that had been in place for decades by limiting the safeguards to "prisoners of war."
"We're dealing with a special breed of person here," Wolfowitz said about the war on terror detainees only four days before signing the new directive.
One former Pentagon official, who worked closely with the agency's ex-general counsel William Haynes, said the Wolfowitz directive provided legal cover for a top-secret Special Access Program at the Guantanamo Bay prison, which experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling subjects and to achieve "deception detection."
"A dozen [high-value detainees] were subjected to interrogation methods in order to evaluate their reaction to those methods and the subsequent levels of stress that would result," said the official.
A July 16, 2004 Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) report obtained by Truthout shows that between April and July 2003, a "physiological warfare specialist" atached to the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program was present at Guantanamo. The CID report says the instructor was assigned to a top-secret Special Access Program.
It has been known since 2009, when President Barack Obama declassified some of the Bush administration's legal memoranda regarding the interrogation program, that there were experimental elements to the brutal treatment of detainees, including the sequencing and duration of the torture and other harsh tactics.
However, the Wolfowitz directive also suggests that the Bush administration was concerned about whether its actions might violate Geneva Conventions rules that were put in place after World War II when grisly Nazi human experimentation was discovered. Those legal restrictions were expanded in the 1970s after revelations about the CIA testing drugs on unsuspecting human subjects and conducting other mind-control experiments.
For its part, the DoD insists that it "has never condoned nor authorized the use of human research testing on any detainee in our custody," according to spokeswoman Wendy Snyder.
However, from the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration employed nontraditional methods for designing interrogation protocols, including the reverse engineering of training given to American troops trapped behind enemy lines, called the SERE techniques. For instance, the near-drowning technique of waterboarding was lifted from SERE manuals.
Shielding Rumsfeld
Retired US Air Force Capt. Michael Shawn Kearns, a former SERE intelligence officer, said the Wolfowitz directive appears to be a clear attempt to shield then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from the legal consequences of "any dubious research practices associated with the interrogation program."
Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert, noted Wolfowitz's specific reference to "prisoners of war" as protected under the directive, as opposed to referring more generally to detainees or people under the government's control.
"At the time that Wolfowitz was issuing this directive, the Bush administration was taking the adamant position that prisoners taken in the' war on terror' were not 'prisoners of war' under the Geneva Conventions and were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
"Indeed, it called those protections 'privileges' that were available only to 'lawful combatants.' So the statement [in the directive] that 'prisoners of war' cannot be subjects of human experimentation ... raises some concerns - why was the more restrictive term 'prisoners of war' used instead of 'prisoners' for instance."
The Wolfowitz directive also changed other rules regarding waivers of informed consent. After the scandals over the CIA's MKULTRA program and the Tuskegee experiments on African-Americans suffering from syphilis, Congress passed legislation known as the Common Rule to provide protections to human research subjects.
The Common Rule "requires a review of proposed research by an Institutional Review Board (IRB), the informed consent of research subjects, and institutional assurances of compliance with the regulations."
Individuals who lack the capacity to provide "informed consent" must have an IRB determine if they would benefit from the proposed research. In certain cases, that decision could also be made by the subject's "legal representative."
However, according to the Wolfowitz directive, waivers of informed consent could be granted by the heads of DoD divisions.
Professor Alexander M. Capron, who oversees human rights and health law at the World Health Organization, said the delegation of the power to waive informed consent procedures to Pentagon officials is "controversial both because it involves a waiver of the normal requirements and because the grounds for that waiver are so open-ended."
The Wolfowitz directive also changes language that had required DoD researchers to strictly adhere to the Nuremberg Directives for Human Experimentation and other precedents when conducting human subject research.
The Nuremberg Code, which was a response to the Nazi atrocities, made "the voluntary consent of the human subject ... absolutely essential." However, the Wolfowitz directive softened a requirement of strict compliance to this code, instructing researchers simply to be "familiar" with its contents.
"Why are DoD-funded investigators just required to be 'familiar' with the Nuremberg Code rather than required to comply with them?" asked Stephen Soldz, director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.
Soldz also wondered why "enforcement was moved from the Army Surgeon General or someone else in the medical chain of command to the Director of Defense Research and Engineering" and why "this directive changed at this time, as the 'war on terror' was getting going."
Treating Soldiers
The original impetus for the changes seems to have related more to the use of experimental therapies on US soldiers facing potential biological and other dangers in war zones.
The House Armed Services Committee proposed amending the law on human experimentation prior to the 9/11 attacks. But the Bush administration pressed for the changes after 9/11 as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan and new medical products might be needed for soldiers on the battlefield without their consent, said two former officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Yet, there were concerns about the changes even among Bush administration officials. In a September 24, 2001, memo to lawmakers, Bush's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the "administration is concerned with the provision allowing research to be conducted on human subjects without their informed consent in order to advance the development of a medical product necessary to the armed forces."
The OMB memo said the Bush administration understood that the DoD had a "legitimate need" for "waiver authority for emergency research," but "the provision as drafted may jeopardize existing protections for human subjects in research, and must be significantly narrowed."
However, the broader language moved forward, as did planning for the new war on terror interrogation procedures.
In December 2001, Pentagon general counsel Haynes and other agency officials contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which runs SERE schools for teaching US soldiers to resist interrogation and torture if captured by an outlaw regime. The officials wanted a list of interrogation techniques that could be used for detainee "exploitation," according to a report released last year by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
These techniques, as they were later implemented by the CIA and the Pentagon, were widely discussed as "experimental" in nature.
Bryan Thomas, a spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to comment on the Wolfowitz directive.
Back in Congress, the concerns from the OMB about loose terminology were brushed aside and the law governing how the DoD spends federal funds on human expirementation and research, was amended to give the DoD greater leeway regarding experimentation on human subjects.
A paragraph to that law, 10 USC 980, which had not been changed since it was first enacted in 1972, was added authorizing the defense secretary to waive "informed consent" for human subject research and experimentation. It was included in the 2002 Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress in December 2001. The Wolfowitz directive implemented the legislative changes Congress made to the law when it was issued three months later.
The changes to the "informed consent" section of the law were in direct contradiction to presidential and DoD memoranda issued in the 1990s that prohibited such waivers related to classified research. A memo signed in 1999 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen called for the prohibitions on "informed consent" waivers to be added to the Common Rule regulations covering DoD research, but it was never implemented.
Congressional Assistance
As planning for the highly classified Special Access Program began to take shape, most officials in Congress appear to have averted their eyes, with some even lending a hand.
The ex-DIA officials said the Pentagon briefed top lawmakers on the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee in November and December 2001, including the panel's chairman Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and his chief of staff Patrick DeLeon, about experimentation and research involving detainee interrogations that centered on "deception detection."
To get a Special Access Program like this off the ground, the Pentagon needed DeLeon's help, given his long-standing ties to the American Psychological Association (APA), where he served as president in 2000, the sources said.
According to former APA official Bryant Welch, DeLeon's role proved crucial.
and as the report points out it is not known to what degree the Obama administration is taking part in these criminal and immoral or unethical activities.
Ongoing Research
Meanwhile, the end of the Bush administration has not resulted in a total abandonment of the research regarding interrogation program.
Last March, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recently resigned, disclosed that the Obama administration's High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), planned on conducting "scientific research" to determine "if there are better ways to get information from people that are consistent with our values."
"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair said during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. He did not provide additional details as to what the "scientific research" entailed.
As for the Wolfowitz directive, Pentagon spokeswoman Snyder said it did not open the door to human experimentation on war on terror detainees.
"There is no detainee policy, directive or instruction - or exceptions to such - that would permit performing human research testing on DoD detainees," Snyder said. "Moreover, none of the numerous investigations into allegations of misconduct by interrogators or the guard force found any evidence of such activities."
Snyder added that DoD is in the process of updating the Wolfowitz directive and it will be "completed for review next year."
also see; Physicians For Human Rights PHR Library
June 7, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Evidence Indicates that the Bush Administration Conducted Experiments and Research on Detainees to Design Torture Techniques and Create Legal Cover
Illegal Activity Would Violate Nuremberg Code and Could Open Door to Prosecution
(Cambridge, MA) In the most comprehensive investigation to date of health professionals' involvement in the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program (EIP), Physicians For Human Rights has uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody. The apparent experimentation and research appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques. The PHR report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program, is the first to provide evidence that CIA medical personnel engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture.
This evidence indicating apparent research and experimentation on detainees opens the door to potential additional legal liability for the CIA and Bush-era officials. There is no publicly available evidence that the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel determined that the alleged experimentation and research performed on detainees was lawful, as it did with the "enhanced" techniques themselves.
"The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation," said Frank Donaghue, PHR's Chief Executive Officer. "Not only are these alleged acts gross violations of human rights law, they are a grave affront to America's core values."
Physicians for Human Rights demands that President Obama direct the Attorney General to investigate these allegations, and if a crime is found to have been committed, prosecute those responsible. Additionally, Congress must immediately amend the War Crimes Act (WCA) to remove changes made to the WCA in 2006 by the Bush Administration that allow a more permissive definition of the crime of illegal experimentation on detainees in US custody. The more lenient 2006 language of the WCA was made retroactive to all acts committed by US personnel since 1997.
"In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime – illegal experimentation on prisoners," said Nathaniel A. Raymond, Director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture and lead report author. "Justice Department lawyers appear to never have assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture."
PHR's report, Experiments in Torture, is relevant to present-day national security interrogations, as well as Bush-era detainee treatment policies. As recently as February, 2010, President Obama's then director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, disclosed that the US had established an elite interrogation unit that will conduct "scientific research" to improve the questioning of suspected terrorists. Admiral Blair declined to provide important details about this effort.
"If health professionals participated in unethical human subject research and experimentation they should be held to account," stated Scott A. Allen, MD, a medical advisor to Physicians for Human Rights and lead medical author of the report. "Any health professional who violates their ethical codes by employing their professional expertise to calibrate and study the infliction of harm disgraces the health profession and makes a mockery of the practice of medicine."
Several prominent individuals and organizations in addition to PHR will file a complaint this week with the US Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) and call for an OHRP investigation of the CIA's Office of Medical Services.
The PHR report indicates that there is evidence that health professionals engaged in research on detainees that violates the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other international and domestic prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. Declassified government documents indicate that:
* Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the effects of large- volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results. After medical monitoring and advice, the CIA experimentally added saline, in an attempt to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water. The report observes: "'Waterboarding 2.0' was the product of the CIA's developing and field-testing an intentionally harmful practice, using systematic medical monitoring and the application of subsequent generalizable knowledge."
* Health professionals monitored sleep deprivation on more than a dozen detainees in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. This research was apparently used to monitor and assess the effects of varying levels of sleep deprivation to support legal definitions of torture and to plan future sleep deprivation techniques.
* Health professionals appear to have analyzed data, based on their observations of 25 detainees who were subjected to individual and combined applications of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, to determine whether one type of application over another would increase the subject's "susceptibility to severe pain." The alleged research appears to have been undertaken only to assess the legality of the "enhanced" interrogation tactics and to guide future application of the techniques.
Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program is the most in-depth expert review to date of the legal and medical ethics issues concerning health professionals' involvement in researching, designing and supervising the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program. The Experiments in Torture report is the result of six months of investigation and the review of thousands of pages of government documents. It has been peer-reviewed by outside experts in the medical, biomedical and research ethics fields, legal experts, health professionals and experts in the treatment of torture survivors.
The lead author for this report was Nathaniel Raymond, Director of the Campaign Against Torture, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the lead medical author was Scott Allen, MD, Co-Director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University and Medical Advisor to PHR. They were joined in its writing by Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD, PHR Senior Medical Advisor; Allen Keller, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, Director, Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; Stephen Soldz, PhD, President-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR Advisor on Ethics and Psychology; and John Bradshaw, JD, PHR Chief Policy Officer and Director of PHR's Washington Office.
The report was extensively peer reviewed by leading experts in related medical, legal, ethical and governmental fields addressed in the document.
also see article outlining how illegal or immoral unethical experiments have been ongoing in the United States since the middle of the 19th century up til the present time. These doctors and researchers saw nothing wrong with performing experiments on African Slaves, on prison inmates or inmates of mental institutions or American troops & on those considered to be mentally deficient.:
The Shocking History of Human Medical Experimentation in the United States
Human experimentation — the practice of subjecting live human beings to science experiments that are sometimes cruel, painful, or deadly — is a major part of U.S. history that you won’t find in most history or science books. It is still continuing today. Here are a few examples, out of many more. They are not for the faint of heart:
1845: J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the “father of gynecology,” performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Because of his belief that the movement of newborns’ skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he uses a shoemaker’s awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers...
and: "Subjects or Objects? Prisoners and Human Experimentation" by Barron H. Lerner, M.D., Ph.D.May 2007 at The New England Journal of Medicine
During the 1950s, inmates at what was then called Holmesburg Prison, in Philadelphia, were inoculated with condyloma acuminatum, cutaneous moniliasis, and viruses causing warts, herpes simplex, and herpes zoster.1 For participating in this research, and in studies exposing them to dioxin and agents of chemical warfare, they were paid up to $1,500 a month. Between 1963 and 1971, researchers in Oregon and Washington irradiated and repeatedly took biopsy specimens from the testicles of healthy prisoners; the men subsequently reported rashes, peeling, and blisters on the scrotum as well as sexual difficulties.2 Hundreds of such experiments induced the federal government to . . .
Source Information
Dr. Lerner is an associate professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University, New York.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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