Further to the points I wrote about in my previous post on the CIA torture memos, Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority has previously raised another important issue: the complicity of medical professionals in CIA torture:

Reading these memos, it’s very clear that there are quite a few CIA employees who are allegedly medical professionals. Those people need to find new professions. I would strongly suggest that you take a few minutes – particularly if you’re a doctor or a psychologist – to suggest to your colleagues at the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association that it might be good to take some formal steps along those lines.

This is related to another topic I’ve written about in past posts: the complicity of medical professionals in the death penalty. In either case, people will argue that medical professionals should actually participate in these procedures to make sure they’re carried out as humanely as possible. I can understand why people would put forth such an argument, but the fact of the matter is that neither the death penalty nor torture is a humane practice, even with the participation of medical practitioners.

In fact, the presence of these medical professionals does nothing but lend these horrible practices legitimacy. If medical professionals totally abstained from these practices, as the Hippocratic Oath compels them to, these practices would be much more difficult to carry out in the future.

Check out Mike’s post for more.