Dr. Steven Miles found one falsified death certificate after another showing that medical doctors on site at Guantanamo Bay were complicit in the torture of detainees. While an isolated few actually engaged in torture themselves, nearly all the medics there simply covered up treatment reports as a matter of course. After combing through 100,000 pages of government documents, Miles has found incident after incident where medics stood by as soldiers abused men, women, and children. He doesn't know why the doctors cooperated with torture and murder. He does know that torture doesn't work.
Miles is the author of Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Iraq, an extension of an article about Abu Ghraib prisoners in British medical journal The Lancet. He has also established a public database hosted by the University of Minnesota with the complete released records regarding the Guantanamo Bay detainees, including death certificates. He will be speaking on medical complicity in torture at the Nolte Center for Continuing Education, Room 125 at the University of Minnesota. Miles is a professor of bioethics for the university; his resume includes extensive work for human rights and a run for Congress.
While Miles speaks in blog posts of trauma after reading of the abuses perpetrated on detainees, now his voice sounds detached; he has mentioned these deaths many times. He lists incident after incident, usually remembering the victim's name, the specifics of the death and what the death certificate did and didn't say. It's the bland statements on the death certificates that he examines. "Heart attack" for a man hung upside down and gagged. "Natural causes" for someone starved to death. In that slew of documents, has yet to see a reason for the false information. "It's not like it was in Chile, or China, or Egypt, or Turkey," he says. US medics were in no danger if they spoke out about abuse. Where Miles had expected to find doctors resisting the abuse, he instead found them going along with the program. "I guess they just thought it would be easier."
Miles research caused him much thought about torture. "Torture doesn't work." He points to one historical incident after another where use of torture has served to destroy and radicalize social culture. He sees this radicalization now happening in Iraq. Because the US has continually employed torture, it has lost its credibility as a builder of social democracy. "It's not that the US is evil," he explains. "They're just doing it wrong." He cites research on interrogation methods from the 50s and 60s that found that the optimal method was negotiation and interrogation.
As of the interview, Miles admits he hasn't really chosen the direction of his lecture. On the one hand, the failure of doctors to serve the needs of detainees deserves further address. On the other hand there's a lot to be said about impact of torture on social culture.