Note from Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I get from ten up to 20 visitors a day from McLean, Virginia (CIA headquarters). The most I had was 22 from there, the day I put up some somewhat speculative data and predictions about Iran’s nuclear program. Since you guys are so interested, I thought I’d say "hi!"

That was no experiment; it was torture, L.A. Times Opinion, June 8, 2010, by Michael McGough, quoted verbatim:

It’s a startling and stomach-turning allegation: that CIA doctors subjected suspected terrorists to "Human Subject Research and Experimentation." But a new report from Physicians for Human Rights doesn’t deliver on that assertion, which conjures up images of Nazi concentration-camp laboratories.

The “white paper” does, however, document the role medical professionals played in enabling waterboarding and other acts of what any reasonable person would call torture. Their role is shocking even if one accepts the explanation that the CIA’s Office of Medical Services collected data on these “enhanced interrogation techniques” in order to ensure that interrogators didn’t go too far.

Consider these findings by Physicians for Human Rights:

“1. Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures.

“2. Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed “susceptibility” of the subjects to severe pain.

“3. Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation was used to establish the ‘enhanced’ interrogation program’s (EIP’s) sleep deprivation policy.”

What shocks the conscience about these techniques, and the role of health professionals in enabling them, is not Nazi-like “medical experimentation” designed to amass academic information, but the acts themselves. By overreaching and alleging “human experimentation,” the report distracts attention from its really damning findings.

– Michael McGough

Download the Physicians for Human Rights white paper Experiments in Torture (PDF), hosted here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: It splits semantic hairs to argue that this was more “torture” than it was experimentation. I don’t care which you’d rather call it. It was definitely torture to experiment with multiple applications of various pain producing techniques for effectiveness. Waterboarding itself is an exquisite torture, a technique close to deliberate drowning which originated in the Inquisition of Spain long ago. The United States is a signer of four different treaties which prohibit torture. Surely, that should have been enough to stop this madness. The fact that it wasn’t, no matter what Obama and Holder do about it, does does not in any way put these activities outside of criminal acts. Certainly, waterboarding and multiple application of pain producing techiques fall in the realm of criminal, prosecutable activity — torture.

Those who made legal justification of these procedures and those who implemented the policy need to be punished. The operatives who carried this out, both CIA personnel, medical enablers and members of the armed forces, are complicit here in a crime. However, I don’t believe that most of these people understood that at the time. Most are patriotic and decent men (and women) and should perhaps be reprimanded. The people who instituted these programs were well aware of the international treaties governing these activities and the fact that the activities fell within the internationally recognized, legal definitions of “torture”. Bush lawyers like Bybee knew that they were coming up with garbage justifications of illegal activities, they just didn’t care. They were probably ordered by Cheney and Rumsfeld and company to come up with legal justifications, and they produced them. These people need to be punished to the full measure of the law. It’s all very well for Obama and Holder to speak of “moving forward” and looking to the future, but these activities were created and justified by high officials in the Bush administration, and that was criminal, if not a war crime.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” – Bertrand Russell

“It’s not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.” –Henry Kissinger