Friday, May 22, 2009

When healers harm

From the CCR website:

Despite the health professions’ universally recognized duty to do no harm, doctors and psychologists have played a key role in the U.S. government’s policy of torture in its overseas prisons. They crafted and justified torture tactics, inflicted pain and oversaw abuse and enabled, covered up and turned a blind eye to cruel treatment. Yet, in the face of mounting evidence, government officials, licensing boards and professional associations defend their failure to act by saying “We do not have enough information.”

CCR disagrees. When Healers Harm presents the evidence for everyone, including those in institutional power, to examine.

It is time to hold accountable the healers who have harmed. Accountability is vital to survivors of medical torture and to health professionals, most of whom take seriously their commitment to do no harm. It is also necessary for the rest of us – as patients and members of civil society we have a right to treatment by health professionals who we can trust, and a right to a government that upholds the law.

Those in power have tortured in our name. We have an obligation to show them that America refuses to be a torturing society any longer. Join us in ensuring that those who choose to cover for torturers as a matter of political expediency come to see the pursuit of justice as a political necessity.

As I've said, we want their names. Before they slip unchecked back into our society. We want the names of those who thought torture was a good thing to do.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Healers who do or facilitate intentional harm are not healers. They are betrayers.

Mahakal / महाकाल said...

OpenID FAIL.

ellroon said...

How'd you like to find out your child's pediatrician worked for a time at Gitmo? Or your dentist at Abu Gharib?

I don't know how these 'professionals' can live with themselves.