Red Cross: Med Workers Complicit in Gitmo Torture

The Red Cross is accusing medical personnel of deep involvement in CIA torture at Guantanamo, calling it “a gross breach of medical ethics,” the New York Times reports. Medical professionals monitored procedures such as waterboarding, telling interrogators to “continue, to adjust, or stop particular methods,” finds a Red Cross report. The document, obtained and examined by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books, claims that medical professionals “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”

A CIA spokesman wouldn’t comment on the report, but said that President Obama has banned all interrogation techniques not sanctioned by the Army Field Manual, and that Leon Panetta, the new CIA director, is enforcing that order. Panetta has also made clear, however, that no one will be investigated for interrogations during the Bush administration.
(More torture stories.)