August 4, 2006

Torturers' Partners; Mad Reason

Healers and torturers have had a professional partnership for at least 500 years. Sixty years ago, the world's reaction to Nazi physicians' horrific abuse of death-camp prisoners finally drove a wedge between torture and the ethics of medicine. Sadly, that postwar medical ethic has more voice than power. Torturing societies routinely employ doctors and nurses to work in their prisons. They use fear, political incentives, and propaganda to secure the acquiescence of civilian medical societies