The Guantanamo suicides reopen a festering question of medical ethics

Anjana Ahuja

GUANTANAMO BAY, the US detention camp in Cuba, has become a synonym for inhumanity: prolonged isolation with no recourse to the law; alleged beatings and torture; forcible feeding of hunger strikers; and now suicides.

The recent deaths of three detainees are certain to reopen a festering debate among psychologists and psychiatrists about whether they should be sharing their expertise on the human mind with military interrogators. The rumours that particular prisoners have suffered unusual punishments — one is said not to have seen sunlight for years — have stoked suspicions that mental health experts with access to detainees’ medical records have customised interrogation techniques (the prisoner allowed out only at night is reported to have a phobia of the dark). In the eyes of many, such assistance constitutes a violation of an ethical code, because it is about breaking minds rather than healing them.

Last year the ethics committee of the American Psychological Association (APA) published a report suggesting that it was ethically acceptable for “psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation or information gathering processes for national security-related purposes”. Stephen Behnke, the APA’s director of ethics, maintained that consulting with military personnel constituted a “very valuable contribution to law enforcement and to national security”.

The APA’s emphasis, said Dr Behnke, is on “benign” information-gathering. But critics suggest that, in such a context, information-gathering amounts to breaking a prisoner’s will and is anything but benign.

Michael Wilks, chairman of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, has condemned the APA’s position, calling it an example of “governments and professional bodies rewriting existing ethical guidance in the service of abuse”. Earlier this year Dr Wilks wrote an unequivocal editorial in the British Medical Journal entitled “Guantanamo: a call for action”, in which he accused Guantanamo doctors of abandoning their ethical duty. He gave warning that a similar creeping complicity saw German doctors become part of Hitler’s killing machine.

Those running Guantanamo have apparently shown interest in studies by Martin Seligman, a past president of the APA, on “learned helplessness”. This theory, dating back to the Sixties, suggests that individuals who suffer persistent ill-treatment eventually submit wholly to their tormentor. Professor Seligman has since achieved worldwide fame as a researcher in the field of happiness. The irony is almost too grim to bear.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.