The Doctors

One thing is also increasingly clear from the torture memos: medical professionals were indeed present throughout the torture sessions, carefully monitoring and measuring the health and suffering of the torture victims. There is no conceivable way in which this is compatible with the Hippocratic oath, or with minimal standards of medical ethics. They were there to ensure that pain was maximized short of death or permanent visible injury. They failed in the score of cases where torture victims died by the Pentagon's own admission - and in the over a hundred deaths-by-torture recorded by human rights organizations. These doctors need to be identified and prevented from ever practising medicine again.