Doctors colluding in torture

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Jonathan Cook looks into the role of the Israeli Medical Association in the torture of Palestinian prisoners, against the background of an international campaign by doctors to oust the Israeli head of the world’s governing body on medical ethics because of his alleged complicity in torture.

Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

The campaign against Dr Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities can be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.

Until 1999, when Israel’s Supreme Court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.

During that period Dr Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.

Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.

Last week, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.

The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.

According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.

Ishai Menuchin, the head of the Public Committee, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, “Ticking Bombs”, in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.

The Public Committee highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent”.

In June last year, Physicians for Human Rights drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.

Anat Litvin of Physicians for Human Rights told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net – take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”

The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.

In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.

Prof Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.

“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.

“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”

This month, Defence for Children International issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”

The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated”.

Campaigners against Dr Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.

Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”

Dr Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous”, saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.

The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during World War II.

In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.

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Former CIA officer charged in Algiers rape

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

A former CIA station chief charged with raping an unconscious Algerian woman last year surrendered to federal agents outside a federal courthouse on Tuesday.

Andrew Warren, 41, was fired from the CIA earlier this year, according to agency spokesman George Little.

Warren’s attorney, Mark David Hunter, told The Associated Press that Warren will be proven innocent.

“The charges are shaky at best and he will be vindicated,” said Hunter. “Andrew has fought and preserved the rights and freedoms of our country.”

A grand jury issued a one-count indictment against Warren on June 18 that was unsealed on Tuesday. If convicted he faces up to life in prison, according the Justice Department.

Two Algerian women came forward separately in 2008 to say they had been sexually assaulted by Warren while at his home in Algiers, according to papers filed in federal court in January by a State Department investigator.

One of the Algerian women claimed that she was drinking at a party at Warren’s home when something made her ill and she passed out, according to the State Department investigation. She awoke believing she had had intercourse, but with no memory of having done so.

The indictment says the alleged victim was not conscious at the time of the Feb. 18, 2008, assault.

Warren had been assigned to Algiers since 2007. He was removed in October.

The CIA station chief is the most senior intelligence officer in the country, overseeing operations and advising the ambassador.

The CIA would not confirm Warren’s title. However, congressional and intelligence officials say he was the station chief. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the information.

AP News

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ID card U-turn under fire

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The Home Secretary has come under renewed fire from civil liberties campaigners for distorting the truth about the compulsory introduction of Identity registration.

This week new Home Office supremo Alan Johnson backtracked on a proposal to force around 30,000 airport workers in Manchester and London to carry ID cards following the threat of legal action.

He announced however that the government was pressing ahead with and accelerating the voluntary roll-out of ID cards, while stating that the cards would not be compulsory for British citizens.

All foreign nationals in Britain are to be forced to carry identity cards and the Home Secretary said he wished to see this scheme fast-tracked.

But Mr Johnson did not mention that, under regulations due to go before Parliament, anyone renewing or applying for a British passport will have their details recorded on the National Identity Register.

The regulations would make passports a designated document under the national identity card scheme.

The regulations would also give the government the power to fine people up to £1,000 if they failed to inform the authorities of a change of address or change in personal details within three months.

When contacted by the Morning Star a Home Office spokesman confirmed that, “from 2011 anyone aged 16 or over applying for or renewing a passport will be enrolled on the on the National Identity Register.”

Critics of the scheme argue that this is just compulsory registration by another name.

Responding to the new Home Secretary’s announcement on ID cards, Liberty Director of Policy Isabella Sankey, said: “However you spin it, big ears, four legs and a long trunk still make an elephant.

“And this white elephant is as costly to privacy and race equality as to our purses.

“As long as entry on the National Identity Register is automatic when applying for a passport the ID scheme will be compulsory in practice.”

Paddy McGuffin

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Police chief in charge of de Menezes shooting is handed ANOTHER promotion

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The police chief who oversaw the bungled operation which resulted in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was yesterday made the third most powerful officer at Scotland Yard.

Cressida Dick, 48, who was severely criticised over her role in the death of the innocent 27-year-old Brazilian, was appointed an assistant commissioner.

She will be charge of the Met’s Specialist Crimes Directorate, which includes murder squads and elite detective units, including the one investigating MPs over alleged expenses fraud.

It is her second promotion since Mr de Menezes was mistakenly gunned down by anti-terror police at Stockwell Tube station in South London four years ago.

Her new job, equivalent in rank to a provincial chief constable, carries a salary of £180,000 - double what Oxford-educated Miss Dick was earning as a Met commander when the tragedy occurred.

Last night, diversity campaigners welcomed Miss Dick’s latest promotion, which will make her the first woman to hold the rank of assistant commissioner on a permanent basis.

However, the move has angered relatives of Mr de Menezes, who believe she and other officers should have faced criminal charges over the shooting.

A spokesman for the Justice for Jean campaign said: ‘Nobody has been held to account for Jean’s death. Those in charge on the day have been rewarded.

‘No wonder more and more of the public have lost confidence in the senior levels of the Met. Like MPs, they simply refuse to accept that they have done anything wrong.’

However, Yard insiders insisted last night that Miss Dick, one of the Met’s most popular senior officers, had been given the post because she was ‘head and shoulders’ above her two rivals.

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