The doctors were in on it!

That's the horrifying, new allegation that has come out of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

According to the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, doctors and other health professionals were "complicit" in the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

"Complicit" is putting it mildly.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," the article states.

In one instance, a prisoner collapsed after a beating and was apparently unconscious. Did the doctors take care of him and get him out of harm's way? No. "Medical staff revived the detainee and left, and the abuse continued," according to The Lancet.

Several times, physicians or other medical professionals were present when torture was under way or knew that it was going on and did not report it to higher ups.

And doctors routinely covered up the torture, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural (cause) of the death," the article states.

It describes one example where soldiers beat a detainee, tied him to the top of his cell door, and gagged him. On the death certificate, the doctor wrote that the detainee died of "natural causes . . . during his sleep."

Once the scandal broke, the Pentagon had to come clean on this one.

But when will the doctors come clean?

If they were doing their job and obeying the Hippocratic oath, they wouldn't have gotten dirty in the first place.

But when you're the empire's doctor, you get blood on your hands.

Copyright 2004 The Progressive

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