Doctors and nurses were complicit in abuses committed at prisons run by the Pentagon and the CIA, an independent report says.
The US Defense Department and the CIA demanded these practices of the health care personnel tasked with monitoring the health of terror suspects.
According to the two-year study, released on Monday by the Institute of Medicine and the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations they were to "collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in US custody."
Medical professionals helped design, enable and participate in "torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of detainees, according to the report.
Collaboration at US prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and the Central Intelligence Agency secret detention sites began after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
"It's clear that in the name of national security, the military trumped (the Hippocratic Oath), and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice," said study co-author Gerald Thomson, professor of medicine emeritus at Columbia University.
The Hippocratic Oath is a commitment made by medical personnel to practice their profession in a way that protects life and health, and does no harm to the individuals treated.
The report, conducted by two dozen military, ethics, medical, public health and legal experts, calls on the US Senate Intelligence Committee to fully investigate medical practices at the detention sites.
The authors also urged the Pentagon and CIA to follow standards of conduct that would let medical personnel adhere to their ethical principles so they could heal detainees they encountered.
Both the CIA and the Pentagon rejected the report's findings.
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