by Nat Hentoff

THE YOUNGEST VICTIMS OF THE “WAR ON TERROR.”

It is now clear that from the very top of the chain of command in the Oval Office the Bush Administration has systematically violated the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (including complicity in torture). The United States and 151 other nations signed that convention.

If there is ever an international war crimes tribunal— or criminal procedures in the United States—Bush, Cheney and the highest-level lawyers in the Justice and Defense departments should not be alone in the dock. Wherever terrorism suspects have been held, complicit in the torture and other barbarisms are military doctors and psychologists.

How is the waterboarding torturer to know if he’s about to go too far and kill the suspect? An attending physician will tell him. For a newly published, meticulously sourced indictment of these crimes that involve the enlistment of medical professionals, see Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by international lawyer Philippe Sands.

The definitive book on the criminal involvement of doctors and psychologists is Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror by Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Miles, whom I’ve interviewed at length, began his deep research to find out why doctors and psychologists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo failed to intervene in the torture and other mistreatment of prisoners. Such abuse was partially exposed when CBS-TV released those infamous Abu Ghraib prison photographs, which became a prime recruiting tool for apprentice terrorists around the world.

In Oath Betrayed, Dr. Miles also revealed that medical personnel gave the torturers information— from prisoners’ records and interviews— about what they most feared. So, as Miles reported, doctors and psychologists were actually “involved in setting the harshness of the interrogation plans.” And, dig this: As loyal implementers of Bush Administration terror policy, they delayed reports of homicides (murders) when the interrogators lost control of themselves.

That’s why it took so long for We the People to know what atrocities were being carried out in order to, as the President likes to say, “protect American values.”

Dr. Miles offered additional shocking revelations in the Fall 2007 issue of the American Bar Association’s publication Human Rights. In “Child Prisoners in America’s War on Terror,” which has largely been ignored even by otherwise-intrepid American journalists reporting on this amoral Presidency, Miles began: “German media and Norwegian officials credibly cite a Red Cross report that more than 100 children were detained in various prisons in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that three of the 60 or so children once imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay were less than 15 years old.”

Dr. Miles continued with the especially chilling: “No statistics exist for child prisoners in Afghanistan.” Bush-Cheney’s initial “victory” was over Afghanistan’s Taliban, which is now murderously resurgent.The Washington Post ’s Dana Priest has revealed that dungeons at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are among the most horrifying CIA “black sites.” There suspects were “softened up” for torture by the brutal Special Forces troops so prized by Donald Rumsfeld. We may never know how many children were “disappeared” into those secret prisons and what happened to them.

Nor do we know how many detained children were killed there or in our other prisons. Noted Dr. Miles: “Reporters are not allowed to photograph their quarters. … The Abu Ghraib photographs depict men being abused; the pictures of children and women being abused remain classified.” Did you know that? I didn’t.

Having gone through tens of thousands of pages of declassified Defense Department documents, Miles found “the only official record of a child prisoner’s death.” It was in a footnote in the appendix of a 200-page Army Surgeon General’s report about detainees (calling them “prisoners” was forbidden) with advanced-stage tuberculosis. A physician cited “one child hemorrhaging from his cavitary TB and dying.”

If there ever is a war crimes trial of those from Camp Cropper near Baghdad Airport (where this nameless child expired) who are responsible for that small corpse, Dr. Miles’s threnody should be in the court record: “No other document describes this child who died bleeding into his (or her?) lungs while in U.S. custody. The Pentagon does not list this prisoner in its list of deaths. It has not released any death certificate, autopsy report or investigation, as is mandated by Geneva Conventions that the United States says were applicable to its prisons in Iraq.

“We do not know whether the parents were told if, how, or when their child died.…We do not know if the child’s body was returned to the family to bury or if the family was informed of the location of the internment.”

Dr. Miles also cited a sworn statement from General Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib. She used to talk to “juveniles,” as she called them, who kept being brought into that reallife horror movie. “I saw a kid,” Karpinski said, “that looked like he was eight years old. He told me he was almost 12. He told me his brother was with him, but he really wanted to see his mother. Could he please call his mother. He was crying.”

The now-defrocked general maintained that she saw no abuse of juveniles at Abu Ghraib. (If she had and said so, she would have had to do something about it.) Dr. Miles dryly added, “Karpinski does not mention if she helped the boy contact his mother.”

As he reported, a former sergeant at Abu Ghraib, John Ketzer, did see “a dog handler and another soldier allow a leashed but unmuzzled dog to ‘go nuts’ and lunge at two children.”

 Dr. Miles has called what happened—and still may be happening—to Bush’s child prisoners “crimes against the innocent.” But the majority of members of Congress who have never demanded bringing criminal charges against the ultimate torturers and abusers of prisoners of any age are not innocent of these crimes. 

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Nat Hentoff is a historian of the Constitution, a jazz critic and a columnist for the Village Voice, the Washington Times and other publications. His books include The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America ; The War on the Bill of Rights—And the Gathering Resistance ; and the forthcoming Is This America?

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