Were the doctors who were looking after Guantánamo Bay detainees complicit in torture by neglecting, or failing to report, evidence of abuse?
That’s the contention of of Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and , a retired US army brigadier general, who advised lawyers representing nine of the detainees.
None of the nine had a prior history of psychological problems, but around the time they made allegations of abuse, eight of them showed a variety of psychological symptoms, including nightmares, suicidal thoughts and hallucinations.
Iacopino and Xenakis fault the Guantánamo doctors for failing to consider a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by abuse. The doctors gave diagnoses including personality disorders and stress associated with confinement .
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Deliberate harm
“I think it’s pretty obvious that there was a deliberate avoidance of diagnoses that imply deliberate harm,” Iacopino says.
That charge may be hard to substantiate. One problem is that the detainees often refused to cooperate with medical evaluations, which may have made accurate diagnosis difficult.
More generally, it is notoriously difficult to assess the adequacy of a diagnosis from a later analysis of someone’s medical records. “There’s not enough information to say anything conclusive,” says , a psychologist at Auburn University in Alabama who specialises in PTSD.
The paper’s publication coincides with the release by WikiLeaks of the first batch of relating to the Guantánamo detainees. These indicate that many were detained of any involvement with terrorism.
Journal reference; , DOI: 10.371/journal.pmed.1001027
