Doctors without (ethical) Borders

WASHINGTON, June 23 - Military doctors at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators. [...]

The former interrogators said the military doctors' role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes by exploiting their fears, in the hopes of making them more cooperative and willing to provide information. In one example, interrogators were told that a detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.

How ... dispiriting. It's not like this is anything new, of course. (Kind of like the Downing Street Memos "aren't anything new" - yet for some reason this story makes the Times ...) Repressive regimes throughout history have found willing accomplices in the medical professions. But it's damn depressing to have it confirmed.