Political India: Engaging America

Even more gory details about the macabre experiments that United States scientists conducted on Guatemalan prison and mental hospital inmates between 1946 and 1948 were released this week, including the deaths of 83 of the victims, many of whom were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases.

When archival research by Professor Susan Reverby of Wellesley College revealed last October that vulnerable Guatemalans had been clandestinely infected with STDs such as syphilis, gonorrhoea, and chancroid, U.S. President Barack Obama had issued an apology to Guatemala's President Alvaro Colom.

Further, he ordered a bipartisan Presidential Bioethics Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to look into the experiments, a process that is nearly complete.

The latest details about the experiments were discussed with media by members of the Commission ahead of the inquiry being wound up. Stephen Hauser, a member of the Commission, said with at least 5,500 prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and children being drafted into the experiments, around 1,300 individuals were exposed to venereal diseases by human contact or inoculations in research meant to test the drug penicillin and that within that group, “we believe that there were 83 deaths”.

Particularly chilling was the case of a terminally-ill woman who had gonorrhoea-infected pus poured into her eyes. She died six months later. In another case, seven women with epilepsy were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, said to be a risky procedure. All the women contracted bacterial meningitis.

While head of the Commission Amy Gutmann described the case as “chillingly egregious”, Anita Allen, a member, said: “The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second.” “Actually cruel and inhuman conduct took place... These are very grave human rights violations,” she added.

Public anger in the U.S. and Guatemala has been directed in particular towards the late John Cutler, a U.S. Public Health Service medical officer who led the experimentation, and also against the Department of State and the U.S. National Institute of Health for funding and authorising the process.

The experiments were acknowledged by officials to be a gross violation of modern-day bioethics standards. “This is a dark chapter in our history. It is important to shine the light of day on it. We owe it to the people of Guatemala who were experimented on, and we owe it to ourselves to recognise what a dark chapter it was,” said Ms. Gutmann.

Last year officials had remarked that the study revived memories of another dark period in U.S. medical ethics — the Tuskegee, Alabama, experiments in which nearly 400 African-American men were infected with syphilis without informed consent. In that case, treatment through Penicillin was not provided.

According to reports, the Guatemalan government is conducting its own investigation into the experiments, including whether they had been approved by some Guatemalan officials.

From The Hindu

“Damn right” — with those two words the former United States President, George W. Bush, implicated his entire administration for condoning the use of “water-boarding” and similar torture techniques to extract information from prisoners, according to a human rights group here.

The group, Human Rights Watch, noted in its 107-page report, “Getting Away with Torture: The Bush Administration and Mistreatment of Detainees,” that Mr. Bush had uttered these words to erstwhile CIA Director George Tenet, when Mr. Tenet requested permission to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of masterminding the 9/11 terror attacks.

The “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration,” according to HRW, “obliges President Barack Obama to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse” authorised by Mr. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet.

Arguing that there was a solid basis on which to investigate the Bush regime for both torture and war crimes, Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of HRW sought to make a subtle point on the failure of the Obama government to view the case in such terms.

Mr. Roth said, “President Obama has treated torture as an unfortunate policy choice rather than a crime. His decision to end abusive interrogation practices will remain easily reversible unless the legal prohibition against torture is clearly re-established.”

Speaking to The Hindu Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director of HRW said, while the question of the Bush administration using coercive interrogation techniques had been flagged “there is overwhelming amount of information now publically available on Bush administration detention and interrogation practices which the Obama government can no longer ignore.”

In particular Ms. Ganguly cited “very public admissions” by Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld in their memoirs about their roles in alleged human rights abuses. A year ago Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to Mr. Bush, said after publishing his memoir called Courage And Consequence, that he was “proud” of the fact that the U.S. had used water-boarding as it “broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information” about various terror plots.

In an interview at the time Mr. Rove said, “I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate; they're in conformity with our international requirements and with U.S. law.”

Despite this and further such evidence that had emerged, Ms. Ganguly told The Hindu, instead of launching a criminal prosecution case, it was evident from Wikileaks documents that in November 2010 the Obama administration had attempted to quash an investigation into the matter in Spain. Further, in May 2011 “the latest in a long line of cases alleging torture and other ill-treatment, including rendition to torture, was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court... because litigation could reveal state secrets,” Ms. Ganguly said.

The HRW report also goes far beyond even the central actors at the very top of the administration; rather it suggests that numerous other senior officials who were said to have devised “justifications” and constructed the institutional edifice for the torture regime be investigated.

These include, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales, Head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, Department of Defence General Counsel William Haynes, and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the OLC John Yoo.