Talk:Medical torture

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We could add other doctors who have actually participated or been in charge of a government, prison camp, or insurgence which has tortured prisoners. On the other hand, GLF and sock puppet 66, it's kind of stupid to have a section like this:

Contents

[edit] Physicians who have participated in or defended governments that condone torture in prison camps

Zillions of physicians in all the countries of the world where this has occurred plus Phil Gingrey, U.S. Representative from Georgia, has publicly defended administration of the Guantanamo detention camp

So I took it out. Alteripse 20:11, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Please stop the edit war.

Please stick to the subject of medical torture, i.e. medical procedures performed deliberately as a form of torture.

To define torture: the infliction of severe physical or psychological pain as a means of cruelty, intimidation, punishment, for the extraction of a confession or information or simply for the entertainment of the perpetrator.

Examples:

  • Medical examination for the purposes of torture.
  • Invasive medical procedures for the purposes of torture.
  • Administering drugs for the purposes of torture.
  • Vivisection for the purposes of torture.

Examples would be Josef Mengele and Unit 731.

Medical staff assisting a cover-up and falsifying medical records IS NOT medical torture. It is unethical, yes, but it is not medical torture. Did the torture in Abu Ghraib include bona-fide medical procedures as a deliberate part of the torture?

Kyz 19:52, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"Sanction" does not mean "collude" or "cover up after the fact". It means to be an authority figure whose permission is needed, and to then explicitly permit. Kyz 20:00, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree entirely. Even more irrelevant is a physician congressman who "agrees" in general with the administration of a prison camp but has no authority over it or participation in it. However, to Amoll and his fellow sockpuppets, the entire purpose of this article seems to be to accuse Phil Gingrey of medical torture. This editor is dishonest and using wikipedia only for the purpose of posting provocative and exaggerated political POV. To date he has been unwilling to discuss, negotiate, or compromise on anything. A request for arbitration has been filed. The Phil Gingrey page has been protected and clearly this one needs to be also. This is not the only article incapacitated by his insertions. Please join the complaint. Alteripse 21:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

So things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study don't qualify, because - unlike Mengele - the Doctors didn't intend to torture people. Got that. Lars T. 14:39, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Edits made 16-Oct-2004

I made sweeping rewrites to most of the material, to improve its coherence, spelling and factual accuracy. I have put a lot of effort into it. Please do not simply revert it.

The article is still POV, and is likely to remain so until there is factual evidence of medical torture for every person listed as "associated" with it, and all "examples" have bona-fide sources showing they are examples of actual medical torture.


The following 3 deletions were made, and here are my reasons for doing so.

1. An Israeli medic was convicted of negligence for refusing to treat Palestinean detainee Mahmud Al-Masri for a burst ulcer 24 hours before his death on March 6, 1989 at Gaza Prison.
Joost R. Hiltermann. "Deaths in Israeli Prisons." Journal of Palestine Studies. Spring 1990. Vol. 19: Issue 3. pp. 101-110.

Medical negligence and refusing to treat the sick is a medical ethics issue. It is not medical torture, even if it occurs in a prison. This item is irrelevant to the article.

2. Aubrey Levine, South African-Canadian military psychiatrist who tortured gay and lesbian military recruits using "aversion therapy", now working at the University of Calgary

I reinstated this upon reading the original, non-sensationalist sources, which includes testimony from medical staff present in SADF at the time. They disagree with Levine and state that the "treatment" was not voluntary.

3. Phil Gingrey, conservative U.S. Representative

Please read the talk page on the Phil Gingrey article. It is not conclusive that Phil Gingrey is "associated" with medical torture. Making such a statement is POV.

4. In the 1960s and 1970s British psychologists participated in the design of mentally disorienting interrogation techniques, including "white noise" to be used against prisoners captured in Northern Ireland. These techniques may have long term harmful consequences for the victims.

From this source and this source, not only was the action limited to 1970-1971, but the EU commission for human rights and the EU court of human rights have both declared it was not torture.

Why on earth add something that's not torture to a list of tortures?

[edit] Calling a dog a cat does not make it a cat.

Imagine you are a medical professional who has never tortured anybody. A torturer approaches you and says "I killed a guy during my torturing. Could you fake his death certificate?". You agree to hush up the torturer's activities.

Did you, the medical professional, torture anyone in this scenario? No. Are you, the medical professional, a torturer? No. Have you, the medical professional, committed medical torture? No. Are your actions a serious breach of medical ethics? Yes.

Torture breaches medical ethics, but not all medical ethics breaches are torture.

If Phil Gingrey did not personally authorise or commit torture, he is not a torturer. End of story. You can't revise the definition of torture to include all who conspire with torturers. You can't revise the definition of torture to include people who design torture methods. I can design a death-contraption on paper, does that make me a murderer?

If you want to label Phil Gingrey as a torturer in your private life, feel free to do so. Don't keep amending Wikipedia to label Phil Gingrey as a torturer unless you have evidence from credible sources.

[edit] Is this NPOV?

It seems to me that there's been precious little disagreement (or editing) recently, any edit wars seem to be over and the remaining incidents are undeniable, significant or appropriately laden with weasel terms. As such, I'm removing the NPOV notice. -- Kizor 15:58, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dictator Allawi?

I think that defining Allawi a dictator apppointed by U.S. is obviously a POV, but it has been there for quite a while. Any ideas? -- Nova77 11:22, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

References to "Dictator Allawi" and Phil Gingrey as torturers are the POV additions of a user who repeatedly vandalises this page. He refuses to discuss any of these on the talk page anymore. See Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/66.20.28.01_and_other_accounts for more info. Kyz 16:40, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Compromise

In an attempt to stop futile and frustrating revert wars re-erupting, I have attempted to make a NPOV compromise edit incorporating all points of view. Please feel free to flame my talk page if you so desire. -- FirstPrinciples 01:34, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Hi FP. Sadly, the problem is that we have a single rogue editor with wide range of sockpuppet aliases. When he got kicked off the Phil Gingrey page for adding uncorroborated POV nonsense, he created the medical torture page and, surprise surprise, listed Phil Gingrey as a medical torturer. He created the "Representative Gingrey" page which was a POV version of the Phil Gingrey page. There is no reason to fill Wikipedia with unrepresentative POV inventions of a single editor, and there is no need to "compromise" with them. I have already wasted valuable time researching his claims and found no evidence to back them up, despite finding plenty of sources for some of the other assertions he made. Inserting these claims against Phil Gingrey, no matter how you word it, makes Wikipedia a less useful and reliable encyclopedia. You say More controversially, a small number of critics have claimed that Dr. Phil Gingrey ..., this "small number of critics" is a single person with a special interest in defaming Gingrey and no evidence to back up his claims. I could not find anyone else who interprets Gingrey's actions as medical torture or even a violation of medical ethics. It is extremely tenuous reasoning, and only one person is asserting it, and is currently under wikipedia arbitration for continuing to assert it.
I notice that you changed the "Examples of medical torture" section to "Asserted instances of medical torture". While this is fine for now, and allows in things which were shown not to be torture, I'm not sure of such a section's worth on this page. There must be thousands of cases of non-torture being claimed as torture by those with a specific interest in attacking or damaging the reputation of the alleged torturers. Do we really want them on this page?
Also, you say There have been numerous claims that... and Some claim that such actions.... What are these specific claims, and who are these people that claim these acts are medical torture? Please add specific examples and name the people making these assertions. Kyz 15:30, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
OK, I appreciate your position. I was simply trying to find a neutral and accurate middle ground that everyone could agree to. Admittedly the claims about Phil Gingrey are pretty insane. I will work on finding more concrete evidence, examples etc. -- FirstPrinciples 03:03, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] anti-apologetics

Using "alleged instances" or any other similarly crabbed and crippled language to describe actual cases of medical torture is a form of apology, a defence that in itself "countenances" medical torture. This Representative Gingrey person is clearly implicated in medical torture by any normal reading of the words of the definition. (unsigned, by ShepsleH)

As your arbcom ruling says 66.20.28.21 (under any account or IP) may be temporarily banned (one day for inital offenses, up to one week for repeated offenses) if he places original research or reinserts it after it has been removed into the disputed articles without establishing and citing an independent, relible source for the information. The blocking administrator may use his/her discretion in determining what an independent, reliable source is.
Those independent, reliable sources in full, please. 81.178.65.55 09:11, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)
ShepsleH, Your misuse of the term "apologetics" in the heading is wonderfully ironic! -- FirstPrinciples 09:46, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] removing Karadzic

Though Radovan Karadzic technically can be called a doctor, he is a qualified psychiatrist, there is no proof nor sustainable evidence or him being involved in mediacal torture.

Nor was he ever head of state of Serbia, he was president of the Serb constituency of Bosian Republic in the Yugoslav Federal Republic.

[edit] MK-ULTRA

I think it would be very good (informative) to introduce at least a link to the MK-ULTRA project in the article. It was a medical torture project carried out in the post-WW2 world in a country considered to be most civilised.

[edit] Misuse of Medicine

How is medical torture different than the misuse of psychiatry and other forms of medicine? Examples of this would be Soviet era attempts to 'cure' political dissidents, or the many psychiatric abuses carried out GLBT people or the practice, widely known about in my childhood, of 'putting people away' - committing inconvenient and powerless members of one's family to a psychiatric facility.

Similarly, there are documented cases of persons who received lobotomies because they were hated by their guardian, or who received electroshock therapy because they reported that they had been raped by medical staff.

So what makes torture 'medical'? Is it because a doctor is involved? Is it because the torture is covered by by wrapping it in the trope of medicine? Is it because the torture was a consequence of the power imbalance in much of medicine, especially psychiatry? Is it because the method of torture used paraphernalia and methods associated with medicine (and in that sense is execution by lethal injection 'medical' in a way that the noose is not?). - anniepoo

As defined in this article, medical torture is torture for political purposes using the medical establishement or medical personnel. From most perspectives it is clearly distinguishable from abusive treatment of patients by medical personnel for dishonorable motives, or treatment that is carried out for honorable motives but perceived as abusive by the patient. The Soviet use of forced psychiatric treatment of political dissidents fits this definition and article, while forced psychiatric treatment of deviant sexual behavior does not because it was intended for the benefit of the patient, no mater how unjustifiable or barbaric the methods and understanding seem to us now. alteripse 05:11, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] HRW Report

I have only browsed through the report, but I don't see any specific allegations of medical torture; on the contrary, it seems like all the doctors involved are working with HRW. If there is a specific allegation, can someone highlight it? And if not, let's cut. 00:16, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Totalitarianism and democracy

Interested that the documented instances all took place in Nazi or Communist countries - or dictatorships like Saddam's Iraq. And the "allegations" are all against democratic countries.

One would think that with the press freedom and ease of private communication in democractic societies it would be much easier to find evidence of complicity, if it's really taking place. I sense a one-sided attempt to push moral equivalence here. --Uncle Ed 01:34, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

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