Guantanamo detainees' medical care

Abandoned hospital used in Camp X-Ray in early 2002.

$2.9 million, 12 bed, psychiatric facility for Guantanamo captives.

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Separate facilities exist to provide for Guantanamo detainees' medical care.

A 2013 Institute on Medicine as a Profession report concluded that health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees". Medical professionals were ordered to ignore ethical standards during involvement in abusive interrogation, including monitoring of vital signs under stress-inducing procedures. They used medical information for interrogation purposes and participated in force-feeding of hunger strikers, in violation of World Medical Association and American Medical Association prohibitions.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

A series of hospitals, dental clinics and psychiatric facilities have been prepared for Guantanamo detainees. On June 7, 2010, the Washington Post reported, after obtaining the first official figures for capital costs of the Guantanamo camps to be made public, that the current hospital building cost $18.2 million USD, and a companion psychiatric facility cost 2.9 million USD.^[6]

Military spokesmen have routinely asserted that the detainees receive excellent medical care.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} Documentary film director Michael Moore used these claims as a central meme in his film Sicko to argue that American citizens should receive better medical care.^{[16][17][18][19]} Former detainees on the other hand have described medical care being withheld at the command of interrogators, in order to coerce detainees to confess. Critics have described the use of the detainees' medical files by interrogators as a violation of medical ethics.^{[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]} Critics have expressed concern that medical personnel violated their professional ethics by aiding in or failing to report the wounds inflicted during interrogations that used prohibited techniques.

Over eighty of the detainees' weights have fallen to life-threatening levels.^{[28][29][30][31]} Many other detainees became obese on the camp's food.

Dental care

One of the two dental clinics for Guantanamo captives.

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In 2009 Guantanamo captives' dental care is dispensed at two dental clinics on the Guantanamo Bay detention camps.^[32] There is a dental clinic at the Guantanamo Bay detention camps hospital for the captives, and a second clinic within Camp 6. The camp's guards have a separate, third dental clinic served by the same dental staff.

The quality of the medical care and dental care, at Guantanamo, has been the subject of public disagreement. After a visit to Guantanamo Congressional Representative William Lacy Clay asserted that many Guantanamo captives received dental care for the first time in Guantanamo.^[33] He asked "did Hitler and Pol Pot provide dental care to their prisoners before they killed them?" In her book, Kristine Huskey, one of the lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was coordinating the captives' habeas corpus petitions, quoted a motion the Center filed, that described the captives' dental care as inadequate.^[34] After viewing Andy Worthington's film, Witness to Guantanamo, which compiled interviews with former captives, law professor Peter Jan Honigsberg wrote that the captives said dental care was dispensed at the discretion of the captives' interrogators.^[35] He wrote "Some prisoners who expected to have cavities filled, had their teeth pulled instead." Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker quoted Rob Kirsch, who represented six Bosnians, who also said dental care was routinely withheld by their interrogators.^[36]

In 2005 a single dentist, Lieutenant Jennifer Tharp, was responsible for treating all the captives and all the guards.^[37] In 2005 captives arms and legs were shackled to the dental chair, and an armed guard was present at all times.

In a July 2009 interview Commander Kenneth Bell said that it took several times longer to treat captives as it did to treat guards, for similar dental procedures, because captives didn't understand why the dental procedures were in the interest of their health.^[32] He said dental procedures were never performed on the captives, without their consent.

In April 2008 Adam M. Robinson Jr., the United States Navy's Surgeon General, reported that 6500 dental procedures had been administered to Guantanamo captives since 2002.^[38]

See also

• Behavioral Science Consultation Team

References