Located in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is established for more than a century, a military base in the United States Navy. That country illegally occupied an area of \u200b\u200b116 square kilometers in 1898, in the context of the English-Cuban war. By 1903, Cuba was forced to give up permanently that territory to the United States, through the signing of a shameful treaty that guaranteed the United States "complete jurisdiction and control of the area" in order to mine coal and naval stations seat. Since 2002, The Guantanamo Naval Base is also home to the "detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, which serves as a military prison and interrogation center. In prison are being held around 495 men accused by the U.S. government of having ties to the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist organizations. The prisoners were captured in Afghanistan and other places in the Middle East.
The living conditions in the Guantanamo prisoners are absolutely inhumane and have sparked hundreds of protests around the world. The European Union, several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, U.S. ally, and human rights organizations have called for the closure of the detention center.
Guantanamo prisoners are confined in isolated cells, exceptionally small, poorly lit and where there are extreme temperatures. Do not know what they are accused, are condemned without a trial involved, and have no legal right to be represented by counsel. Denied the opportunity to speak, receive visits or contact with relatives. They were banned from talking to the rest of his fellow detainees or have a minimum of mobility. It prevents them from seeing the sky or the sun in an open area. And, with the exception of the Koran, are forbidden to read.
According to testimony from former prisoners of Guantanamo, detainees have suffered humiliation and psychological torture that violate their cultural and religious values.
"The officers urinating on them, show them pornographic pictures, I enclose
cameras with loud music, for days, depriving them of all the senses
(Blindfold, earplugs, tape on the mouth
) and apply them "suspicious injections." Sassi and Mourad Nizas
Benchellali, two French citizens who were prisoners at Guantanamo,
believe they were victims of "experiments" by the medical staff at Guantánamo
. " (From "suicides, Process Magazine, Year 29, No. 1546, June 18, 2006)
Benchellali also said that inside the prison units are reserved" for those who go crazy "in the who work "an impressive number of psychiatrists."
In April 2005, the law firm Allen & Overy sent a letter to the American Medical Association (AMA) in denouncing the abuses committed by U.S. doctors and psychologists hired by the Pentagon to "treat" prisoners Guantanamo.
On July 7 of that year, the magazine The New England Journal published the report Use of medical and psychiatric detainees for interrogation purposes. The report argues that "Since 2002, psychiatrists and psychologists (hired by the Pentagon) have employed strategies of extreme stress and reward techniques for behavior in order to extract the valuable intelligence detainees for interrogation. "
In late 2004, the New York Times published a report of the International Committee of the Red Cross directed the government of the United States. The report argues that the Pentagon's torture experts have advice from a group of psychologists and psychiatrists called Consultation Team Behavioral Science, which is also known as Biscuit.
In September 2005, attorneys Paul Weiss, Jennifer Ching Julia Tarver and denounced various abuses against prisoners through "medical treatment" and said that detainees who have been hunger strikes are forced to feed through tubes or plastic tubes.
"Yusuf Al-Shehri, who was arrested four years ago when he was 16 years old
is regularly tied up in a special chair. He tied the legs, arms and torso
feeding tubes twice the size that
usually used in hospitals. This has caused nausea, diarrhea, convulsions and
. "
Such reports led to 250 health professionals published an open letter in the British medical journal The Lancet. It called on U.S. authorities finish force-feeding prisoners through tubes because, they say, is a flagrant violation of human rights.
Access to Guantanamo is very limited. Only allowed a few visits a year international media and journalists finally gain access to the complex are strictly forbidden to take photographs of the site. You may have to take decades for the true extent of human rights violations committed there, finally go to the public. Guantanamo is an instructive example, it allows us to understand that the chapter on illegal human experimentation is not yet a closed case. Although little information has been released to date, there are enough indications to believe that the Guantanamo prison they may be incorrectly perpetrating human medical experiments that violate the existing rules on the conduct of clinical studies.
The purpose of this study was to expose some of the most notorious and outrageous medical experiments on humans have done throughout the twentieth century. Some cases have been extensively publicized, such is the case of the Nazi experiments and atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Others, however, remains unknown to most audiences. Such is the case for the vast majority of experiments that the U.S. government has perpetrated against its own population. Tuskegee Experiment - which is probably the best known U.S. case - has not been not nearly as widespread as the Nazi experiments during the Holocaust.
German scientists were judged and sentenced for their crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Trials. Not so with Dr. Shiro Ishii and other Japanese scientists of the infamous Unit 731, who despite having committed crimes that rival and even surpass the atrocity of any experiments of Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz, were never charged. Not only evaded the courts, but continued with their careers under the protection of U.S. government, which on one hand calling for the maximum penalties for Nazi criminals in the Nuremberg trials, and on the other, hosted for more than 14 years a racist experiment, which name of science, left to 399 African Americans slowly dying due to syphilis (Tuskegee Experiment). The same could be said of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, MKULTRA Project Coordinator of the CIA, Dr. Ewen Cameron or military doctors who conducted the aberrant radiation experiments during the Cold War, throughout the United States. None of them received any punishment for their crimes.
The enactment of the Nuremberg Code (1946) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) are huge achievements in the field of clinical research and medicine in general. Its significance is indisputable. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that despite its existence, conducting experiments that violate human rights, has continued almost uninterrupted since these documents were drafted. It took 26 years since the promulgation of the Nuremberg Code, that the Tuskegee Experiment was finally canceled. By the time the Code was drafted, the same experiment had already been 14 years activity. Eleven years after Dr. Ewen Cameron to collaborate in the Nuremberg trials, was sponsored and funded by the CIA to carry out his monstrous experiments under Project MKULTRA. Human radiation experiments that the U.S. government conducted its own population and incontrovertibly violated human rights of research subjects, also were made after the enactment of the Nuremberg Code, and continued to develop during the same time that promulgated the Declaration of Helsinki.
human experimentation in the twentieth century brings together some of the most sad and shameful episodes in the history of mankind. It is arguably one of the darkest chapters in the history of medicine. Although at first, might be more comfortable turning our eyes to another part, pretending that this endless series of horrors never happened, knowledge of this part of our past is essential. Like so many issues, knowledge and reflection about these events can help us avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
valuable observations can be drawn from several of the crimes perpetrated by the doctors who are referred to throughout this text. One is referred to the obligations entities that have doctors and scientists in general. Science is probably the most valuable tool that has humans in their quest for knowledge and their own welfare. But it is also the means by which man enters the domain of power that often is not prepared to handle. Science is not free from moral responsibilities to those men who practice it. Thus, it is inconceivable that the dignity and human rights of a person to be relegated to second place in the name of scientific research. Human beings can not be reduced in any way to be a simple means to access knowledge. The handy justification to violate the rights of subjects experimentation, on behalf of a more important goal of course, as is the science or the "national security" - is without any ethical grounding. It is absurd from the beginning, because science and medicine are the means by which the human being truly unique ultimate goal of both disciplines, seeks his own welfare.
In most cases presented in this text, physicians believed to be doing science, when in fact their activities were nothing more than criminal acts. This is another valuable observation. Science has often been used to disguise the low and degrading acts. This is the reason why the image than the general population has scientists, is a distorted caricature that often we are taught to fear. It is fair to say that in many cases, science has been guilty of abuse that some people have made on their behalf. Nazi and Japanese doctors and "researchers" of the CIA were not actually scientists. They were criminals who mistakenly believed to be practicing science, as they tortured and murdered their victims.
The same is true of the subtle deployment of racist ideologies using science as a vehicle. The Tuskegee Experiment is perhaps the most obvious case. Is it really a coincidence that this experiment will be carried out precisely in Tuskegee, Alabama? Was it a coincidence that the scientists choose one of the poorest populations in one of the poorest states in the U.S.? A community populated exclusively by African Americans? "Arguably, this was a coincidence considering that Alabama has traditionally among the most racist state in the United States? I think it would be naive to exonerate the scientists who conducted the Tuskegee Experiment of this charge, claiming that the selection of the population was random. The truth is that such an experiment would not have ever made in the island of Manhattan or in Hollywood, California. It was not coincidence, the same way that it was not the experimental subjects of the Nazis were almost exclusively Jews, Gypsies and disabled. Or that the experimental subjects of the Japanese prisoners were exclusively Chinese. In more recent cases, in 1990, the Department of Health of the United States applied an experimental vaccine against measles to 1,500 babies in the City of Los Angeles. The vaccine was not licensed for use in the United States. And, again, by play of chance, all babies who underwent the procedure were black and Hispanic. The truth is that victims of human experimentation are almost normally most vulnerable groups traditionally discriminated against in society.
The misuse of scientific research allows us to analyze some of the worst aspects of man. In the case of the horrors of medical experimentation on humans, the impact is particularly strong because the crimes from society member of the traditionally least expect such atrocities: the doctor. Unfortunately, medicine is a discipline practiced by fallible human beings like everyone else. For that reason, we must never lose sight of the magnitude of the risks we are exposed when medical science is the wrong way.
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