MONDAY

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Q & A with Dr. Miles
• Article on Dr. Miles
• Dr. Miles bio

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Dr. Steven Miles is a medical ethics expert and a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. He's also the former President of the American Association of Bioethics. His new book is "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror.' Dr. Miles, nice to have you on the program.

Dr. Steven Miles: Pleasure to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you. I guess a book like this doesn't make you popular to the medical profession, does it?

Miles: Well, you know, actually it's been very favorably received. Many people think that this issue had to be explored and opened up.

Tavis: The first thing that one notices when one opens up this book is what you have to say on the title page essentially which is from the Hippocratic Oath from 500 B.C. "I will use regimens for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgment, but from what is to their harm or injustice, I will keep them."

Miles: Correct.

Tavis: Do we have folk who are violating this?

Miles: Absolutely. We have a problem. When I first saw those Abu Ghraib pictures, the questions, "How come the docs were quiet? How come they hadn't blown the whistle on it?" To my utter dismay, what I found was they were not only quiet for several years and at multiple prison sites, but they were deeply imbedded in the process of the active abuse of people and suppressing information about the abuse of people.

Tavis: Of course, the obvious question for the viewer right now is give me an example. What do you mean by that? Back it up.

Miles: Fair enough. First off, the document itself is based on thirty-five pages of government documents, not press accounts. Let me tell you the story of Abed Mahoush (ph). We took his sons and we said we'll give the sons freedom if you come in. He was an Iraqi military person. He came in for about two weeks.

We beat him. He was hit with rifle butts. There was a medic in the room during his final interrogation. He was stuffed head first into a sleeping bag which was wrapped with twenty feet of wire. An interrogator sat on the bag and put his hands on the guy's head. The guy died.

The medic was in the room. Resuscitation was started. The resuscitation was overseen by an Air Force surgeon. This guy was covered with bruises from head to toe. She had to see them while she was doing the resuscitation. She asked the interrogator what happened. The interrogator said, well, he passed out while he was being interrogated.

She signed it out as a heart attack. It was listed as a heart attack on the official Pentagon website for several months. She kept quiet about it. The investigators, the autopsy, all found these abuses and bruises and they found that he died of asphyxiation and the system kept dead quiet even though they are propagating the information about natural death.

Tavis: Let me jump ahead. We'll come back. But the question that jumps out at me, obviously, is why a medic, why a doctor, would do such? Why a doctor would remain silent? I mean, patriotism is one thing. Nationalism is far more scary for me. That's another thing. I don't know what you even call this.

Miles: This breaks my heart because, first off, I'm a doc, so these are my colleagues. When I look at the way that military medicine acted in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War I, I can't find anything that looks like this. This is a non-recognizable military medical system to me and it wasn't just Iraq. There are multiple prisons in Iraq, multiple prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Tavis: So what is your sense of why we created this monster, as it were, when in so many wars past you saw nothing even approaching what you see now?

Miles: We created these incredible secret institutions. We said that the Geneva Conventions will not apply. We locked out the international human rights monitors and we said that these people, the vast majority of whom were entirely innocent of terrorism, were the worst of the worst. In that environment, these abuses flourished.

Tavis: I've always believed - it's my own view, but I want to get your point. I don't mean to politicize the text. One thing you do a good job of, to your credit, is not politicizing this. This is not about anything other than right and wrong, which I applaud you for.

That said, when you say "we" say the Geneva Conventions don't apply, we didn't say that. The president, quite frankly, said that in arguing his rationale for going to war. Again, I'm not raising this to cast aspersion on him. I'm just trying to get the facts out here, the truth out here.

I'm going to this point with you, Doc, because it seems to me that oftentimes when government looks the other way, when government looks askance or askew, other people do the same thing. I'm wondering whether or not you think that part of the way this got created and the reason why it exists is because government looked the other way, the military did, and the doctors did as well?

Miles: And we did. Because the problem is that the Congress allowed the president to suspend the Geneva Conventions and we allowed our Congress to suspend the Geneva Conventions. At some point, we have to assume a national responsibility as citizens for what our government does on our behalf. This is not a book about the rightness or wrongness of the war, but it is a book about what we as a society have tolerated. We built the Geneva Conventions to protect prisoners of war and we have stood by as those standards have been taken down.

Tavis: I assume, though, again, given my read of the text, that you did not mean this book "Oath Betrayed" to be an across the board casting of aspersion on the entire military or the medical profession.

Miles: Good Lord, no. There in fact were some military medical people like a psychologist at Guantanamo who did stop a set of abuses. There were some others that I found that tried to stop the abuses, but interestingly enough, the major objection to the abuses came from the FBI, from seasoned intelligence personnel. By and large, the medical system was quiet.

Tavis: What, where, how does a doctor, a medic, in a situation like the ones you describe find - I don't know if you want to call it courage because back to your Hippocratic Oath which you swore you were going to do. It's what you said you were going to do as a medic. But oftentimes what we say we're going to do and what we do in those moments are very different.

How do you summon the courage to say what needs to be said when you're in a room full of military officers and they're beating the heck out of somebody and you're the only one in there who's under oath to speak up and say something? You got to look around like, well. . .

Miles: Tavis, you know, I got friends in Turkey and Egypt who are protesting torture. These guys risk being disappeared. One of them has been arrested for six months. He had a coke bottle shoved up his rectum. His office was destroyed. When I look at the risks that United States military personnel face for blowing the whistle on these abuses, all I see is something that required the courage to be inconvenienced. They were in no danger of disappearing into a torture system themselves. This is where professionalism meets the line and they should have been there for these prisoners.

Tavis: How widespread - to your point, we don't want to cast aspersion on the entire military or the medical doctors therein. I mean, one can say, you know, "Dr. Miles, you found twelve examples of this." That's not to minimize the fact that one example is significant, but how widespread a problem is it?

Miles: I think that's a fair question. Obviously, the number of docs who are doing things like, for example, hitting prisoners or medics who are hitting prisoners is extremely small, perhaps only a few dozen. But the problem was that enough docs and medics and nurses were willing to be quiet. But a broad system of abuse could continue for at least two years throughout an entire system of prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, so it varies according to that.

Now with regard to concealing and delaying death certificate information, there we're talking about a group of about twenty pathologists operating under the administration of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, but that's enough to stop the information from getting out.

Tavis: How do you read - this may be an impossible question, but it certainly calls for speculation on your part - how do you read what it means for a doctor to strike a patient? How do you read that?

Miles: Well, clearly, the doc is stressed. It was actually a medic who offered the most graphic personal statement. He said, "When you're wearing four-point armor and you're carrying an M-16 and you are surrounded by other troops, you have the feeling of God in you and that feeling is very powerful and it feels great." You know, that kind of sense of absolute entitlement seems to be where the most horrific of direct abuses on the part of the medics continued.

Now some of them just strike me as bored, stupid actions. For example, an anesthesiologist who kept dropping a two-pound bag of IV fluid on a prisoner. But I don't know. These people were operating totally outside of what looks like a normal health care system.

Tavis: I suspect there is somebody watching right now, with all due respect to the work that you've done here and the rationale for why you wrote this, the justification for why you wrote this, I suspect there's somebody watching right now whose attitude is essentially, "So what, Dr. Miles. They bombed our country on 9/11, they killed innocent Americans. They had it coming and I, quite frankly, don't care who they get it from, including medical doctors."

Miles: I think that's a fair point. First off, eighty-five percent of the prisoners in Iraq, by the military intelligence own estimates, were either innocent or entirely ignorant of terrorism. When these abuses got out, public opinion against us plummeted in Iraq and contributed to the destruction of our ability to create a civil society in Iraq, which was the core mission that we went into.

Second, this is not about treatment on the battlefield. This is about treatment of disarmed captives. And we abuse these standards to appeal for humane treatment of our own prisoners and friends of democracy in other countries. What we have basically done is taken down the framework of international law so that we can appeal for humane treatment of, say, a prisoner in China or in Burma.

Tavis: It's a powerful book. You will not be disappointed. It's called "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror" by Dr. Steven H. Miles. Dr. Miles, thanks for your work. Nice to have you on the program.

Miles: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Tavis: The pleasure's all mine. Up next on this program, Oscar-winning actress, Eva Marie Saint. Stay with us.