Biscuit Recipes

The LA Times has an op-ed by the guys who wrote the NEJM article on doctors and torture...

Critical to understanding the medical role is the change in interrogation doctrine introduced by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and his team, first at Guantanamo, then at Abu Ghraib. A classified memo, prepared by Miller in late 2003, made the case for "fusion" of all prison functions to support the "interrogation mission."

Miller argued that "Behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists" were needed to "develop … integrated interrogation strategies and assess … interrogation intelligence production." To this end, he called for creation of "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams," known as "Biscuits," made up of psychologists and psychiatrists.

Desperate for some edge against a worsening insurgency in Iraq in November 2003, U.S. commanders implemented Miller's design at Abu Ghraib. In one example that came to our attention, Maj. Scott Uithol, a psychiatrist, arrived in Iraq expecting to serve with a combat stress-control unit. He was deployed instead to Abu Ghraib's newly formed Biscuit.

Uithol declined to talk to us, but other sources, including Abu Ghraib's chief of military intelligence, Col. Thomas Pappas, shed light on what at least some Biscuit members did. In testimony taken last February for an internal report but made public in October, Pappas described how physicians helped devise and execute interrogation strategies. Military intelligence teams, he said, prepared individualized "interrogation plans" for detainees, including a "sleep plan" and "medical standards." A physician and a psychiatrist monitored what went on.

[...]

How did military physicians who advised or served with Biscuits justify this role to themselves? Some may have conflated Geneva protections with the ban on torture. So long as interrogation strategies didn't rise to the level of torture, they could see their conduct as lawful. Other physicians feared prosecution for disobeying orders more than they worried about the consequences of following illegal orders.

Some military doctors advanced another rationalization: Whatever their obligations under the international human rights law and the laws of war, medical ethics do not apply when they devote their skills to intelligence-gathering and other war-fighting functions. In such cases, these physicians say, they are combatants, not physicians, because they apply their knowledge to achieve military ends. A medical degree, Tornberg told us, isn't a "sacramental vow." When a doctor participates in interrogation, "he's not functioning as a physician," and the Hippocratic ideal of fidelity to patients is beside the point.