Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

Abstract

A lot, it turns out. A professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota, who has worked with torture victims and refugees in Africa, Europe, and Asia, Steven H Miles was moved to write Oath Betrayed after he saw the now infamous pictures of victims at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, their bodies beaten, bones broken. He was haunted by a seemingly simple question: why didn't medical personnel blow the whistle long before the scandal became public? The answer, it turns out, is far more complex than one might imagine, and in the process of exploring his question, Miles places torture in a historical perspective, dismantles common myths about its practice, and examines US policies that allow and even encourage it. Miles relates a conundrum posed by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov in which Ivan puts the following question …