(The following article is from the June 16-30,  2010 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)

People's Voice Editorial

Yet again, the country which claims to "lead the war on terror" has been exposed as a regime of war criminals. This time, a new investigation of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program" ("mass torture" would be more accurate) has been released. Physicians For Human Rights (PHR) has uncovered evidence that doctors took part in human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody, acts which are utterly illegal and highly unethical. PHR says the experiments "appear to have been performed to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies governing the use of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques."

     Descriptions of this "research" are shocking. The physicians measured various "techniques" to help answer "important" questions: how much torture can prisoners endure before it kills them? How much water can be ingested before prisoners go into a coma? How long can prisoners be deprived of sleep before they lose their minds? What combinations of torture techniques yield the best results?

     Similar "research" was conducted by the Nazis and Japanese fascists during World War Two. Sixty years later, U.S. health professionals are engaged in violations of the Geneva Conventions, The Common Rule, the Nuremberg Code and other prohibitions against illegal human subject research and experimentation. These are war crimes, not minor transgressions.

     A Canadian government which believed in international law would immediately break its ties both with the U.S. war machine, and with the genocidal Israeli government. Instead, we are saddled with a minority Harper Tory government which calls these regimes its closest allies. To end this shameful situation, Canadians must press for a quick defeat for the Tories in Parliament, and then in the electoral arena, after an election campaign in which Canada's alliances with war criminals is made a prominent issue.