Rights group points to medical study as evidence of U.S. detainee torture

The most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees to date found evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes, as well as complicity and denial of care by military health professionals, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Eleven former terrorism suspects – seven from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and four from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – were examined in the recently-published Physicians for Human Rights study.

According to the article, “Those examine alleged that they were tortured or abused, including sexually, and described being shocked with electrodes, beaten, shackled, stripped of their clothes, deprived of food and sleep, and spit and urinated on.” One Iraqi prisoner recounts being subjected to electric shocks and sodomized with a stick.

“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. “It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”

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