Physician Involvement in Military Interrogation

The New England Journal of Medicine has an open-access article: Bloche MG and Marks JH. Doctors and Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. N Engl J Med 2005:353(1);6-8 (PDF-593KB). Mr. Marks is a barrister at Matrix Chambers, London, and Greenwall Fellow in Bioethics at Georgetown University Law Center and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  In lieu of an abstract, they posted the following:

Notice: Because of current public interest in this topic, this Perspective and its accompanying audio interview were published early at www.nejm.org on June 22, 2005. The article will appear in the July 7 issue of the Journal.

As supplementary material, the audio file of an interview with Mr. Marks is here, a 3.3MB MP3.

Early-publication articles at NEJM are almost always worth reading.  In this post, I review the contents of the article briefly, then discuss a recent report by Physicians for Human Rights, then some commentary from the Blogosphere.  I conclude with some thoughts about the ethical issues raised by the NEJM article and the PHR report.  Continue reading here.