Lawyers for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have filed an ethics complaint with the medical licensing board of California asking that the commander of the Guantánamo detainee hospital be disciplined on the ground of providing improper care.
[. . .]
It maintains that Captain Edmondson has supervised a system in which doctors sometimes withhold medicine from prisoners if they are deemed not cooperative enough with their interrogators. The complaint does not assert that Captain Edmondson has been a direct participant in that effort, but says he is responsible for its occurrence.
Amidst the Focus on the Fool coverage and the "I've always been honorable and doing it for the team so I'm stepping down . . . because I'm being investigated" it's hard not to notice the issue of "balance" in the Times today. It appears to be right wing, right wing, right wing, oh here's a Democrat. It's a funny kind of duck-duck-goose reporting. Anybody else noticing that or is it just me? Maybe I'm seeing things?
Instead of noting that, we note the above. A tiny article, truly it's five paragraphs, by Neil A. Lewis entitled "Head of Hospital at Guantanamo Faces Complaint." It's a small article, but it's an important one. It's one about accountability. And it's no shock to anyone who's aware of Jane Mayer's recent article ("The Experiment") in The New Yorker. (Again, click here for a summary of Mayer's article as well as links to Mayer's interviews discussing the article -- two on Democracy Now! and one in The New Yorker.)
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