U.S. military doctors involved in Abu Ghaib abuse, human rights cover-up

The report also criticized U.S. senior commanders that allowed the abuses to occur. The Lancet calls for all who were involved in or saw the ill treatment to reveal what really happened at the prisons.

• In this undated photo, a hooded Iraqi detainee appears to be cuffed at both wrists and collapsed over a rail inside the Abu Ghraib Prison.
• military doctors and medics at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were "complicit" in the torture of Iraqi detainees and faked death certificates to try and cover up homicides, says a report in a top British medical journal.
• The scathing analysis in The Lancet puts the spotlight on the role of medical professionals in a torture scandal that has so far focused on the abuse committed by U.S. soldiers.
• The report, written by University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles, says U.S. military doctors, nurses and medics at Abu Ghraib grossly violated medical ethics and international treaties on human rights.
• "There was a fundamental breakdown of the military medical system for these prisoners," Miles, a doctor in the university's bioethics centre, said in an interview yesterday.
• "Medical staff revived the detainee and left, and the abuse continued," the report says, citing the sworn statement of an Abu Ghraib detainee.
• In another instance, "a medic inserted a intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital," the report says, citing evidence from a military police officer.
• Military officials in Washington also said a high-level army inquiry will cite medical personnel who knew of abuse at Abu Ghraib but did not report it up the chain of command.
• He says "death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified" and medical investigators "routinely" attributed deaths to natural causes when proof of abuse was glaring.