By Karen Lee Ziner
Journal Staff Writer
Providence Journal (Providence, Rhode Island, USA)
PROVIDENCE — Cambodian refugees were streaming into Thailand in 1980 when Scott Allen — then 17 — ran away from home and signed up for relief work in the border camps. There he learned about the reverberating effects of torture that would steer his adulthood as a physician.
A childhood burn victim, Allen was already sensitive to human suffering. His sensitivity deepened during the several years he spent interviewing thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge, a regime responsible for the torture, murder and starvation of several million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
“Those stories never lost their poignancy and individuality and humanity,” said Allen, a clinical assistant professor at Brown University and an advisory member of Physicians for Human Rights.
Allen’s vested interest led him to co-author a report, issued last week by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First, which challenges the CIA’s so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Both groups have been leaders in the fight against torture.
Stepping into a contentious debate, the report concludes that all U.S. personnel who engage in those techniques “are at serious risk of violating U.S. law,” and therefore at risk for criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.
Allen is the lead medical author of the report, “Leave No Marks, ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality.” Medical and legal experts spent six months researching and preparing the report, which Allen describes as the legal base for their argument.
It focuses on 10 techniques believed to have been used in CIA interrogations, including water-boarding (simulated drowning), exposure to extreme heat and cold, sexual humiliation, beatings, prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory bombardment, among others.
“What we found was that it’s pretty clear these techniques the administration has argued are not harmful, in fact, are quite harmful,” Allen said, and cause long-term effects such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychosis, substance abuse and suicide.
“We’re expecting hearings on the subject,” Allen said. “We’re aiming for an explicit ban [by Congress] of those techniques.”
The groups released their report just two weeks after the White House said it had given the CIA permission to resume some severe interrogation methods for questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas.
According to the New York Times, CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden said the White House executive order would allow the agency to “focus on our vital work, confident that our mission and authorities are now clearly defined.”
Details remain classified, but press accounts that have cited anonymous administration officials suggest that at least one or several of those techniques, including water-boarding, may no longer be used. The executive order signed by President Bush does not explicitly rule out the use of the “enhanced” techniques authorized by the CIA in March 2002.
Allen, 45, is a former medical program director for Rhode Island’s Department of Corrections. He resigned in 2004 after disagreeing with the department’s response to an abuse incident that Allen said he believed “was not strong enough.”
He currently serves as an attending physician on an inpatient psychiatric ward at the Eleanor Slater Hospital. He is also co-founder, along with Dr. Josiah D. Rich, of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Miriam Hospital, which operates out of Brown University. Allen said the center “formalizes the large network of collaborators who do prison health work at Brown.”
Two formative events — a gas can explosion when he was 10 that left him with severe burns — and his experience at the Thai refugee camps, led him to take part in a campaign against torture, Allen said.
“About a third of my body was burned, arms legs and back and neck,” he said. At the Shriners Burn Institute, in Boston, where he was treated, “I was one of the healthier kids there. That was a very transformative experience. My experience was traumatic, and then I saw all these people who were so much worse.”
At age 17, “already keenly aware of human suffering in a way that most young kids aren’t,” said Allen, he found himself tugged by news reports that brought to light a four-year holocaust in Cambodia.
“Something inside of me said, ‘I can’t not do something,’ ” Allen said.
When he arrived in the border camps, people were still emerging from the jungles through which they fled, and began to tell their stories of the killing fields.
“And that was the next transformative experience,” said Allen. “It washed over me, and became the second thing in my life I could not ignore.”
His involvement with the Cambodian community for the past 27 years started there, at the Thai border camps. In particular, it started with the first family he met. Some of the daughters, who are Allen’s age, now live in the large Cambodian community in Lowell, Mass.
“We have remained close for all that period, which has taught me a lot about the impact of torture and trauma, including a couple of key concepts. One is how long the reverberations occur: they are essentially life-long. There are long periods of quiet that give people the sense that everything is all better, but then there are these reverberations that still happen.” Those reverberations “affect subsequent generations.”
Said Allen, “It’s been a very personal journey for me.”
To read the report issued by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First, visit the Web site www.physiciansforhumanrights.org.
Material from The New York Times was included in this report.
kziner@projo.com
A childhood burn victim, Allen was already sensitive to human suffering. His sensitivity deepened during the several years he spent interviewing thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge, a regime responsible for the torture, murder and starvation of several million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
“Those stories never lost their poignancy and individuality and humanity,” said Allen, a clinical assistant professor at Brown University and an advisory member of Physicians for Human Rights.
Allen’s vested interest led him to co-author a report, issued last week by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First, which challenges the CIA’s so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Both groups have been leaders in the fight against torture.
Stepping into a contentious debate, the report concludes that all U.S. personnel who engage in those techniques “are at serious risk of violating U.S. law,” and therefore at risk for criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.
Allen is the lead medical author of the report, “Leave No Marks, ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality.” Medical and legal experts spent six months researching and preparing the report, which Allen describes as the legal base for their argument.
It focuses on 10 techniques believed to have been used in CIA interrogations, including water-boarding (simulated drowning), exposure to extreme heat and cold, sexual humiliation, beatings, prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory bombardment, among others.
“What we found was that it’s pretty clear these techniques the administration has argued are not harmful, in fact, are quite harmful,” Allen said, and cause long-term effects such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), psychosis, substance abuse and suicide.
“We’re expecting hearings on the subject,” Allen said. “We’re aiming for an explicit ban [by Congress] of those techniques.”
The groups released their report just two weeks after the White House said it had given the CIA permission to resume some severe interrogation methods for questioning terrorism suspects in secret prisons overseas.
According to the New York Times, CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden said the White House executive order would allow the agency to “focus on our vital work, confident that our mission and authorities are now clearly defined.”
Details remain classified, but press accounts that have cited anonymous administration officials suggest that at least one or several of those techniques, including water-boarding, may no longer be used. The executive order signed by President Bush does not explicitly rule out the use of the “enhanced” techniques authorized by the CIA in March 2002.
Allen, 45, is a former medical program director for Rhode Island’s Department of Corrections. He resigned in 2004 after disagreeing with the department’s response to an abuse incident that Allen said he believed “was not strong enough.”
He currently serves as an attending physician on an inpatient psychiatric ward at the Eleanor Slater Hospital. He is also co-founder, along with Dr. Josiah D. Rich, of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Miriam Hospital, which operates out of Brown University. Allen said the center “formalizes the large network of collaborators who do prison health work at Brown.”
Two formative events — a gas can explosion when he was 10 that left him with severe burns — and his experience at the Thai refugee camps, led him to take part in a campaign against torture, Allen said.
“About a third of my body was burned, arms legs and back and neck,” he said. At the Shriners Burn Institute, in Boston, where he was treated, “I was one of the healthier kids there. That was a very transformative experience. My experience was traumatic, and then I saw all these people who were so much worse.”
At age 17, “already keenly aware of human suffering in a way that most young kids aren’t,” said Allen, he found himself tugged by news reports that brought to light a four-year holocaust in Cambodia.
“Something inside of me said, ‘I can’t not do something,’ ” Allen said.
When he arrived in the border camps, people were still emerging from the jungles through which they fled, and began to tell their stories of the killing fields.
“And that was the next transformative experience,” said Allen. “It washed over me, and became the second thing in my life I could not ignore.”
His involvement with the Cambodian community for the past 27 years started there, at the Thai border camps. In particular, it started with the first family he met. Some of the daughters, who are Allen’s age, now live in the large Cambodian community in Lowell, Mass.
“We have remained close for all that period, which has taught me a lot about the impact of torture and trauma, including a couple of key concepts. One is how long the reverberations occur: they are essentially life-long. There are long periods of quiet that give people the sense that everything is all better, but then there are these reverberations that still happen.” Those reverberations “affect subsequent generations.”
Said Allen, “It’s been a very personal journey for me.”
To read the report issued by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First, visit the Web site www.physiciansforhumanrights.org.
Material from The New York Times was included in this report.
kziner@projo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment