First, do no harm: health professionals and Guantánamo.

I would like to thank the organizers of this event for this important teach-in and convening this panel to address the ways in which health professionals have become embroiled in human rights violations against detainees in U.S. custody. Just as the embrace by the Bush Administration of torture as an interrogation strategy led to a corrosion of law, so did it undermine the ethics of the health professions and the integrity of the tradition, within the military, of medical independence and commitment to the health of soldiers and detainees. What is surprising is not that physicians, psychologists, and other health workers can become enmeshed in the machinery of torture, from design to execution to monitoring⎯there is a long history of such engagement. Rather, what is startling is the ease with which this role was officially developed and new rules and ethical standards that were adopted to facilitate it. The shift began in 2002, following the Bush Administration’s reinterpretation of laws designed to prevent and criminalize the prac-