WASHINGTON, June 24 (UPI) -- Military doctors have been advising Guantanamo Bay interrogators on increasing stress levels and exploiting fears of detainees, it was reported Friday.
The New York Times said details of the aid in conducting and refining coercive inquiries came in a series of accounts from former interrogators. The revelations came as the Pentagon and mental health officials examine possible professional ethics violations by psychiatrists and psychologists at the prison camp.
The former interrogators said the military doctors' role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees in hopes of making them more cooperative and willing to provide information.
In addition, the authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said they found the program to be explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees.
Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, suggested that the doctors were not covered by ethics strictures because they were not treating patients but acting as behavioral scientists.
