The Sacramento Bee reports that Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas has proposed a resolution that would notify California health professionals that they could lose their license and be prosecuted by the state if they are involved in the torture:
Yet some professionals do not agree that this is the best strategy in tackling the problem of health professionals involved in torture:"California has the obligation, I believe, to notify its licensees of laws pertaining to torture that may result in prosecution," Ridley-Thomas said.
The senator said physicians have reportedly advised interrogators whether prisoners were fit enough to survive "physical maltreatment, informed interrogators about prisoners' phobias and other psychological vulnerabilities that could be exploited."
Invoking the Hippocratic oath that physicians traditionally take, he said the state can "withdraw its consent to torture by demanding that its health professionals remember their oath to first do no harm."
Dr. Vito Imbascini, state surgeon of the California National Guard, said "a few Californians were among the practitioners in the healing arts involved in torture" at U.S. military facilities at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"But given the tiny number of renegade offenders, we think a more effective approach (than the resolution) would be to target those offenders," said Imbascini, who represented the 35,000-physician California Medical Association at the hearing.
Read the different views here.
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