Educational Media Reviews Online

In July of 2003 Amnesty International issued a press release condemning human rights abuses by the U.S. military and its allies at detention centers throughout Iraq. One of these centers was the Abu Ghraib prison which had been recently liberated by the U.S. from Saddam Hussein’s regime of torture and executions. The discovery of abuses with photographs that were published for the public became known as "the Abu Ghraib Scandal". Martha Davis, through this film, Doctors of the Dark Side raises questions about where the doctors were while this was going on and why have they not been held accountable for their role? Davis spent four years investigating this issue before producing her documentary.

Through interviews with legal, medical and intelligence experts, evidence from declassified government memos and staged demonstrations of the doctor’s participation in Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT), Davis reports on the role of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists in this process. She sites international agreements governing the safety of prisoners with readings from the CIA Office of Medical Services Guidelines that includes the requirement that a doctor and psychiatric personnel be present for interrogation. They are described in the film as calibrators of harm who provide a safety net for those who torture prisoners by assessing when the torture can continue without the loss of life. This involvement is called into question given the expectation that these professionals will uphold a number of professional ethical standards. She then illustrates, through five case studies, the atrocities inflicted on foreign and citizen prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Detention Centers and the role played by medical and psychological helpers.

Though the film is over an hour long it is divided into seven chapters that are linked from a table of contents. They begin with a history of torture and international law and introduce the use of a psychiatrist as an interrogator for the Navy while posing as a helper to a patient. Chapter two recounts how two CIA psychologists helped to develop Advanced Interrogation Techniques that were used in Afghan and Iraq the details of which became public when the records of those interrogations were declassified. Another chapter details the death of a prisoner during interrogation including the role of medical personnel who were complicit in the cover up and falsifying of death certificates. The fourth chapter tells how doctors have served as part of the intelligence command, withholding medication to obtain information or failing to provide humane treatment to force compliance; and a fifth addresses the reportedly insubstantial measures taken by the government to address the issue. Finally, chapter seven talks about the professional organizational stance on their memberships’ participation in AIT.

This film will be a good addition to a public library collection or an academic library that supports programs or courses in criminal justice, medical ethics, human rights, law, military studies, political science, or ethics in the field of psychology. The associated website includes a study guide, a discussion of the Georgetown University Law panel, and an extensive list of links to websites about doctors and torture.