Physicians Report on Torture: A Questionable Case

Pajamas Media ^ | June 21, 2008 | Bob Owens

[Uncle Ralph]

Why didn't the press ask Physicians for Human Rights about how weak most of their evidence of torture by Americans turned out to be?

Despite claims uncritically repeated in some media outlets, medical examinations of 11 former detainees of U.S. military prison facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba advanced by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) do not provide open-and-shut examples of prisoner abuse. Instead PHR offers up one-sided accounts based largely upon allegations made by former detainees to an organization with a predefined political agenda and financed in part by Bush Administration opponent and convicted felon George Soros and his group, the Open Society Institute...

While prisoner abuse and torture have occurred during the War on Terror and have been well documented, the report by (PHR) was not a peer reviewed document and contained errors, obfuscations, and repeated charges unsupported by the evidence collected. Despite how it has been portrayed in the media, the PHR account is far from being an objective or conclusive document, as even the report’s authors are occasionally forced to admit:

It is possible that allegations of torture and ill-treatment made by the former detainees were affected by recall bias and/or intentional exaggeration or misrepresentation for personal and/or political gain. PHR could not independently investigate and corroborate all statements made by the former detainees...

[Uncle Ralph]

And yet The Washington Post on Thursday saw fit to promote this specious report in "Exams Back Up Reports of Detainee Abuse, Group Says" by staff writer Joby Warrick.

In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer famously predicted, "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."

JP, of course, did not reckon on a blogosphere rising to supplant "dead-tree" journalism in the latter's days of decay.

[xcamel]

Aren't these the same people (under a different moniker) that claimed that WE killed 100,000 innocent people in Iraq ????

I bet if you dig into it, you'll find that they are.....

[carcraft]

Yep, since the “war in Iraq” is going well, strides are being made, something needs to be done. The US’s treatment of scumbag terrorists is brought to the fore front. See Haditha Massacre! Yawn, nothing new here!

[llandres]

“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.”

It is, and it has. The “disinterested” part went out the liberal window decades ago.