William Winkenwerder Jr. was Assistant Secretary of Defense for health affairs from 2001 until his resignation on April 16, 2007.

their licenses are already wasted. they should not have licenses to practise medecine anywhere.

prisons and third world countries are some of the places we need our most ethical and compassionate professionals, imo.

In the event you do get back to this, I wanted to reiterate (copied below) my question/comment and add the following:

According to a confidential source whom I interviewed, and with whom I diswcussed testifying before Congress, a former interrogator who admitted torturing American female detainees, clitorectomies without anesthesia were carried out on orders of his superiors by medical personnel on a US naval aircraft carrier in international waters and the females were pharmaceutically treated to prevent them from disclosing their treatment or remembering exactly what happened to them.

my comment above follows:

As an attorney and activist journalist I interviewed a former interrogator who told me the following:

1. That rendition is kind of a red herring because he interrogated prisoners on air craft carriers beyond the bational boundaries. The victims may have been told they were rendered but in fact were way offshore under OMI supervision.

2. Genital mutilation was used against females as well as males.

3. American citizens were tortured and psychologically neutralized with chemicals to “forget” or else be so disoriented that they could not reliably descrive their experiences (in one case after clitorectomies with no anasthesia AND

4. that there are hundreds of former interrogators in hiding, veterans, who are afraid of their government and the ONI-CIA who will kill them rathert than let them disclose these crimes. Many went awol and into hiding.

Any evidence of any of this in your records?

and if not…

keep an eye out for them.

My source told me that only with anonymity and immunity would he testify (and that he would accept punishment except he expects to be killed if he were to testify without anonymity)

Thanks for doing what you do and to all your colleagues: this is a frightening and critical point in our history and your work is invaluable.

right after dana priest ? did her big story on ‘black sites’, the official who was in charge of passing out surveys to all medical personnel in all sites where detainees were interrogated was on the show . (he was head of a department, big cheese, cna’t remember)he was there to calm the waters and tried to do so by talkng about the surveys thta were required and mandatory for all medical personnel in __#_sites. the number he used was way higher than any number i had heard by that date. the survey was specific about whether any of them had been asked or forced to participate in torture AND whether they had witnessed any torture-outside the bounds kind..he said at that time there were NO REPORTS OF IT.

what was weird was that i don’t think he meant to say the number of sites he did. (113?) he immediately tried to move on and was more measured after that. he goofed. his name was weiner-something or weimeriner sounding. i heard it when he resigned a year or two ago but was in the car and couldn’t find a thing on it later. if i had the name i could find the show.

big questions are–where are those surveys and where is the report from those surveys?

and where/what are the 113? sites he mentioned where interrogations took place?dana’s site number was under 20 in europe not counting iraq.

the show was pre-holiday week, i tried to find it, but without his name have not been able to.has bothered me ever since. i wondered at the time why it wasn’t in the news.

What about the Pentagon OIG investigation into the drugging of detainees? Will that be coming out anytime soon? Is it even concluded? Will it be made public? Are you aware of any of their findings?

There… that’s just one more “little” question ;-)

All the best…

And thanks to the FDL for this service to us all!

Christy, thanks so much for hosting this forum and for all that you do.

Hope my ? wasn’t too tin-foily. Hard to tell these days.

Sorry for kibitizing (I’m in clinic between patients), but I wonder if AMSA would be a powerful ally in med schools. Once AMSA took up chasing drug reps out of med schools, that made an internal difference (even in huge ac med centers).

With exams/NBME coming up, it may be too late for this academic year; the third and fourth years hitting the floors right about now will likely be focused on clinical issues, not the political matrix. But – cause the torture docs will still be with in us in late August – the AMSA chapters at each American med school can be potent change agents.

(oops – 1:30 pt showed up…gotta go)