Disclaimer: This Blog is not Dr. Steven Miles's official site.

Disclaimer: This Blog is NOT Dr. Steven Miles's official site NOR associated with him.
As I consider important to divulge the subject and this work, I have created this independent Blog about his books and some of his activities. As you contact this site, you will be contacting the creator of this Blog, not Dr. Steven Miles.
In case you want to contact him, Dr. Steven Miles official page is at:
http://www.ahc.umn.edu/bioethics/facstaff/miles_s/home.html


Monday, November 24, 2008




Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

by Steven Miles

“If law be the bedrock of civil society, it can no more undergird torture than it could support slavery or genocide.” –from the Introduction

After Dr. Steven H. Miles, an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights, learned of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, first question was:

“Where were the prison doctors while the abuses were taking place?”

In Oath Betrayed, Dr. Miles answers this question. In the book, Dr. Miles gives a detailed picture of the medical system after 9/11, when the U.S. military began using physicians, psychologists and other medical personnel to assist in the interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.

The book is based on meticulous research, including eyewitness accounts from victims of prison abuse, and more than thirty-five thousand records obtained after the ACLU put a FOIA suit, a Freedom of Information Act suit.Those records include Army criminal investigations, FBI notes, autopsy reports, and prisoners’ medical records.

About the Author

Steven Miles, MD is Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis and is on the faculty of the University’s Center for Bioethics.

He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and teaches and practices at the University of Minnesota.

He has served as President of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and received its Distinguished Service Award. His other awards include the National Council of Teachers of English’ George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language and membership in the National Honor Society for Public Affairs and Administration.

He has published three books and more than twenty chapters and 120 peer-reviewed articles on medical ethics, human rights, tropical medicine, end of life care and geriatric health care. His latest book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, Random House, 2006 examines military medicine in the war on terror prisons. The Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, Oxford University Press, reviews the meaning of the Hippocratic Oath as illuminated by the medical texts of its time.

He has taught in many countries and has served as medical director for the American Refugee Committee for twenty-five years which has included service as chief medical officer for 45,000 refugees on the Thai Cambodian border and projects in Sudan, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Indonesia and the Thai-Burmese border.

His work has changed end of life care, nursing home care, and medical care in prisons and refugee camps.