Summary Of Steven H. Miles's 'Oath Betrayed'

According to the author of “Oath Betrayed,” Steven H. Miles, a total of 130 different countries are employing their health professionals to carry out torture in interrogation practices. Clearly, this directly conflicts with the normative perspective of doctors in the presence of war, whom are the expected individuals to idolize human rights and follow an ethical and professional path of helping all human beings, enemy or not. We all know that doctors are the foundation to the very health and well-being of society in accordance with their ethics. However, this is not an ubiquitous notion that applies broadly over all contexts; we evidently see that doctors actively participate in the torturing of prisoners of war. Without the presence of a moralistic figure, the only shred of reason and sense of humanity are lost in times of war. Evidently, it can be seen that a doctor’s unchecked responsibilities and powers can lead to a deadly power to be exploited for the wrong reasons. Given the fact that doctors are essentially both a physically and morally necessity,
For example, the harsh interrogation techniques of utilized on the terrorists after 9/11 during the Bush administration did not thwart any specific imminent attacks. The captive, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself said: “the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.” And thus, according to 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate, this ineffective method of acquiring information has not led to the prevention of any major terrorist operation in the past information. All in all, it is inevitably clear that the absence of moralistic doctors, along with the fact that torturing is not effective in the first place, leads to a counterproductive and subhuman nature of several