The Shadow Doctors: The underground race to spread medical knowledge as the Syrian regime erases it

Ben Taub, The Shadow Doctors: The underground race to spread medical knowledge as the Syrian regime erases it. The New Yorker, 27 June 2016. “In the past five years [2011-2016], the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.””

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The Experiment: The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?

Jane Mayer, The Experiment: The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo? The New Yorker, 11 July 2005. “From the beginning…the Guantánamo Bay prison camp was conceived by the Bush Administration as a place that could operate outside the system of national and international laws that normally govern the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Soon after September 11th, the Administration argued that the Guantánamo site, which America had been leasing from the Cuban government since 1903, was not bound by the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, the Administration claimed that terrorist suspects detained at the site were not ordinary criminals or prisoners of war; rather, they would be classified under a new rubric, “unlawful combatants.” This new class of suspects would be tried not in U.S. courts but in military tribunals, the Administration announced. ”

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