Lt. General "Coverup" Kiley: From abused detainees to neglected soldiers

[babylonsister]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/lt-general-coverup-kil_b_42596.html

03.04.2007
Lt. General "Coverup" Kiley: From abused detainees to neglected soldiers (2 comments )

The Army Sugeon General, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, may be the next person fired or forced to resign in the wake of the Walter Reed outpatient care scandal that has already cost the jobs of the Secretary of the Army, Francis Harvey, and Walter Reed's commander, Maj. Gen. George Weightman. It was Harvey's appointment of Kiley, who essentially brushed off for years concerns about the squalor and degrading care facing Walter Reed's outpatients, to replace the fired Weightman that help trigger Harvey's forced resignation on Friday.

The only question on Kiley's future is this: will he be fired before the week's out, after he testifies before Congress, or will he keep his job until assorted independent reviews and panels finish their work investigating outpatient care and issue their scathing criqiques?

But the Walter Reed scandal isn't the first time that Kiley has covered up abuses. He was a point person for the Army's coverup of the torture and degrading treatment of detainees by health professionals, including psychologists, at Guatanamo and other unaccountable military detention sites. He commissioned whitewashed "studies" of the problem that concluded that there wasn't any abuse abetted by health professionals -- even though his investigators never talked to any detainees or their attorneys. The problems were so widespread that the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychiatric Association banned its members from being involved in interrogations, but the American Psychological Association allowed its members to continue to aid military interrogators. (The American Prospect and Salon , among others, helped publicize these issues in the last two years. ) Even so, Kiley appeared last year at the psychologists' conference to plead for their continued involvement, while blithely downplaying the impact of coercive interrogation strategies. As I reported recently in The Washington Monthly, opening my article on the psychologists' role in torture with a presentation by Kiley:

At around six-foot-eight and clad in combat fatigues, Kevin Kiley, the army surgeon general, cut an imposing figure. It was August 2006, and Kiley was in New Orleans to address the governing council of the American Psychological Association (APA) on the subject of psychology in the war on terror. For over a year, the organization had been under fire from human-rights groups and many of its own members, because psychologists had been tied to coercive interrogations and abuse at Guantanamo Bay and other places. Now, many APA members wanted the organization to draw up a firm policy--one that mandated adherence to international standards barring abuse--to prevent psychologists from participating in such practices again.

It was Kiley's job to convince them not to bail out on interrogations. It's an open question how much psychologists have contributed to the art of interrogation in the war on terror, but the APA provides a seal of legitimacy that the government values. If it joined the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association by barring their members from joining the Guantanamo interrogations, it would further stigmatize the military's practices. So, armed with PowerPoint slides, Kiley argued for keeping psychologists on the offensive against "sworn enemies" of the country. "Psychology is an important weapons system," he explained. For the APA to draw up an explicit definition of abuse would be counterproductive. After all, "is four hours of sleep deprivation? How loud does a scream have to be? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

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[Morgana LaFey]

1. Six foot eight degenerate, socipathic coward

interesting

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. wasn't he an OB-GYN? and no offense to women warriors, but

the majority of of soldiers rarely have to deal with ectopic pregnancies or D&Cs.

[babylonsister]

3. Yes, you're right, though I don't think the specialty matters so much:

http://www.armymedicine.army.mil/leaders/kiley.html

Kiley is a graduate of the University of Scranton, with a bachelor's degree in biology. He received his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington D.C. He served a surgical internship and then an obstetrics and gynecology residency at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, El Paso, Texas.