Hot on the heels of the comments on the Senate floor by Senator Dick Durbin of Ohio recounting the report of an FBI agent detailing an incident of torture at Gitmo we now have this report:

Military doctors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators.

The accounts, in interviews with The New York Times, come as mental health professionals are debating whether psychiatrists and psychologists at the prison camp have violated professional ethics codes. The Pentagon and mental health professionals have been examining the ethical issues involved.

The former interrogators said the military doctors’ role was to advise them and their fellow interrogators on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes by exploiting their fears, in the hopes of making them more cooperative and willing to provide information. In one example, interrogators were told that a detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.

In addition, the authors of an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine this week said their interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo showed that the program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means to obtaining intelligence.

The accounts shed light on how interrogations were conducted and raise new questions about the boundaries of medical ethics in the nation’s fight against terrorism.

Durbin was loudly excoriated by Republicans and their ideological supporters in the media for his remarks when he compared such behavior to the behavior of Nazis in Germany and repressive regimes throughout history. He was right, as it turns out, but still caved in to the heckling and threats and partially recanted his remarks, accompanied by loud bronx cheers from the peanut-brained gallery to his right.

But now, as it happens, we have this new evidence of complicity by psychiatrists and psychologists with the torturers, helping to design specific techniques for each prisoner. Such techniques allowed torturers to create ever more powerful psychological and even physical torture to break down the prisoners. And let us not forget that there is often little evidence that any of these people even possess useful knowledge, especially after being held for two years, or that anything they say is of any use at all. One of the lovely side effects of torture, especially “effective” torture, is that people will say whatever they think the torturers want them to say just to get it to stop and there is no real way to know if any of it is true.

So now we have doctors aiding in torture at prison camps containing inmates who aren’t considered POWs, aren’t afforded the slightest legal assistance, and who are outside the jurisdiction of any court in the world. Sound familiar?

The Nazis routinely used doctors in their camps, to assist in torture and to experiment on prisoners. Now, I can hear the O’Reillyites screaming already “We aren’t Nazis!” they shout in unison. Lovely slogan. Something to be proud of for certain.

Where is the line here? At what point do we finally say it’s unacceptable? At what point will the insult directed by future generations at repressive regimes and dictators be “you’re Americans!”? We’re heading down a road here that no civilized society wants to travel, and we’re being led down that road, all too willingly, but the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.