The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of (...) healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners. (shrink)

Although knowledge of torture and physical and psychological abuse was widespread at both the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and known to medical personnel, there was no official report before the January 2004 Army investigation of military health personnel reporting abuse, degradation, or signs of torture. Mounting information from many sources, including Pentagon documents, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc., indicate that medical personnel failed to maintain medical records, (...) conduct routine medical examinations, provide proper care of disabled and injured detainees, accurately report illnesses and injuries, and falsified medical records and death certificates. Medical personnel and medical information was also used to design and implement psychologically and physically coercive interrogations. The United States military medical system failed to protect detainee's human rights, violated the basic principles of medical ethics and ignored the basic tenets of medical professionalism. (shrink)