CIA Interrogation Experimentation

Physicians for Human Rights released a report in 2010 accusing the Bush administration of conducting experiments on prisoners.  The report titled "Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the 'Enhanced Interrogation' Program" claims that prisoners of the CIA were exposed to "unethical and unlawful" experiments in which data was taken regarding interrogation techniques primarily waterboarding.  The CIA according to the report used saline instead of water while preforming interrogations in which they collected data and evaluated the differences between applying these techniques individually and in combination.   The purpose, the CIA claimed, of these data collections was to make the interrogation process both safer and more effective. However Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights and lead author of the report states that, "What the evidence shows is science being applied to law as part of a attempt to insulate the Bush administration from charges of torture".  To what degree is this case unethical because of torture and to what degree is it unethical because of the use of data collection?  There seems to be an implication in this report that the actual gathering of information is the problem with this case.  Though there is certainly some grounds for debate on the subject of what methods of interrogation are ethical, it seems that the government's decision to gather data on its interrogations is not unethical and is a good decision.  The actual interrogation may be questionable, but the data collection is not.  The more data we gather the more we can keep our country safe by finding what interrogation techniques work.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/8/experiments_in_torture_medical_group_accuses