Did the Bush Administration Experiment on Detainees?

A new report on Mother Jones raises this this disturbing question: were terrorism suspects not only tortured, but were they also used as human guinea pigs?

I know its can be easy to say "well these were terrorist and better they suffer than we."  But we also have to remember that is what Hitler said and where do you draw the line.  When you justify such cruelty towards one group where do you stop?

Our Constitution guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment because our forefathers knew of the cruelty which had been used in the past by governments.  Nations around the world have condemned War Crimes, entered into the Geneva Conventions - the US even helped prosecute many Germans for War Crimes - so our involvement is very troubling.

From the article:

In the course of trying to prove that its "enhanced" interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.

According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, "medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA" frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain thresholds of detainees. This information was then used to "enhance" future interrogations, PHR contends.

The PHR report doesn't produce a smoking gun—there's no memo saying "we're going to experiment on detainees." The organization acknowledges as much, noting that none of the actual medical monitoring data from interrogations has ever been made public. PHR says that only a "comprehensive federal investigation" can answer the questions raised by its report. But don't hold your breath for one. To date, the "enhanced interrogation" program itself has yet to be fully probed.