If doctors were on standby because there was a “fear” that the activities might hurt or kill a detainee, what were the detainees feeling?

And only because these particular detainees were deemed arbitrarily as outside the scope of the Geneva Convention or UNCAT did the administration not care.

Thanks to both you and drational for making the house call for free. It really helps to have your contributions.

LIke your answers, drational.
I would add that obesity is an independent risk factor for developing deep vein thromboses (DVTs).
Take an obese person, add inactivity (usually lying on a couch, but I guess hanging quietly from a meathook would qualify) increases the risk of forming blood clots in the legs — leading to a life threatening pulmonary embolism if the blood clots travel from the leg to the heart and lungs.

This combined techniques discussion reminds me of an earlier discussion about waterboarding and the way that respiratory drive is increased by rising CO2 levels in the blood stream (and that respiratory drive is not normally affected by falling oxygen levels). Several exceptions to the primacy of CO2 producing the respiratory drive is found in people with sleep deprivation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema), or with sleep apnea. With Hassan Ghul’s reported obesity, he might qualify for all these categories, more so if he is a chronic cigarette smoker.

Why this is important when talking about combined techniques:
in someone like Ghul, his respiratory drive is controlled primarily by oxygen concentration, and not by CO2 concentration. Reviving someone like him with oxygen after a waterboarding session would satiate his respiratory drive but not correct the pH imbalance introduced by the increased CO2 levels in the blood stream during waterboarding. Without correcting the CO2 concentration, cell function could go haywire (enzyme reactions required for normal cell function are affected or stopped by large changes in cellular pH). The person would stop breathing and the intubation kit (or trach kit) would be needed to resuscitate. The rescue oxygen, ironically, would remove his respiratory drive to breathe, and he would die of respiratory failure.

Somewhat related: I was struck by the OLC techniques memo (or maybe it was a later Bradbury memo?) that went out of its way to mention the trach kit would remain out of view of the torturee (my word choice, not Bradbury’s). I keep wondering why this was so important to codify?

Is seeing the trach kit a give-away that the US was looking out for the safety of the torturee and therefore a psychological boost to the presumed terrorist?,
or more likely something too scary for a torturee to see –in which case any accidental viewing of the scalpels and tubes would be just an ahem “accident” and not torture…no siree, not torture.

If I may inject a late rant here. We can conclude from this that fearing for one’s life is not a medical problem. Now fear is a psychological behavior, and the professional standing by should be psychologist. From what we know, that was so on some occasions. Yet unlike psychological disorders such a paranoia, PTSD, even some conditioned fears, these are considered “problematic” only to the extent that they are unreasonable responses, given a normal enviornmental context. When extreme fear is evoked by understandable circumstances (as for example a fear of spiders is evoked by having spiders thrown in one’s face), that is not the manifestation of a psychological disorder, and therefore not a pathological condition. So even standing by is irrelevant. What is going on however is the psychopathic exploitation of the suffering of a human being at the hands of another. Who shoud be “standing by” is law enforcement, and we have some reason to believe that legal authorities were doing just that-standing by.

Apparently they did not have a tame, competent, amoral physician or physiologist, and the “psychologists” (or whatever we call them) just did not cut it.

What a horror show.