Doctors “calibrated” pain for CIA interrogations

[Jan Klimkowski]

Medical students are trained to develop a clinical distance from their patients. This clinical distance, or lack of emotional attachment, is regarded as essential to enable them to treat their patients with professional objectivity.

This is worth comparing with the following:

Psychopathy (pronounced /saɪˈkɒpəθi/[1][2]) is a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal. Neither psychopathy, nor the similar concept of sociopathy, are nowadays defined in international diagnostic manuals, which instead describe a category of antisocial/dissocial personality disorder.

This is not to say that student doctors are necessarily trained to develop the psychological lack of empathy of psychopaths.

However, it is presumably this clinical distance which, in part, enables spook doctors to behave entire dispasionately towards individuals being tortured, and to see their role as being merely to measure vital signs, degrees of pain, etc.

Either that. Or these "doctors" were born without a functioning moral conscience......