From Nuremberg to Guantanamo Bay: Uses of Physicians in the War on Terror.

Seventy years after the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, health professionals and lawyers working together after 9/11 played a critical role in designing, justifying, and carrying out the US state-sponsored torture program in the CIA "Black Sites" and US military detention centers, including Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We analyze the similarities between the Nazi doctors and health professionals in the War on Terror and address the question of how it happened that health professionals, including doctors, psychologists, physician assistants, and nurses, acted as agents of the state to utilize their medical and healing skills to cause harm and sanitize barbarous acts, similar to (though not on the scale of) how Nazi doctors were used by the Third Reich.

Subject, sexuality and biopower: legal defence of soldiers living with HIV and sexual rights in Mexico.

The appeals that 11 service men filed against the Mexican Army in 2007 for unfair dismissal, on the grounds that they were living with HIV, opened an unprecedented chapter in the relationship between sexuality and the judicial system in Mexico, and in the links between biopower and the processes of democratisation and citizenship in the country. In this article, we analyse this process by looking at claimants' discourses as well as those of the Supreme Court judges. We follow three analytic axes: the relationship between biopower and human rights; the paradoxical place of sexuality in this legal process as an element that is both present and absent in legal debates; and the spectre of homosexuality as the implicit undercurrent of this tense discursive event.

La problemática de la apendicectomía profiláctica en las Fuerzas Armadas / The problem of the prophylactic appendicectomy in the Armed Forces

Las Fuerzas Armadas establecen como requisito, para el personal militar que es destinado a prestar servicios en las bases antárticas, que debe realizarse en forma voluntaria la apendicectomía "profiláctica". Esta práctica, que significa aceptar someterse a la extirpación de un órgano sano para acceder a un destino militar, tiene como único propósito evitar una futura y eventual apendicitis aguda. Este acto médico adquiere características filosóficas, científicas, éticas y legales con muy pocos antecedentes en la práctica moderna, por lo que se justifica su análisis, que es realizado en el trabajo. No se ha encontrado en la bibliografía consultada, trabajo alguno que justifique la realización de una intervención quirúrgica en una persona sana, para extirpar un órgano sano del tubo digestivo, con el fin de evitar un eventual riesgo futuro. No existen evidencias científicas que avalen la realización del procedimiento. Desde la perspectica de la bioética, la ejecución del procedimiento viola los principios de no maleficencia, de beneficencia y de autonomía, por lo cual no puede ser éticamente aceptado. Tanto la prescripción como la aplicación del procedimiento no se ajustan a lo que establece la Ley del Ejercicio de la Medicina 17.132/67 vigente. (AU)