Governments that torture protect their torture doctors. Their medical communities help them do so. And that is exactly why torture doctors, including those who work for the United States, must be punished.

Torturing regimes need torture doctors. They routinely hire torture doctors to invent, monitor and conduct techniques like waterboarding and rectal feeding that crush the soul without leaving a tell-tale scar for a human-rights advocates to point to as evidence. Torture doctors watch the torture to keep alive those who are not supposed to die. They falsely certify “no signs of injuries” on medical records and “natural causes” on death certificates to protect their collaborators in torture from punishment – to protect the governments that pay them well and protect them from punishment.

President George W Bush’s regime tortured, and as the Senate’s report on the CIA makes clear, doctors and psychologists were hired to help every step of the way.

Torture doctors are not sadists like some character in a Saw movie sequel. Most are careerists who are aware that they are breaking the rules. Doctors should know the science behind their work; doctors who torture should know that torture – even under the euphemism “enhanced interrogation” – does not work. Any of the US doctors or psychologists quoted in or redacted from the torture report could have lived up to the ethical duties; they were not working under the threat of death or disappearance. As careerists, they lacked a larger vision of the consequences of their actions. The medical association codes condemning medical torture must be backed up by accountability – or else they are merely words on tissue.

The United States, its courts, its medical licensing boards and its medical associations must punish doctors who torture. People of vision in the mainstream medical community see through the lies to hold colleagues to account – like Physicians for Human Rights, which on Tuesday called out potential war crimes, or Psychologists for Social Responsibility, who have called out the two peers, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who made $81m to help design the CIA torture program.

Convicting, censuring, delicensing or suspending the torture doctors is not impossible. In fact, the United States is lagging behind the rest of the world in doing so.

I track torture doctors across the globe. I track the repeated revulsion and all-too-occasional but still increasing punishment, over the decades and even into this one, of those doctors who violate the oath to “do no harm”. In 1947, Nazi doctors were convicted, imprisoned and even executed for horrendous abuses and genocide. The Cold War allowed torture doctors to practice with impunity east and west, north and south. In 1975 in Greece, the home of Hippocrates and his oath, a torture doctor was finally called to account. Prisoners called Dr Dimitrios Kofas the “orange juice doctor” because he prescribed orange juice to prisoners, even when kicks to the kidneys had turned urine bloody orange. He was court-martialed and imprisoned ... and now he is rumored to have resumed practice. After two doctors watched anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko die of torture in 1977, South Africa dragged its feet for eight years before finally giving two doctors slaps on the wrist.

The United States cannot drag its feet after allowing doctors to write off the death of Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who was beaten during American detention in Iraq until six ribs were broken. He was stuffed head-first into a sleeping bag that was wrapped in wire. A CIA case officer sat on him until he died. The doctor said Mowhoush collapsed during interrogation.

How can the US medical community fall asleep on basic injustice when medical boards and courts around the world have chosen to jail or revoke the licenses of their torture doctors decades ago?

The world has passed the United States by: The movement started in South America, where CIA-backed juntas brutally ruled. When freedom came during the 1980s, 12 torture doctors in Brazil, Chile and South Africa were punished. During the 1990s, 20 more doctors – from Brazil and then Serbia, Uruguay and Rwanda – were sent to jail or had their licenses revoke. During the first decade of this century, 34 doctors from Serbia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and Rwanda were punished. Since 2010, 16 more doctors – from Italy, the United Kingdom, Guyana, Argentina and Rwanda – were jailed, or else had their licenses suspended or revoked.

Meanwhile, the United States, home of the Geneva conventions and a lighthouse of human rights, allows its torture doctors and psychologists to continue to be free, to practice, or even to spout off on TV news.

Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) “There were medical personnel there,” says man who interrogated KSM. #TortureReport #CIA #KellyFile pic.twitter.com/AMsVqSvOBo

When courts and medical boards in some countries move too slowly, civil society strikes back. Town councils have declared some physicians persona non grata. Hospitals and clinics have revoked privileges. Medical societies have revoked honors. Other groups name and shame torture doctors by naming their victims and posting of them pictures on websites and plastering indictments on the doctors’ homes and offices.

But in the United States, so-called “War on Terror” cases have brought a couple clinicians before state licensing boards that have mumbled about military orders. The American Medical Association touts its codes of conduct and makes sure to “remind physicians of their ethical obligations” – but calls for no punishment and no independent medical truth commission. The bravest it got was to ask the Defense Department to investigate itself.

For torture doctors, waterboarding is a payday with a pension – and zero accountability.

Not so long ago, the United States medical community could stand with and protect brave doctors who were resisting torture around the world. These days, to its shame, the community has sidelined itself in the struggle to protect the torture whistleblowers: In 2009, an Iranian doctor named Ramin Pourandarjani spoke out against torture in his country after government documents had clearly shown that US doctors were thoroughly part of the Bush-era system of medical torture. But he didn’t get the international support he deserved. Instead, Dr Pourandarjani was arrested – and died in custody. His family’s request for an autopsy was refused.

That is the price of the United States choosing to forsake human rights: a doctor dying in jail, for telling the truth about torture.