To the Editor:

Re “When Doctors First Do Harm” (Op-Ed, Nov. 23):

M. Gregg Bloche quotes memos from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Medical Services that made clear what was expected of its doctors at clandestine interrogation sites: to flout medical ethics by deceiving and brutalizing detainees and generally collaborating in abuse that included designing a waterboarding method more extreme than the one condoned by lawyers in the George W. Bush administration.

That is, engineering and participating in torture was expected behavior for C.I.A. doctors. There was thus created what can be called a malignant normality in a subculture of torturers.

For me this is reminiscent of Nazi doctors, whose more vast and systematic participation in torture and murder I studied some decades ago. The doctors in charge of the gas chambers in Auschwitz had not killed anyone before their assignment to that death camp. They, too, had been socialized to a subculture of killing in what was also a manifestation of the normalization of evil.

President-elect Donald Trump has advocated waterboarding and other forms of torture, but you report (front page, Nov. 29) that if he seeks to resume it, he would meet with resistance from within the C.I.A., and especially from its medical professionals.