I guess if we just don’t go quite as far as this guy...

..then it’s all pussy and Pringles and Pabst Blue Ribbon with the GOP!


I mean if we’re only doing shit like this (all graphics from this Josef Mengele site)…

High-Altitude Experiments
to investigate the limits of human endurance and existence at extremely high altitudes. The victims were placed in the low-pressure chamber and thereafter the simulated altitude therein was raised. Many victims died as a result of these experiments and others suffered grave injury, torture, and ill-treatment.

Or this…

Freezing Experiments
to investigate the most effective means of treating persons who had been severely chilled or frozen. The victims were forced to remain in a tank of ice water for up to 3 hours. Extreme rigor developed in a short time. Numerous victims died in the course of these experiments. After the survivors were severely chilled, rewarming was attempted by various means. In another series of experiments, the victims were kept naked outdoors for many hours at temperatures below freezing. The victims screamed with pain as their bodies froze.

Then we’re not REALLY Nazi’s, right?

OK, then what are we?

And how deep into the moral Abyss do we have to plunge before someone on the Right will say, “This is wrong and this must stop.”?

Jesus, but it all unfolds like a bad, old play, doesn’t it? One where half us know the lines almost by heart and watch in dread as the curtain rises on one act bloodier and more shameful that the last. And we shout our throats raw in warning as it just gets worse and worse and worse.

And the other half of the crowd bewilderingly ignores the fact that they have been 100% wrong about every single plot twist up until now, but still insist that we STFU and sit down, because we don’t know what we’re talking about.

What am I talking about?

Well, hot on the heels of Dick Durbin’s puss-out over comments he never, in fact, made, about the fact that one may have troubling distinguishing certain behavior by US personnel as reported by the FBI from the behavior of Nazis, the irreplaceable Crooks and Liar brings us the story of the U.S. using medical personnel to make it's torture of prisoners more effective.

From the Toronto Star. (Yes, the one in CANADA.)

U.S. doctors linked to POW `torture'
Guantanamo medical records misused
Basis of interrogators' strategy: Report

TANYA TALAGA AND KAREN PALMER
STAFF REPORTERS

Medical records compiled by doctors caring for prisoners at the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay are being tapped to design more effective interrogation techniques, says an explosive new report.

Doctors, nurses and medics caring for the approximately 600 prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Cuba are required to provide health information to military and CIA interrogators, according to the report in the respected New England Journal of Medicine.

"Since late 2003, psychiatrists and psychologists (at Guantanamo) have been part of a strategy that employs extreme stress, combined with behaviour-shaping rewards, to extract actionable intelligence from resistant captives," it states.

Such tactics are considered torture by many authorities, the authors note.

Medical personnel belonging to the U.S. military's Southern Command have also been told to volunteer to interrogators information they believe may be valuable, the report adds.

The report was published ahead of schedule last night on the journal's website "because of current public interest in this topic," the journal says.

The report's authors — Dr. Gregg Bloche, a physician who is also a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, and Jonathan Marks, a London lawyer who is currently a fellow in bioethics at Georgetown's law centre — say that while Guantanamo veterans are ordered not to discuss what goes on there, making it difficult to know how, exactly, military intelligence personnel have used medical information for interrogation, they've been able to assemble part of the picture.

They suggest that interrogators at the camp, set up in 2001 to detain prisoners captured in Afghanistan and later Iraq, have had access to prisoners' medical records since early 2003.

That contradicts Pentagon statements that there is a separation between intelligence-gathering and patient care.

William Winkenwerder, U.S. assistant secretary of defence for health affairs, said in a memo made public in May that Guantanamo prisoners' medical records are considered private — as are American citizens'.

However, "this claim, our inquiry has determined, is sharply at odds with orders given to military medical personnel and with actual practice at Guantanamo," the authors write.

…

"The American government needs to accept its responsibility to expose what is actually happening and show the world they are following standards that are acceptable in terms of international law," he said.

According to the authors, a previously unreported U.S. Southern Command policy statement dated Aug. 6, 2002, instructs health-care providers that communications from "enemy persons under U.S. control" at Guantanamo "are not confidential and are not subject to the assertion of privileges" by detainees.
…

"The global political fallout from such abuse may pose more of a threat to U.S. security than any secrets still closely held by shackled internees at Guantanamo Bay," they add.

…

The New England Journal of Medicine is the second respected journal to criticize U.S. interrogation techniques.

The British medical journal The Lancet reported in August, 2004, that U.S. military doctors violated medical ethics as part of the interrogation regime at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"Not only were (they) aware of human rights abuses, they were actually complicit in them," University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles, who wrote the report, told the Toronto Star's Sandro Contenta. A Lancet editorial urged health-care workers to "now break their silence."

Dear Moderate Republican Quislings:

Of COURSE it came to this.

How could it not?

A frightened nation?

A dry-drunk, half-wit President Hindenberg, run like a Predator Drone by a cabal of amoral Neocon thugs stoned out of their minds on opium dreams of Empire?

A cowardly and deeply complicit press?

A Perfect Villain sitting on an Ocean of Oil?

A piggy bank that can be looted by Dick Cheney’s Rolodex Army for the next 50 years. Nine billion in cash that has already been looted outright; god knows how much oil already plundered?

How many millions upon million to mercs and “contractors” and private security firms, who obey no law and recognize no authority but their paymasters?

With the Regular Army dutifully marched in as cannon-fodder?

So who was left but The Left to warn the public that they were not only witnessing the Biggest Heist in the history of the Universe, but acting as wheel men for the a gang of plunderers on a scale that would make a Viking blush, and a would make Genghis Khan tip his hat and say, “Your Kung Fu is strongest.”

And as the infallable Drgustore Cowboy Rush Limbaugh has been drumming into yous monkey skulls for years, the Left can't be trusted...so no one but Otis the Drunk was left to guard out blood, treasure and national interests.

And as all of us movie and crime novel and magic fans know, how do you conduct the Big Job?

By misdirection, baby!

By keeping the marks distracted enough to not notice that you’re stealing the flesh from their bones, and then keeping them embarrassed enough to go to their graves (and take a lot of us with them) before they’d every admit they’d been took.

What, did you think a little thing like being caught Red Fucking Handed was going to shame these wretched Magwitches into stopping?

Did you think that a little thing like being utterly, totally, omnidirectionally and pandimensionally wrong about Every Fucking Thing would ever guilt the Wahabi Christian Party into changing course?

Haven’t you been keeping up with the assigned reading, little man?

Christopaths don’t “do” guilt. They don’t “do” shame. And they sure as shit don’t “do” “I’m sorry, I was wrong.”

They’re going All The Way with this one – they took us to war over this one – and it's Paradise or Bust for these madmen –- these madmen that you RE-ELECTED when the evidence of their insanity and their crimes were as thick around you as flies on a dead man.

And when you go All In with the Devil as your stakehorse, you don’t let trivia like torture and murder and treason and lying to the American public about matters of life and death prevent you from Passing Go.

So of course it came to this: How could it not, so can you hear us NOW??

This is not “a few bad apples.” This is not an isolated incident. This cannot be explained away by blaming it on a few, untrained sadists and mental underperformers turned loose without adult supervision, so quit scapegoating the G.I’s you fucking bellycrawlers.

This is using trained US Army medical personnel to make sure that the torture being conducted under the auspices of the United State Government is as effective as possible.

This is fucking p-o-l-i-c-y and if you don’t denouncing this – denounce it for REAL and demand that people at the highest level of the US Government be held to account – if you plan on defending this atrocity, or by your deafening silence in print or on the radio or on television you plan to give your usual give your coward’s quiet assent, then as a Belated Father’s Day gesture, go now and sincerely apologize to your old man for ever bringing you into this world.

Because you have now officially become the very thing that your fathers and grandfathers went to war and gave their lives to protect their country against.