Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Physicians for Human Rights points out the obvious

To wit, there were health care professionals working for Cheney's torture operation, and no, they aren't supposed to do that.

Here's one funny quote (ha ha):

Dr Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical advisor and an author of the analysis, said Cheney was “either terribly misinformed of propagating a lie. Any reasonable person knows feeding does not take place rectally.”

Now that we've all had a good chuckle, the true fact is that physicians participated in torturing people in various ways, enumerated thusly:

  • Designing, directing and profiting from the torture program;
  • Intentionally inflicting harm on detainees;
  • Enabling US department of justice lawyers to create a fiction of “safe, legal and effective” interrogation practices;
  • Engaging in torture research that could potentially violate the Nuremberg Code, brought in after World War II to ban “experiments” like those practiced by the Nazis, and could constitute a crime against humanity;
  • Monitoring torture and calibrating the level of pain;
  • Evaluating and treating detainees for the purposes of torture;
  • Conditioning medical care on cooperation with interrogators;
  • Failing to document physical and/or psychological evidence of torture.
As for the first bullet, "designing, directing and profiting," that particularly applies to psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were paid $81 million for their services and have now retired to lives of luxury and ease. They are of course war criminals, as is the also wealthy Richard B. Cheney, and we have now abandoned our national honor.

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

I don't think we had much national honor to begin with. But now we have none. We are a crumbling empire, crumbling from within, obsessed at the highest levels with conjured external "threats" that don't exist. People are asked, on a daily basis, to (in the words of Patrick Carnes) "disbelieve the obvious and accept the improbable"--something elst that came into fashion with the Nazis, and enjoyed a tremendous resurgence under ersatz-president Cheney: the Big Lie! Heil Bush! Heil Cheney! It is weird how we fit the dictionary's description of a fascist country. Ya wouldn't know it from the mainstream media . . .