Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Monday, June 7, 2010

Vice President Richard Mengele?

Not exactly shocking news, though:
In the course of trying to prove that its "enhanced" interrogation program was legal, the Bush administration may have broken the law, according to a new report (PDF) by Physicians for Human Rights. The watchdog group claims that in an attempt to establish that brutal interrogation tactics did not constitute torture, the administration ended up effectively experimenting on terrorism detainees. This research, PHR alleges, violated an array of regulations and treaties, including international guidelines on human testing put in place after the Holocaust.

According to the report, which draws on numerous declassified government documents, "medical professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA" frequently monitored detainee interrogations, gathering data on the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques and the pain thresholds of detainees. This information was then used to "enhance" future interrogations, PHR contends.
Monitoring the health of the people you torture in order to make sure that you don't inadvertently kill them is one thing. But using that information to design better torture routines does cross the line into human experimentation. Which, as everyone other than a Bush sympathizer knows, is a major war crime.

And there is the thing: Under the rationale for charging al Qaeda worker drones that was advanced during the Bush Administration, virtually everyone who was at Guantanamo Bay is culpable. Every contractor who worked there, every barge crew that delivered supplies, all of them can be charged for aiding and abetting the commission of war crimes.

2 comments:

squatlo said...

I've been amazed that both Dick Cheney and his sock puppet Curious George have admitted authorizing torture, with apparent impunity.
Now the Physicians for Human Rights report that White House lawyers encouraged medical observation of the torture sessions, not out of concern for the well-being of the detainees, but to calculate pain thresholds as a legal recourse to War Crimes charges in the future.
If there is justice in the world, all involved will face a Crimes Against Humanity charge before the World Court at The Hague.
This was done in our name...

montag said...

So will SCOTUS give us a new legal doctrine that if all are guilty and it is embarrassing to the government, then all are not guilty?