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.