Tuesday, June 27, 2006

New book reveals the Bush administration has doctors sign off on torture

The link above and the excerpt below are from a Time magazine article on a new book by Dr. Stephen Miles called Oath Betrayed. The book details, from thousands of FOIAed government documents, how George W. Bush and Don Rumsfeld authorized doctors to examine prisoners at places like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib before the prisoners were totured. The doctors were also asked to give recommendations, based on the individual, as to the type of torture that would be most effective.

Sometimes you come across stories and they leave you jaded, slipping towards cynicism. This story just made me sick and angry. We are fighting a war with made up rules.

One of those rules was that a prisoner's medical information could be provided to interrogators to help guide them to the prisoner's "emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses" (in Rumsfeld's own words) in the torture process. At an interrogation center called Camp Na'ma, where the unofficial motto was "No blood, no foul," one intelligence officer testified that "every harsh interrogation was approved by the [commander] and the Medical prior to its execution." Doctors, in other words, essentially signed off on torture in advance. And they often didn't inspect the victims afterward. At Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's surgeon general, only 15% of inmates were examined for injuries after interrogation.

Fighting the "war on terror".
After a while, you get numb reading these stories. They read like accounts of a South American dictatorship, not an American presidency. But we learn one thing: once you allow the torture of prisoners for any reason, as this President did, the cancer spreads. In the end it spreads to healers as well, and turns them into accomplices to harm.

This might be George W. Bush's America but it's not mine.

Monday, June 26, 2006

Terrorist Posada's Ties to CIA Miami Office Revealed

The Miami Herald uncovered CIA documents on a FOIA request that highlight Luis Posada Carriles's employment by the Miami bureau of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The story also notes that Posada, who a US Federal Court refused to extradite to Venezuela to stand trial for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner killing 76 people, is seeking US citizenship.

Astounding.

Friday, June 23, 2006

The end of the PNAC?

The Project for A New American Century is "heading toward closing", said one undefined source close to the project.


The conservative think-tank claims members such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Governor Jeb Bush, radio host and former "drug czar" William J. Bennett, Scooter Libby, president of the world bank Paul Wolfowitz and Dan Quayle...and Don Rumsfeld.

The nine-year-old group founded by William Kristol will be closing its doors because of a sense of "goal accomplished" among its members.

Sounds strangely familiar to something our president said a few years ago.

The PNAC, if you don't know, has pretty much dominated the Bush administration's foreign policy for the past 6 years and championed a plan to oust Saddam Hussein long before 9/11.

I guess the new American century is finally here.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

US Deaths in Iraq Reach 2,500

For WHAT?

Iraq is destabilized, it has become a home base for al Qa'ida, Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, our rights have been curtailed, and 2,500 Americans are dead.

Heckuva job, Bushie.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006