I Thought Shark Week Started Next Sunday

Let's go Greg!

War Crimes

The actions at Guantanamo are clearly war crimes, and it seems evident that Bush and his henchmen ordered it. Time to hold them to account, or we risk becoming "Good Germans."

Here is an excerpt from Human Rights First's blog from today's show trial of osama's "alleged" driver:

I was sick for a week and no one did anything, but as soon as I told the interrogator the doctor came.”

Mr. Hamdan suffers from sciatica, a painful back condition. He testified that, after repeated requests for help over a week, nothing was done. He was then taken to an interrogation session, and the interrogator had a doctor and corpsmen treating him in five minutes, in the interrogation room. He quickly learned that the path to medical care lay through cooperation with his interrogators. It is a violation of the laws of war to make medical treatment conditional on cooperation.

“I felt like I started to live again.”

This is how Mr. Hamdan described the feeling of leaving isolation and being transferred to Camp 4. Mr. Hamdan has been in isolation of some sort for virtually the entire time he has been at Guantánamo. For approximately 30 days, he lived in Camp 4 where he shared a dormitory style room with 9 other detainees, had access to outdoor exercise and could pray with other detainees. Despite a federal court order directing that Mr. Hamdan be placed in the general prison population, the government has kept him in isolation. Mr. Hamdan suffers from anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, and his physical and mental condition has deteriorated continuously since he was removed from Camp 4.

“No recreation time per Intel”

The above is an entry Dr. Kemal discovered in Mr. Hamdan’s medical records for February 2004. Mr. Hamdan had seen the medical officer because of the pain of his sciatica. The entry indicates that “Intel” had directed that Mr. Hamdan be denied exercise. Exercise is a universally prescribed treatment for sciatica.

“Doctors or Butchers, How Would I Know”

Mr. Hamdan went on a hunger strike to protest his removal from Camp 4. After that, he was force fed. The first feeding was done humanely according to standard medical procedures. Subsequently, however, he was restrained and force fed using an oversized nasal tube and no anesthetics or lubricant, an extremely painful process. During this force feeding, Mr. Hamdan was placed in a full body restraint chair where he could not move. He was left there for three or four hours. He was told that, if he needed to relieve himself, he could do so in the chair. The persons who did this did not wear hospital uniforms, and Mr. Hamdan does not know whether they were medical personnel.

“He feels dead inside. He has not been treated like a human being here.”

I can’t compress eight hours of testimony into two pages. I haven’t discussed the sleep deprivation program, the anxiety-producing effect of removing comfort items a few hours or days before each interrogation, or the sexual humiliation a very disturbed Mr. Hamdan described today, but I think you may have gotten the general idea.

Anyone else disgusted? Why is impeachment not on the table? Why aren't Americans (good or otherwise) outraged?
Then you have newsweak and Stuart "Torture em then Pardon em all" Taylor putting out this horrific pile, claiming that it has to be done in order to find out what happened.....

Meanwhile, W is back on the links.