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Gag Reflex
By Chris Floyd
01/12/06 "Moscow
Times" -- -- If President George W. Bush shows
no qualms about violating the 217-year-old U.S. Constitution or
the 791-year-old Magna Carta, why should we be surprised to find
that he is now violating the 2,400-year-old Hippocratic Oath?
And yet this week's revelation of how U.S. doctors are
force-feeding captives on hunger strike in Bush's concentration
camp at Guantanamo Bay still has the power to shock and sicken
-- not just from the savage act itself, but also for the wider
moral defeat it represents: another open embrace of raw
brutality, another step in America's accelerating plunge into
vicious despotism.
News of the hunger strike has been trickling out from the
ever-incurious U.S. media for months. Indeed, Pentagon warlord
Donald Rumsfeld even joked about prisoners "going on a diet."
But the full scope of the strike -- and the unethical methods
being used to quash it -- only emerged this week in The
Observer, which obtained legal affidavits from the Army doctors
involved in this "torture lite." The strike, which began last
August with a handful of captives, has now spread to 81
prisoners trying to starve themselves to death.
Men driven to such desperation make bad PR for their captors --
especially a blustering pipsqueak who likes to pass himself off
as a God-blessed beacon of goodness and freedom. So the strikers
are being strapped down and force-fed by tubes shoved through
their noses and crammed down into their stomachs. This daily
process leaves them bleeding and retching, according to sworn
testimony from the concentration camp's hospital chief, Captain
John Edmondson.
The good doctor defended the practice as humane, noting that his
medicos grease the captives' nostrils with lubricant, and use
only "soft and flexible" 3-millimeter hoses -- an amelioration
of their previous technique: stuffing 4.8-millimeter hard-rubber
tubes down nose and gullet in order to pump gruel into a
prisoner's belly more quickly. Yet despite the Christ-like
tenderness of this treatment, Edmondson is now being sued in
California, his native state, for unprofessional conduct. It
seems that U.S. doctors are legally bound by the 1975 World
Medical Association Tokyo Declaration, which explicitly forbids
force-feeding under any circumstances.
Ah, but what are laws, treaties and oaths in our brave new
world? There are of course no inherent legal protections or
human rights in the Bushist philosophy of power. Like his
brother in blood, Osama bin Laden, Bush recognizes no law beyond
his own will. Anyone he designates an "enemy" -- without any
charges or evidence whatsoever -- becomes sub-human, a piece of
trash. And so it is with the Guantanamo captives. None of them
has been charged with any crime, as The Observer notes; none has
been shown any evidence justifying their imprisonment, or knows
how long they will be held. Many of the hunger strikers have
been chained in this agonizing limbo for more than four years, a
living death guaranteed to induce torment, madness and fatal
despair.
Yet it has been thoroughly documented -- sometimes by the
Pentagon itself -- that numerous "Terror War" prisoners are
innocent men (and children) who have been falsely accused
through incompetent intelligence work, or even sold into
captivity by bounty hunters paid by eager Bushist agents, as The
Washington Post reports. We know too, by the regime's own
admission, that all "high-value" terrorist targets are held in
secret CIA prisons hidden around the globe, not at Guantanamo.
But last week Bush turned the screws even tighter on his Gitmo
trash, signing a law that strips the captives of the ancient
right of habeas corpus, which predates the Magna Carta. They are
to have no access to the legal system, not even a simple
declaration of why they are being held. What's more, last week
Bush also asserted his right to ignore an anti-torture law he
had just signed, The Boston Globe reports. Even as he reaped
kudos for his apparent approval of the mild restraints on
torture pushed by Senator John McCain, Bush simultaneously
issued a "signing statement" -- an unconstitutional
"presidential interpretation" of law -- declaring that he can
set aside the law if he feels it conflicts with his "authority
as commander-in-chief" at any point. (Cries of "Amen, brother!"
were immediately heard in that quadrant of hell where Hitler and
Stalin sit gnawing on the anuses of rats.)
No doubt any spot of legal bother about force-feeding captives
will be dismissed under the rubric of this unbridled
"authority," perhaps with the help of Supreme Court nominee
Samuel Alito, a longtime apologist for authoritarian rule by
unrestrained presidents. After all, it was Alito himself who
concocted the law-gutting device of the presidential "signing
statement" when he was a legal factotum in the Ronald Reagan
White House, The Washington Post reports.
But just how far does the "Commander's" torture authority reach?
To the crushing of an innocent child's testicles. So says John
Yoo, the former deputy assistant attorney general who helped
craft the official White House "torture memos" that justified
any torture short of permanent maiming or death -- and even
countenanced the latter if it was "unintentional." Yoo also
helped devise the regime's crank philosophy of the "unitary
executive" -- that is, dictatorship for a "war president." In
response to a question at a public debate last month, Yoo
declared that Bush could override any law or treaty and order
his goons to crush the testicles of a prisoner's child in the
name of "national security," commentator Andrew Sullivan
reports.
Crushed testicles. Torture. Tyranny. Aggressive war. Bush better
start developing a taste for rat rectums right away. He's going
to need it.
Annotations
Scandal of Force-Fed Prisoners
The Obsever, Jan. 8, 2006
Kinsley on Torture
Andrewsullivan.com, Dec. 17, 2005
Who is Watching the Watchmen?
The Daily Cardinal, Dec. 14, 2005
Bush Adviser Says President Has Legal Power to Torture Children
Information Clearinghouse, Jan. 8, 2006
Alito Once Made Case For Presidential Power
The Washington Pos, Jan. 2, 2006
George Bush's Rough Justice
The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2006
Rumsfeld Defends Guantanamo Decision
Associated Press, Nov. 2, 2005
Amnesty Releases New Gitmo Torture Testimony
Amnesty International, Jan. 10, 2006
NSA, FISA and the DNA of Tyranny
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 11, 2006
3 GOP Senators Blast Bush Bid to Bypass Torture Ban
Boston Globe, Jan. 5, 2006
Wrongful Imprisonment:Anatomy of a CIA Mistake
Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2005
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2005
Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale
The Guardian, Dec. 6, 2005
Empire Burlesque, Dec. 28, 2005
The Hippocratic Oath
BBC, Aug. 20, 2003
A Brief History of Habeas Corpus
BBC, March 9, 2005
Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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