Health Care Professionals Aided Torture Significantly Under Bushites – W.P.

In today’s Washington Post an opinion piece written by Eugene Robinson concerning the extensive use of American health care professionals in designing and consistently supporting torture in a hands-on manner has been posted for your reading.  It is a hard read. 

We apparently have many, many Doctor Mengele’s in this country ready to do the bidding of the "defense establishment" in this our nation, the country, "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave",  "the Homeland".  Dear God!  What have we become?

Apparently as more and more is released by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about how we treated alleged terrorists, the International Red Cross, Physicians for Human Rights, and even the highly political American Medical Association have all officially protested this abuse at the hands of doctors and health care professionals to President Obama.

When did we turn this country into an organized and consistently secret and terrifying, sanitized suburb of Auschwitz?  When did we decide that it was okay for American health care professionals to take part in defining and structuring torture for human beings?  When did that behavior become okay for medical people working for the U.S. government?

Terrorists exist.  They are dangerous psychopaths that need to be restrained, held in captivity and kept there.  Even the most ardent anarchist would agree to that.  But there is a difference between restraining and holding captive dangerous human beings and torturing them. 

Time and time again since World War II we have been told that torture does not normally give reliable information.  I would tell a torturer that Josef Stalin was my mother if I thought it would stop the pain.  Is a terrorist all that different than me in that reaction to torture?

We need an entire decade at least for national self re-evaluation.  We have strayed so far off the mark of American core values that I am not sure that we can call ourselves Americans anymore.

I am not even sure that we have the national moral compass necessary to even call ourselves "American wannabe’s".

Who in the hell are we?  What have we become?  How did this happen?

Do we even care?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)