GUANTANAMO: DICK CHENEY'S FANTASY ISLAND
Dick Cheney Is Not Like You or Me. The way Dick Cheney describes Guantanamo, you would think people would be breaking down the gates to get in there. No dark threats to dignity neither physical nor mental worry the population of Dick's Paradise Beneath the Palms. And the doctor in the white coat has no dark design, except perhaps figuring out your weakest points and sharing your medical information with your kindly interrogators. Guantanamo floats adrift in a cynical amoral sea. If not stemmed now that sea's rising tide will flood us only with shame for what we do on that island of doomed days and nightmare nights. Or not. Cheney only sees the bright side.
Cheney also rejected calls for closing the detention facility for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the inmates there "are serious, deadly threats" who will "go back to trying to kill Americans" if they are released.
He also defended the treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military at Guantanamo, telling Blitzer, "There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."
"They're living in the tropics. They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want," the vice president said.[CNN]
Asked if it was Mr Cheney's intention to portray the prison as a holiday camp, an official in his office said he stood by his comments.
At a recent congressional hearing, Republican senator Jeff Sessions said the site, on the south-eastern tip of Cuba, "would make a magnificent resort", while a Republican congressman, Duncan Hunter, told reporters recently: "The inmates have never eaten better ... they've never been treated better, and they've never been more comfortable in their lives."[GUARDIAN UK]
Yes, Dick. Yes, Jeff. they have everything they could want, except their freedom and and a shred of dignity. In the Nineteenth Century one would here similar stories about other such fortunates. They were called slaves.
DOCTOR'S ETHICS TWISTED AND SOCIALIZED TOWARD EVIL
At Guantanamo, the doctor's helping hand and inquisitive mind have been turned to a more practical but evil purpose. Be a Good American. Save lives. Get intelligence at any cost. What do we get when doctors lose their ethics? We get dark science advancing against the light of life.
. . . both the New York Times and
the New England Journal of Medicine describe how doctors helped
interrogators to increase the psychological pressure on the detainees
in the hope of making them more cooperative and willing to provide
information.
The
statement said that doctors advising interrogators were not breaking
any rules because they were not treating patients but acting as
behavioural scientists.
Here is what an older report had to say about Guantanamo and its sister sites of sadism with a human face hidden behind a doctor's degree. Dick Durbin got criticized for describing in blunt historical terms what he saw happening at Guantanamo. Robert Jay Lifton, MD draws similar parallels quite clearly
FROM THE [NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE] JULY 2004
A June 10 article in the Washington Post tells of a long-standing policy at the Guantanamo Bay facility whereby military interrogators were given access to the medical records of individual prisoners.2 The policy was maintained despite complaints by the Red Cross that such records "are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan." A civilian psychiatrist who was part of a medical review team was "disturbed" about not having been told about the practice and said that it would give interrogators "tremendous power" over prisoners.
Other reports, though sketchier, suggest that the death certificates of prisoners who might have been killed by various forms of mistreatment have not only been delayed but may have camouflaged the fatal abuse by attributing deaths to conditions such as cardiovascular disease.3
Various medical protocols — notably, the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo in 1975 — prohibit all three of these forms of medical complicity in torture. Moreover, the Hippocratic Oath declares, "I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing."
To be a military physician is to be subject to potential moral conflict between commitment to the healing of individual people, on the one hand, and responsibility to the military hierarchy and the command structure, on the other.
--snip--
American doctors at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have undoubtedly been aware of their medical responsibility to document injuries and raise questions about their possible source in abuse. But those doctors and other medical personnel were part of a command structure that permitted, encouraged, and sometimes orchestrated torture to a degree that it became the norm — with which they were expected to comply — in the immediate prison environment.
The doctors thus brought a medical component to what I call an "atrocity-producing situation" — one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people can readily engage in atrocities. Even without directly participating in the abuse, doctors may have become socialized to an environment of torture and by virtue of their medical authority helped sustain it. In studying various forms of medical abuse, I have found that the participation of doctors can confer an aura of legitimacy and can even create an illusion of therapy and healing.
The Nazis provided the most extreme example of doctors' becoming socialized to atrocity.4 In addition to cruel medical experiments, many Nazi doctors, as part of military units, were directly involved in killing. To reach that point, they underwent a sequence of socialization: first to the medical profession, always a self-protective guild; then to the military, where they adapted to the requirements of command; and finally to camps such as Auschwitz, where adaptation included assuming leadership roles in the existing death factory. The great majority of these doctors were ordinary people who had killed no one before joining murderous Nazi institutions. They were corruptible and certainly responsible for what they did, but they became murderers mainly in atrocity-producing settings.
[MORE]
When we decide we face an evil our best selves cannot defeat and we bring out our worst ways to defeat evil so good may triumph, do we not realize we have surrendered to evil and fight not for good cause but rather against our best selves?
If we fight to save our way of life but in the process lose our way in life, what do we come back to when our dark victory is won?
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SEE ALSO: [DARKNESS VISIBLE][WHO'S SORRY NOW]
[GUANTANAMO UNBOUND]
Maybe DICK can have some Gitmo "techniques" tested upon him at the Vail Hospital.
Posted by: jillian | June 25, 2005 at 02:59 AM
It's Club Med with free physical exams! How could anyone complain about that?
Posted by: Agitprop | June 25, 2005 at 08:55 AM
Devil's Island in Guyane is also in the tropics. Following Cheney's logic, perhaps it's time to revise the history of the French penal colony on the island.
Posted by: JDC | June 25, 2005 at 11:32 AM
The atrocities at Guantonamo are one symptom of the systemic breakdown of our nations foundation. We cannot claim to be the greatest nation on earth when what made us great is being eroded at the keystone. We have no justice for any when we eliminate the justice of any. We have no liberty when we take the liberty of any. We have no LIFE when we take the life of any. We are a dying nation and a republic no longer - I pray we are not just the echoes of the death knell, awaiting our turn in the grinder.
Posted by: DuWayne | June 25, 2005 at 08:25 PM