Global Eye - Dark Waters - By Chris Floyd

[CHIMO]

Last Friday, the former physician of ex-President George H.W. Bush wrote a guest column for The Washington Post. Two days later, the attorney general appointed by current President George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad. These seemingly unrelated events are not only inextricably linked; together they form a portrait of a nation gone wretchedly astray, hurtling into a moral void from which there may be no return.

There was nothing unusual about the physician, Dr. Burton Lee III, doing a piece for the Post, of course; the paper is the house organ of the U.S. political elite, and a whole troop of loyal Bush Family retainers make regular appearances in its editorial pages, lauding the son who has now ascended the throne. What is remarkable is that Lee came not to praise the younger Bush, but to bury him -- with hard truths about the torture regime he has installed in his "terror war" gulag.

Lee, a former military doctor, denounced Bush's use of military medical personnel to help "set the conditions for interrogation": withholding treatment from tortured prisoners, breaking medical confidence to tell interrogators of prisoners' physical and psychological weak spots, and other heinous practices approved by the White House and codified in Pentagon directives for military medical staff.

This breathtaking lie, regurgitated in the face of undisputed fact, shows how far the Bush gang has fallen into the void of radical evil. Lost to honor, law and truth, unmoored from reality, they are sailing into madness -- with no end yet in sight.


http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/07/08/120.html

There is nothing left to say.

[enough]

1. Open, legalized barbarity. (And a sudden junket for Gonzales.)

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The good doctor is right to be shocked: The shadow of Josef Mengele hovers over these deliberate perversions of medical ethics. Yet Bush has not only countenanced these crimes against humanity -- he has commanded that medical personnel commit them. This level of open, legalized barbarity has not been seen in the U.S. government since the days of slavery and the Indian wars.

Lee also shredded the big lie that the noble "terror war" had only been temporarily tainted by a few "bad apples," now removed from the wholesome barrel. In denouncing the "systematic, government-sanctioned torture and excessive abuse of prisoners in the war on terror," Lee noted the true extent of the criminality -- and those who bear the ultimate responsibility for it. He wrote:

"The widespread reports of torture and ill-treatment -- frequently based on military and government documents -- defy the claim that this abusive behavior is limited to a few noncommissioned officers at Abu Ghraib or isolated incidents at Guantanamo Bay. When it comes to torture, the military's traditional leadership and discipline have been severely compromised up and down the chain of command. Why? I fear it is because the military has bowed to errant civilian leadership."

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After Lee's article appeared, Gonzales was suddenly sent to Baghdad, The Associated Press reports: a headline-grabbing diversion that not only obscured Lee's hard truths but also buried the Observer's breaking stories about the torture and murder being dealt out by Bush's disciples in the new Iraqi government. There, Gonzales -- the ghostwriter of Bush's torture opus -- simply erased the mountains of evidence cited by Lee and PHR, reducing the ongoing, worldwide atrocity to a single aberrant episode: "From the best we can tell, it really related to the actions of the night shift at one cell block at Abu Ghraib."

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