I don’t believe in torture or so called enhanced interrogation. I don’t think that is who we are as a nation. Yeah, I know! I didn’t lose a loved one on September 11. I have an acquaintance who lost a child on September 11.
I am not CIA so I don’t know what you have to do to get the bad guys to tell us what they know. Yeah, I know! They are bad guys, cowards, murderers of innocent folks and if they had their way again they would pull a September 11 and this time maybe in my hometown.
I was supportive of the Senate Intelligence Committee releasing the so called torture report because we have to know what happened – and boy did it happen. I read some of the media accounts just to keep up and ran across the usual water boarding, keeping detainees awake, making threats on detainee family members, and ice baths. Then I ran across rectal rehydration. You know – we can debate a whole lot on a lot of this but I really don’t think we can on rectal rehydration. Come on! Who in the heck thought up this sick sh__!
Normally I try to keep graphic stuff out of my Commentary but this an exception because – well just because. Here is a Washington Post article by Brady Dennis that was posted yesterday:
Among the more jarring passages in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects are descriptions of agency employees subjecting uncooperative detainees to “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding.”
The report said that at least five CIA detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity, while other detainees were threatened with the procedure.
At one point, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen who allegedly masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole, launched a short-lived hunger strike, which resulted in the CIA force feeding him rectally, it stated.
According to the report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also was subjected to rectal rehydration with no documented medical need for the procedure. An interrogation official later characterized the measure as illustrative of his “total control over the detainee.”
The practice of rectal feeding and rehydration, while not unheard of, seems to have received little attention in modern medical literature, and certainly not in the context of treating obstinate prisoners.
The methods CIA agents used to question detainees between late 2001 and Jan. 2009 were “far worse than the CIA represented them to policy makers and others,” Senate Intelligence Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said Tuesday before giving examples of the techniques.
Traditionally, it has been used only in dire circumstances, such as in the treatment of a 21-year-old man who was discovered by trekkers to be suffering from shock in the mountains of Nepal. President James Garfield’s doctors decided to feed him rectally as he lay dying from an assassin’s bullet — he received egg yolks, milk, whiskey, beef bouillon and drops of opium in this manner, though he continued to waste away, according to a biographer. Some German psychiatric patients who refused food in the 19th century apparently were subjected to the practice.
Tuesday’s report detailed a new twist on an old practice.
According to the Senate report, one of the detainees who underwent the procedure was Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen and former resident of the Baltimore suburbs, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to five war crimes, including murder, attempted murder and spying. He previously had been held by the CIA at a secret prison overseas for three years before his transfer to the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay. He claimed he was “mentally tortured” by the agency and twice attempted suicide.
The report said Khan was subjected to “involuntary rectal feeding and rectal rehydration,” which included two bottles of Ensure. Later the same day, his “lunch tray,” consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins, was pureed and “rectally infused.”
The report also said CIA medical officers discussed rectal rehydration as a form of behavior control. According to the report, one officer wrote, “[w]hile IV infusion is safe and effective, we were impressed with the ancillary effectiveness of rectal infusion on ending the water refusal in a similar case.”
If you don’t believe me, go here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/senate-report-uncooperative-terrorism-suspects-faced-rectal-rehydration-feeding/2014/12/09/fcffb1ec-7fb8-11e4-8882-03cf08410beb_story.html.
This is some sick stuff. I guess they tried to give legitimacy to the practice by calling it rectal rehydration when all it amounted to was sticking a tube up a detainee’s arse and filling him up with a puree version of the daily blue plate special – that’s sick!
It has been pretty pitiful watching the ex-CIA honchos and key 43 staffers defend this horsesh_t over the past 18 hours or so.
Check out Nick Anderson’s latest cartoon on the subject here: http://blog.chron.com/nickanderson/2014/12/torture/.
Commentary was watching the H-Town City Council yesterday and I just had to tweet out the following:
Marc Campos @MarcCommentary 24m24 minutes ago
CM @cobradbradford : “Who lied to the Council?” re City Council agenda item on “land grab.” #TIRZPolitics #HouNews #HouCouncil
Former Council Member Sue Lovell spoke at the meeting and got pretty worked up on this agenda item. She went after some city bureaucrats for trying to pull a fast one. It has to do with a TIRZ trying to annex some property.
I just can’t do a MLB question in the same post with torture.
The team still hasn’t made a major signing but the GM got a contract extension.
Camposcommunications' Blog 