Under the headline “President Bush Is No Nazi Torturer,” Washington Post editorial writer Eva Rodriguez uses a blog post (6/9/10) to “take exception” to another Post blog item (6/9/10) written by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. The point of contention: vanden Heuvel, responding to a report that the U.S. government has been conducting research on torture victims, wrote:
Granted, this “research” was not the Frankenstein stuff of Dr. Mengele—the experimentation seems to have been conducted in order to determine how sadistic American torturers could be before they crossed into illegality. But it is still appalling.
Now, you might think that when vanden Heuvel said the U.S. experiments were not like Nazi Auschwitz doctor Mengele’s, she meant that Mengele’s experiments were different from the U.S.’s. But that’s why you don’t have a job writing editorials for the Washington Post. Actually, vanden Heuvel’s “acutely insincere” blog post said that the American researchers were unlike Mengele because she meant to say that they were just like Mengele. (“By raising the specter of Mengele, vanden Heuvel makes her point clear.”) And that’s not true!
Writes Rodriguez:
She’s wrong. Mengele and his cohorts performed grotesque operations that left his victims with permanent physical, emotional and psychological scars—if they were lucky enough to survive. Most did not. Sometimes death was the objective; he would at times kill his “patients” so that he could get right to the business of dissecting the body. This is monstrous. This is evil incarnate. This is not what the Bush administration did.
Aside from vanden Heuvel’s “insincere” denial that U.S. torturers were as bad as Mengele—note her lack of an “I really mean it!” or any other such guarantee of sincerity—Rodriguez seems to object to the use of the word “sadistic” to describe U.S. torture: “These weren’t experiments to gratify a sadistic streak; they were efforts to ensure the interrogations remained ‘legal’ and ‘humane.'”
Here’s a description, from the Washington Post (4/27/07) no less, of one interrogation that turned out to be less than “legal” or “humane”:
In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who’d never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.
He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.
Don’t call that “sadistic”—those are just what Rodriguez calls the “misguided acts of a president intent on protecting his country from another devastating attack.” They have nothing at all to do with the “impulses of a psychopath,” no matter what Katrina vanden Heuvel didn’t say.
Well, vanden Heuvel may not have meant to compare the Shrubberites to the Nazis, but I think it’s a fair cop – at least to the victims.
It’s a matter of kind, not degree, isn’t it? Aren’t the motives essentially the same?
And it hasn’t ended with Dear Leader’s exit, has it?
Call it whatever the hell you want. I know what I’d call it if it were happening to me, wouldn’t you?
OK, I totally do not understand what is being describe here, because I don’t care that much whether one opinion writer gets it wrong about another opinion writer, and whatever drama might exist between them.
Mosly, what I get from this ‘blog post is: This is another example of how easy it is to derail any important discussion of important stories in media. The story is not that one opinion writer got it wrong. The story is that the US government conducted illegal torture as a part of scientific observation of which torture methods might be allowed some legal wiggle room, and that this was all done in order to generate ‘intel’ which would support the Bush administration’s policy of illegal invasion of a sovereign nation.
ER: The story is certainly what you say it is, but this site deals with how it was told and still is being told to a gullible electorate.
I once taught a course in which a student said that Bush was another Hitler. When the student was unable to defend his argument before the class, I intervened with counter-examples. I first pointed out that Hitler had written an entire book all by himself, while it was not clear whether Bush had ever read a book, other than the one he was reading to a kindergarten class while terrorists took down the World Trade Center. Hitler was an impassioned and skilled orator, while Bush seemed to run into difficulty speaking as if he had attended Harvard. Hitler had hopes of becoming an artist. Hitler surrounded himself–or was surrounded by–specialists of remarkable ability, but evil, like Goebbels. “Cheney.” Need one do more than write or speak the name?
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WTFing Female Psychobattle?! If the thought of it Tortures YOU, IT’S TORTURE!! And MONSTROUS!!!
The Bush family has had Nazi connections. I read that Prescott Bush, the father of Bush,Sr. and grandfather of Bush,Jr., was accused of trading with the Nazi Germany. Furthermore, if a guard in a detention camp kicks somebody until that person’s legs are a bloody pulp and the person dies from such a beating five days later, I would describe that as sadistic. Bush,Jr. had started the policy of monitoring Americans phone conversations without warrants. The Patriot Act was used to enshrine further violations of the U.S. Constitution. Bush,Jr.’s Administration also imprisoned people without trials and then tortured them. This could be fairly close to Nazism.
Does it really matter to the person being tortured to death or tortured repeatedly up to that point what we call it? The question is, what are we going to do about it, talk?
We who allow torture to go unpunished are establishing precedent for all future aggressors to act with impunity against whomever they identify as an enemy. Thousands of events of WWII led to the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Torture is illegal. Prosecute it.
Yesterday Bush was a dumb jackass.(Strangely at the same time he was the supposed head of the illuminati, bent on world domination)Today -George Bush is a Nazi.Tomorrow maybe he will be a space invader from Mars.Want to know what he is?He is……TICKING ME OFF!He sits at home writing a book while we have a sitting socialist President who is spending this country into oblivion.Bush should be renting a soapbox in central park to scream against this insanity.He WAS once the leader of the free world who had i thought- a certain” vague” understanding of conservatism/capitalism and our constitution.Or was that all a crock?Today he is neutered and silenced by the good ol boy presidents boys club.Truth be told;He and Obama are looking forward to their golf date(along with Clinton and George Bush senior)in roughly 2 years.See ya on the links boys. Lots of back slapping.Yucking it up.Good food.And lokes about who is pulling in the most on the lecture tour.Carter isn’t invited because……….well he’s Carter!
The US continued the Nazi program of human experimentation, to the extent of spiriting many of the scientists involved out of Germany and to the USA (Operation Paperclip). The experiments may have gone in different directions from what Germany was doing, but there is voluminous, convincing evidence (MK-ULTRA, among other programs) that US government experimentation on humans continued (and almost certainly still continues). To deny this while refusing to look at the evidence is cognitive dissonance, something many if not most Americans have grown unfortunately inured to. If you don’t believe it look it up. Or shut up. Or admit your refusal to examine your own country’s faults and crimes.
As far as I can determine from reading several accounts on several blogs, the accusation is that American medical professionals were present and carefully documented the effects of various means of torture used by “interrogators”. As a victim was hanged by his wrists for hours at a time, deprived of sleep, waterboarded, hooded, beaten, blasted with loud music, sexually humuliated, dowsed with ice water while naked in an air-conditioned cell, and otherwise subjected to dozens of other inhuman tortures, doctors carefully documented the effects of each method of torture in violation of American and International law and their own Hippocratic oath. Doctors were present to revive victims in case they were rendered unconscious or died during their torture, and kept careful notes documenting which torture techniques were the most effective.
The interesting part is that the defenders of these practices which are a violation of American and International laws are the same people that cry for a return to a literal definition of the terms of our Constitution. They repudiate morality while laying claim to it. Orwell called it “Doublespeak”.
First I am a Reagan conservative Tea party type. But I have thought the conservative radio has been off the mark in theirappeasment of the use of torture.(And let us not argue that water boarding is or is not torture)It is a specious argument.It is.And that is that.I agree with John McCaine(who was tortured over years
in Vietnam) as he clearly stated during his run….”All forms of torture must be deemed unclean by this country.”
We must never let this become part of who we are.Period!If this was used during the Bush administration than we must begin the dialog to I hope end it.It has been said that it was extremely successful in gaining information against terror suspects, and in stopping plots, and thwarting terror organizations.I don’t doubt it.But as glad as I am for those being alive today due to these extreme methods having being used ,I am also keenly aware of what we have lost in the process..And what we will loose going forward.Obama has sidestepped this by sending people to countries who do torture.But we knew he was a lawyer right?So no big surprise him finding a legal way out.Putz!
If we must ..I say must keep it on the plate as a way of dealing with this murderous filth;In the case of nuclear arms being used against our cities lets say.Then the president and the president alone must sign for the use of this force.There can be no plausible deniability.No underlings.It must be his show.What he does he does in our name.It must be filmed and/orcompletely documented for the peoples ….and histories later judgement.
I’m just curious Michey how exactly does an Afgan taxi driver from some little village get a nuke and how
would he get it to the U.S.A.
Paen your question is not really detailed enough to answer. Please embellish your reference to a taxi driver?If your asking could per say a “taxi driver”from Afghanistan bring a nuclear weapon into this country- I would say yes. Why not?The Russians developed tactical nuclear weapons that could fit in a brief case. Some today are supposedly unaccounted for.Of course a more deadly weapon would be the size of a 55 gallon drum. Brought in on a ship lets say. The nightmare scenario would be a rogue country giving these weapons to a terrorist network.Or military grade nuclear weapons stolen from poorly guarded stockpiles fall into terrorist hands willing to move them into populated cities a detonate them..Of course chemical and Bio agents would also be a part of this dangerous state of affairs. Richard Clark has talked about this at length.
Bush was an agreeable and willing front-man for Cheney – who is the real Evil Force of the Bush administration.
Time will tell. . .
Bush was drinking, keeping Rove happy with a supply of male prostitutes and keeping the media engaged, while Cheney went about his business.
Yes DA Bush is a robot.Rove a fembot.And Cheney the true head of the illuminati.I forget who is Darth Vadar? That’s right… Rumsfeld!That means Condolisa Rice is really the Cat woman.Oh and please pass the ketchup…I think its gonna rain.
This looney sickness with Bush started with people like Daniel Carvil.He admits that minutes after the Bush election he and some other top Dems decided to a plan of attack.They would basically attack attack attack painting Bush as a nincompoop on the one hand.And on the other hand………Anything else they could come up with that would be a negative tag.They owned the press at that time so it really was not hard.Of course after 911 they had a setback as the world rallied around the Us(and Bush). Carvil admits that was a balancing act.Attack Bush and all his works (the war)wether or not there was agreement among bi-partisan legislation and the American people..(That plan phase was what I like to call” retreat,defeat, and surrender.)_The press spin ..the lies…the disinformation.All to paint Bush so as to gain power.Ok it worked but it left America confused.And We still are not out of it.It led to conservative radio that acted as a counterweight and is only now beginning to right the ship.”Hilary admitted they were so successful that it will probably be a scar carried by many future presidents.. A scar by osmosis as it were.