Our Own Little Mengele's

Abu Ghraib is just full of disgusting little surprises. Army Doctors and Medics designing and aiding in the torture of prisoners. Including reviving them so they can have the shit beaten out of them again. So says this weeks Medical Journal, The Lancet. So much for the Hippocratic oath.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet. "Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."

The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.

A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon's own investigation of the abuses.

There is no goddamned excuse for this in a civilized society. Digby puts it best I think:

It is a sick culture that would think nothing of medical personnel who would design, implement and enable torture, especially in a country we were ostensibly liberating from exactly that kind of treatment. That not one came forward to report any of it says something very troubling about how we define morality and ethics in this country. Let's not forget that these people are from the same nation that spent more than a year and tens of millions of dollars in the pursuit of a leader who allegedly lied about an extramarital affair.

I don't want to hear another word from the religious zealots on the right, including their mascot, our God anointed president, about good and evil until they stand up and explain why they aren't screaming bloody murder about American doctors reviving prisoners who've been beaten unconscious so that they can be beaten again.

The Whitewash reports are likely to end up punishing the enlisteds who were stupid enough to pose.

But the stain is on us all. The investigations are in my opinion covering up that, at a minimum, these actions were the logical outgrowth of the Bush Administrations policies on the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

But certainly the fact that the stain is on all of us rest squarely upon the alleged "manly man" residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.