Sickening

Well, here's a new one coming down the pike. Just when you think you've heard about most of the bad stuff at Abu Ghraib, some more oozes out.

Unqualified US military medics stationed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison carried out amputations, recycled used chest tubes and lacked medical supplies to treat the overcrowded jail's inmates after the fall of Baghdad, according to a report.

The Time magazine report, to hit newsstands Monday, also said that a medic was ordered, by one account, to cover up a homicide inside the jail.

Although the prison just outside Baghdad was jammed with as many as 7,000 detainees -- some of whom displayed serious mental illnesses -- no US doctor was in residence for most of 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The report said "with straitjackets unavailable, tethers -- like the leash held by Private Lynndie England -- were put to use at Abu Ghraib to control unruly or mentally disturbed detainees, sometimes with the concurrence of a doctor."

England has been charged with abusing Iraqi detainees at the jail. She was infamously photographed holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi inmate sprawled on a cell block floor.

In a statement obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites), Time reported that an Army medic based at Abu Ghraib spoke of examining 800 to 900 detainees daily as they were admitted. If he worked a 12-hour day, that gave him less than one minute for each exam.

The report cited National Guard Captain Kelly Parrson, a physician's assistant at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and 2004. Parrson was seriously injured by a mortar during an insurgent attack that targetted the jail.

Parrson told Time there were times when he and other non-physicians carried out amputations and other procedures on inmates that should have been performed by surgeons.

"I took off an ankle and a lower leg," he recalls. "There was no one else, and if it was death or amputation, you just had to do it."

"When somebody died, we just took out their chest tube and inserted it into another, living person," he said.

The National Guard captain cited a shortage of catheters, breathing tubes, orthopedic supplies, including casts used to treat bone fractures caused by shrapnel from high explosives.

More great planning.

Better sell some more magnets.