Say "Yes" to torture

As time goes by, the list of human rights abuses by the Bush Administration gets longer and longer.

And as we are learning in our wonderful Cable News era, no one will really mention this beyond the original article -- especially if they can obsess about the horse race of the next President.

What a valuable lesson in "how to get away with a crime".

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle.

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.' "

Nusairi, now free in Saudi Arabia, was unable to learn what drugs were injected before his interrogations. He is not alone in wondering: At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.

All former detainees...released because, well, turns out they weren't "the terrorizers". So we're just drugging them because ultimately we can.

But we're the SHINING CITY ON THE HILL PEOPLE!!! SHINING CITY ON THE HILL!

"Last best hope of mankind" and all that sh*t.

Naturally, the Bush Administration denies they did anything at all...

The Defense Department and the CIA, the two agencies responsible for detaining terrorism suspects, both deny using drugs as an enhancement for interrogations, and suggest that the stories from Nusairi and others like him are either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of routine medical treatment.

Uh-huh.

This, of course, fails to consider that in 2003 John Yoo totally ignored the actual law to say that using mind-altering drugs on detainees is perfectly legal, in Bush World. Even, apparently, on those that were not soldiers, nor even threats of any kind.

Strange that drugging American POWs is one of the things that Saddam did that got us so outraged in the first Gulf War.

Of course, this Bush Administration has screwed them over as well.

But the President can do what he wants in "war time" and the Bush Administration has created a perpetual undefined war. So, I guess, someday we can all look forward to the nod & wink that accompanies the building of the John Yoo Memorial Shower Room.

(pic from 3arabawy)