I Am Sick at Heart

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At Harper's Scott Harper has piece -- well, you just have to go read it for yourself.

• Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story.
• Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees.

CHILD-DETAINEES ? ? When/how did I miss that? Did you know? There were "child-detainees?"

What constitutes a "child-detainee?" My God.

But wait, there's more: [Emphasis added in the following is mine.]

• The Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners.
  
• This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
• Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

Christ, any "health professional" who would take part in systematic torture is no better than Josef Mengele.

All the "health professionals" who served at Guantanamo should be stripped of any licenses they hold. They should never come close to touching another person in any medical fashion.

Can they suddenly be transformed from a torturer back into a caring person? How? PLEASE TELL ME HOW?

Would you want one of them to treat or care for your mother, your child, yourself?

I wouldn't want any of them even to touch my mother's dog.

Maybe they should not even be allowed in our communities. Leave them at Guantanamo. They, too, can be declared "Enemy Combatants."

Disgusting, rotters, all.

And, so, the list grows.
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