Whatever happened to the United States?

Recognize this guy? OK, he's even before my time. Well it's Dr. Josef Mengele. So what does this have to do with our United States of America. Well Joe Gandelman directs us to Doctors Without Ethical Borders by Andrew Sullivan with this question:

If THIS had happened in another country several years ago, what would Americans have said about that country?

Sullivan then directs us to his review of Oath Betrayed by Dr. Stephen Miles. The evil of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal has corrupted many things but corrupting a doctor's sacred ancient oath is perhaps one of the lowest.

One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision — and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.

One of those rules was that a prisoner's medical information could be provided to interrogators to help guide them to the prisoner's "emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses" (in Rumsfeld's own words) in the torture process. At an interrogation center called Camp Na'ma, where the unofficial motto was "No blood, no foul," one intelligence officer testified that "every harsh interrogation was approved by the [commander] and the Medical prior to its execution." Doctors, in other words, essentially signed off on torture in advance. And they often didn't inspect the victims afterward. At Abu Ghraib, according to the Army's surgeon general, only 15% of inmates were examined for injuries after interrogation.

Sully's review has much more if you have the stomach for it and Dr.Miles book will be available on June 27th.