A cruel and mocking land where decency knows no home

The wingnuts were right - 9/11 did change everything - but not the way they couch it. Because of the insanity that has set in after that heinous attack, we have become something worse than what we were determined to defeat in the Cold War on ideological grounds.

Anything goes for Americans, and all other comers are less than human, bereft of rights and not entitled to dignity, subjected to treatment that would set up howls from every quarter if any country dared to subject any exceptional American to such treatment.

The next president needs to dissolve the Department of Homeland Security and all of the agencies that fall under that umbrella and return to the 9/10/01 status quo ante that served us quite well and even warned against the impending terror attacks over a month before they happened, only to be dismissed with a smirking "okay, you've covered your ass now."

The Washington Post has a long and sickening article on deportations in which people are sedated with dangerous psychotropic drugs normally used to control episodes of extreme psychosis and violence.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records and interviews indicate.

Records show that the government has routinely ignored its own rules, which allow deportees to be sedated only if they have a mental illness requiring the drugs, or if they are so aggressive that they imperil themselves or people around them.

Stung by lawsuits over two sedation cases, the agency changed its policy in June to require a court order before drugging any deportee for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons. In at least one instance identified by The Post, the agency appears not to have followed those rules.

As a medical professional, this sickens and disgusts me, and any medical person who has carried out this immoral and possibly illegal protocol should be in front of a professional review board to determine the status of their license and perhaps refer for criminal charges of assault.Let me give an example - if I am on duty in the lab and the police bring in a person they have arrested for driving under the influence for a blood test to back up the breathalyzer, I have to have that patient's consent before I perform a venipuncture under a very specific set of protocols for collection of forensic evidence. If that patient refused to give consent, and I perform the procedure anyway - I would be criminally liable for assaulting that patient and could see jail time as a result. And in that instance, evidence is being collected for presentation at trial - nothing is injected which carries inherent risk of injury or death via a physiological reaction.

There is simply no way that the sedation protocol passes muster, I don't care what those sadistic thugs Yoo and Addington (you just know that those feckless thugs wrote the legal opinions that allow this apostasy) say about it.

Citizens should be pissed of, sure - but every single medical professional in the country should be contacting their representatives and senators, and our professional organizations as well. I don't like being made complicit in crimes against humanity - and when medical escorts are prohibited from carrying out follow-up doses during layovers on foreign soil because it violates human rights laws, what the fuck else could a reasonable person call it?

I hang my head in shame.

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At the end of the day - February 20, 2008

Remember, when they say our economy is in the most vicious cycle ever, that includes 1929...The subprime crisis is far beyond what anyone has managed to get their heads around yet.

Bank of America delivered a report last night highlighting the current losses of the "credit crisis." According to the report, the meltdown in the U.S. subprime real estate market has led to a global loss of $7.7 trillion in stock market value since October.

It is affecting banks and economies world wide. We have taken a large chunk of the world along on our out-of-control handcart ride to hell.

Oh, this just makes all kinds of sense...The Philippines is a poor and struggling nation, surviving on the remittances of a migrant workforce already. So what kind of sense does it make for an impoverished country, already incapable of producing enough food to feed it's own population, to take what farmland it has and lease it to grow rice for EXPORT to China? Brilliant.

Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher has a new book coming out next month - "So Wrong for So Long: How the The Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq." You can listen to a podcast preview of the book here.

Now the US Military is backing away from the story that two female suicide bombers had Down Syndrome. Now they are saying that the women had received psychiatric treatment, but were not mentally retarded. "Both had recently received psychiatric treatment for depression and/or schizophrenia. From what we know now there's no indication that they had Down syndrome," said a spokesman, citing records obtained by the military.

Is anyone really surprised? After FEMA screwed the pooch on deploying trailers for victims of Hurricane Katrina and then realized the trailers were poisoning the people in them, it’s hardly news that they misused the money they made from selling said, poisoned trailers.

Increased Hurricane Losses Due to More People, NOT Stronger Storms...(.pdf alert) A new paper from noted tropical researchers have concluded that damage from hurricanes and tropical cyclones have increased in the U.S.... but not from stronger storms.

Chris Landsea and others found that it was due to population growth, infrastructure and wealth along the coastline... not a spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin.

"We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time," said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami. "There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts."

Interesting to see how the issue of rendition plays out in the U.K. where concern for civil liberties seems to be more important than fear-mongering (today's special: humble pie).

Dog and Pony Shows™ are going to get someone killed. I have been saying it for ages. I don't want a potentate to perish, but it's going to happen, and that is the only way the stupid, wasteful, tax-payer funded junkets are going to stop. They never get the real scoop anyway. For the second time in recent months, an aircraft in a war zone has been in peril with lawmakers aboard who are traipsing off to war zones for photo ops and to perhaps do a bit of shopping.


And that's it for Thursday - I hope when I wake up on Friday it isn't 1979 any more...


Tonights At the End of the Day has been brought to you with the help of Deb-TUD and Sniderman.

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Was waterboarding taping also outsourced?

With one new “war on terror” detainee claiming to have his torture videotaped, we have to wonder how many videos are out there.

And, just who all may have them.

First, the story:

The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization. He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released.

Note that he was held in an unidentified country. He may have been taken back to Jordan. Maybe Egypt. Maybe one of the Eastern Europe rendition sites.

Since we know about rendition itself, here’s a possibility:

Given that Bashmilah said he was taken to "an undisclosed country" during the time he said he was taped, maybe the CIA had intelligence officials of this country officially do the taping. That would be another way of trying to keep tapes hidden from U.S. oversight.

Maybe Jordanian or Pakistani intelligence, or Egypt's, has whole libraries of torture tapes. Although Bashmilah saw a full setup, maybe yet other detainees had interrogations, ones that included torture, taped on hidden cameras.

And, as TPM Muckraker notes, there may be more tapes that are still in CIA hands.

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