Happiness is a Warm Gun

God, someday our country’s hubris is going to come back to haunt us big time. And payback is going to be a mighty bitch when it comes (and it will come someday). The latest International Red Cross report from July, leaked and printed in the New York Times yesterday, condemns the Bush administration for using interrogation techniques in Guantanamo Bay that are “tantamount to torture” and are clearly illegal according to international and U.S. laws.

Haven’t we already done enough to piss off the Arab world for at least the next 50 years? The cultural memory in many of these countries is long…they’re still fighting over events that happened centuries ago…

The IRC people also noted that, in violation of all medical ethics, physicians were being consulted to ascertain the POWs’ physical and mental weaknesses, and sometimes the interrogators had the POWs’ medical files right in front of them during questioning. "Paging Dr. Josef Mengele to interrogation room 'C'..."Angel of Death" to interrogation room 'C'..."

According to an editorial in today’s Times, the good news is that the IRC noted that the Pentagon has backed off the sexual humiliation of the POWs and has ceased having female interrogators bare their breasts, fondle the POWs’, show them porn, and make sexually suggestive comments.

How does our government respond to all this (from today's Times):

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a news conference in Indianapolis on Tuesday, dismissed accusations that the tactics amounted to torture.

"We certainly don't think it's torture," General Myers said before delivering a speech to the Economic Club of Indianapolis, according to the Web site of The Indianapolis Star. "Let's not forget the kind of people we have down there," he said. "These are the people that don't know any moral values."

Who are we talking about here, general, the prisoners or their keepers?

And just who exactly would Jesus torture?