torture is wrong

EXCLUSIVE: Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding"

From the article:

The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding."

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

EXCLUSIVE: Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding"

from the article:

Here's a new twist in the U.S. military's Islamic sensitivity effort in the prison camps for suspected terrorists at the Guantánamo Bay Navy base:
Military medical staff are force-feeding a secret number of prisoners on hunger strike between dusk and dawn during the Muslim fasting holiday of Ramadan. 

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175234/tomgram%3A_karen_greenberg%2C_the_two-guantanamo_solution/#more

Karen Greenberg, , the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, talks about the real meaning of the proposed “Closing Guantanamo” solutions.

from the article:

    The administration’s disingenuousness on this point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the system of indefinite detention that lay at its core and that continues to defy the rule of law as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. military law, and the international conventions that this country has signed onto.

    Closing Guantanamo does not simply mean emptying the prison cells at that naval base and throwing away the keys. It means ending the policy that has become synonymous with Guantanamo -- of incarcerating individuals without the need to prove their guilt, and without a clear and recognizable process for determining the grounds for their detention.

    Faced with opposition in Congress and in public sentiment generally, the Obama administration increasingly seems focused on ending not the conceptual nightmare we call Guantanamo, but the irritating problem that Guantanamo represents.  Unfortunately, as this administration will learn to its regret, there is no closing Guantanamo if preventive detention continues. 

He who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself. And if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss will stare right back at you.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

Scott Horton reads Homer and Auden and is sensible of  their truth. Their words reach across centuries and decades to Guantanamo Bay.

From Scott’s post:
A society that tortures and kills those placed entirely in its power and passes this fact by as a matter of indifference truly is plunging into the dark side of the world which these two poets describe–one at the dawn of man’s recorded history, the other in the crucible of modernity. On the day of these deaths in 2006, the American commander in Guantánamo violated the Homeric rules of decorum by taunting the dead and afflicting their families. The deceased prisoners “have no regard for human life,” he said. But in the end we must ask to whom those words more appropriately attach–the prisoners or those who have orchestrated the tragedy at Guantánamo? Another saying of the Achaean epoch applies to this tragedy. Long associated with the story of the Minotaur on Crete, it was recalled near the end of the nineteenth century by a philosophy professor at the University of Basel who waded deeply into the history of the era. “He who does battle with monsters,” he wrote, “needs to watch out lest he in the process become a monster himself.”

Here is the entire article:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006423