Bet ya didn’t know…
By Chris Floyd
01/12/06 “Moscow Times” – – If President George W. Bush shows no qualms about violating the 217-year-old U.S. Constitution or the 791-year-old Magna Carta, why should we be surprised to find that he is now violating the 2,400-year-old Hippocratic Oath?
And yet this week’s revelation of how U.S. doctors are force-feeding captives on hunger strike in Bush’s concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay still has the power to shock and sicken – not just from the savage act itself, but also for the wider moral defeat it represents: another open embrace of raw brutality, another step in America’s accelerating plunge into vicious despotism.
News of the hunger strike has been trickling out from the ever-incurious U.S. media for months. Indeed, Pentagon warlord Donald Rumsfeld even joked about prisoners “going on a diet.” But the full scope of the strike – and the unethical methods being used to quash it – only emerged this week in The Observer, which obtained legal affidavits from the Army doctors involved in this “torture lite.” The strike, which began last August with a handful of captives, has now spread to 81 prisoners trying to starve themselves to death. </i>
81? I had no idea it had gotten that widespread. Lord.