Waterboard Drew Sharp!

Assholes Anonymous

The Associated Press is reporting members of the medical community are accusing other members of the medical community of helping the Bush Administration refine it’s waterboarding technique.

Physicians for Human Rights outlined the allegations stemming from a Bush-era interrogation program and called on the White House to investigate. Its report was based on a re-examination and new interpretation of records that had been previously released.

U.S. government officials denounced the report, saying the government did not conduct human research on detainees. The officials said that such charges and documents have already been made public and were examined by multiple government investigations.

The author of the report, Nathaniel Raymond, said the declassified documents had never been examined with an eye on laws including the Nuremberg Code, established to ban Nazi Germany medical experimentation.

“We’re not writing the indictment here,” Raymond said before the report’s release at midnight Sunday. “We’re saying there needs to be a search warrant. If the White House does not act on this, it’s turning its back on something that could be perceived as a war crime.”

According to the report, “Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures.”

For example, the report said, doctors recommended adding salt to the water used for waterboarding, so the patient wouldn’t experience hyponatremia, “a condition of low sodium levels in the blood caused by free water intoxication.”

The report interpreted that doctor-recommended practice of using saline solution as “Waterboarding 2.0.”

More Bush bashing? Another NGO getting their panties in a twist over enhanced procedures for getting fascists like Khalid Sheik Mohammed to give up information on further ‘operations’? Absolutely. Will it keep us safer? That’s up for debate.

Personally, I believe torturing information out of a suspect like Ramzi Yusef or Mohammed Atta will result in bad information. If captures on the battlefield, our troops are taught to give as much disinformation as possible to their interrogators in the event they are tortured. Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Turkish and Iranian operatives are taught to do the very same thing. The real reason to waterboard an enemy of humanity is for the sheer joy of payback. You murder 3,000 of our civilians and were going to punish your ass starting with our interrogations.

I have no trouble with this at all. In fact, I’m all for it. However, if the AP article is to be believed, it appears the government needs human subjects to see if these new techniques will work. And so I’d like to nominate a waterboarding dummy for the CIA to experiment upon: Detroit Free Press columnist Drew Sharp.

It’s bad enough Sharp refuses to cast a Hall of Fame vote for Alan Trammell, although his numbers and years of service warrant inclusion in that elite fraternity. However his latest DEFENSE of Bud Selig, a man he regularly rips on his ESPN appearances, and his passive aggressive decision to not award Armando Galarraga his perfect game, is beyond the pale.

Commissioners must take into account the ripple effect of their actions. When they willingly enter the business of selectively determining which prior judicial wrongs are righted, they risk creating more problems.

Selig could have taken the easy path. Do what’s popular. Endorse Gala raga’s perfection. Let Joyce off the hook. And everybody would be happy.

But often, the right thing is unpopular because that requires telling people something they don’t care to hear.

Some injustices stand uncorrected, not due to a lack of conscience but due to practicality.

Detroit is sinking further into frustration and despair. The city is in desperate need of any good news and the best news of the spring was taken away by human error. A human error that can be corrected mind you. However, Sharp claims by doing the wrong thing Selig is actually doing the right thing. Detroit native Drew Sharp obviously went to the Goebbels School of Journalism because his stance makes perfect sense to me.

Perhaps, once we have Sharp in the waterboarding chair, we can try other ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques as well. A little electrocution perhaps?