I can't even believe I'm writing another post about this, because it's just ludicrous that anyone would try and defend rectal rehydration with a straight face. But I am.
Two of the most brutal CIA interrogation tactics revealed in the Senate’s report on torture are little-known techniques called “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration.” The backlash to the exposure of the techniques was swift, but former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden defended them Thursday as “medical procedures” necessary to get fluids into dehydrated detainees and were not used as “a method of interrogation.”
Doctors and psychiatrists, however, said they have zero medical application and are nothing more than full-bore torture methods that no medical professional should ever be a party to. More than that, they are well-documented forms of painful, humiliating torture that have been used since the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, doctors said.
“This is a variation on a medieval form of torture in which the intestines were swollen up with fluid in order to cause pain," said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and board member of the Center for Victims of Torture, both of which are in Minneapolis. "You can’t feed somebody this way. And so, for the U.S. government to claim that this is some sort of feeding technique, that’s just totally bizarre,” he said. “Because there is no physiological way for any nutrients to be absorbed in the colon, any medical participation in this rectal feeding procedure is medical participation in torture.”
There you have it. Hayden's just a lying jerk like the rest of them over at the CIA, and he should experience it rather than pretend it's something legit.
By the way, you know what galls me most about all the CIA counterspin on this? The claim they did it all in our name. It was for us, fellow Americans. In our names.
I never signed onto anything allowing heinous acts of inhuman treatment to be done in my name now or ever. So they can take that talking point and shove it...where rehydration doesn't happen.
