CIA conducted medical experiments in torture on prisoners. Congress, multiple Presidents approved.

You need to read this. The Bush administration engaged in medical experimentation on prisoners. According to a report released June 7, 2010 by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) titled Evidence Indicates that the Bush Administration Conducted Experiments and Research on Detainees to Design Torture Techniques and Create Legal Cover, the CIA not only tortured prisoners in its custody, its interrogators performed grotesque experiments on them in our CIA's hideous quest to "perfect" torture.

PHR examined three instances of the CIA’s illegal medical research, although it should be understood this most likely does not constitute the full extent of the torture research program. Some of the experiments concerned the elaboration of more extensive forms of waterboarding, testing the use of large-volumes of water, the use of saline solution as a substitute for plain water, as well as the use of ancillary equipment, such as a gurney that could swing the prisoner into different angles, and use of a blood oximeter to measure subject vital signs and calibrate them with experimental techniques. The CIA also experimented on different levels of sleep deprivation in order to assess effects and coordinate practice with legal definitions constructed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

Part of the motivation behind the experimentation was in keeping with the notion of fabricating legal cover for their continued use of torture. And it didn't start with 9/11, 2001, either. We've apparently been engaged in the self-destructive business of torture for quite some time.

One of the most original pieces of research in the PHR report concerns the rewriting of the War Crimes Act (WCA) as part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). Concerned, it would seem, over their vulnerability to criminal prosecution for illegal and unethical research conducted upon detainees, including, as I’ve pointed out before, Abu Zubaydah, the Bush administration amended the WCA language in the MCA to weaken the protections against the strict prohibitions against scientific experiments on prisoners found in the Geneva Conventions. These changes were then made retroactive to 1997, which suggests the U.S. government was shielding interrogators and other officials for illegal acts going back four years prior to 9/11. And to their shame, Congress passed this legislation, and the language on the WCA was then retained by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress when the MCA was amended in 2009.

How can the American people allow the monsters who brought this shame and horror to our country to continue to walk the streets as free men? When will these deranged tormentors be brought to justice? And why, for the love of all that is decent, were these twisted sadists allowed to pervert the government of the country I was raised to love?

I am sickened beyond words.

...Cranky.