Someone will have to explain to me how the practice of “rectal feeding” becomes a medical necessity.
Yet it’s a practice that Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove defended this morning on Fox News Sunday.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/14/karl-rove-torture_n_6322774.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013
The term was revealed in that Senate Intelligence Committee report on the treatment of terror suspects by the Bush administration immediately after the 9/11 attacks. One of the revelations is the practice of “rectal feeding,” which Rove said this morning was a “medical necessity.” The report issued by the Intelligence Committee’s Democratic members said otherwise.
Maybe I don’t get out much, but this practice is new to me.
As I understand it, the procedure involves pureeing food and then inserting it into individuals’ rectum. This is how suspects are, um, fed by their captors. Sounds yummy, doesn’t it?
Well, it’s apparently quite a painful process. It inflicts misery on those receiving these food injections.
If the suspect is refusing to eat as a form of protest, aren’t there other ways to “feed” them? Sedation, perhaps, and an intravenous line inserted into their arm would seem to do the trick.
The Senate report suggests the procedure was meant to torture the suspects and to get them to reveal battle plans or other “actionable intelligence” to which our military and spooks could respond.
It seems to me that rectal feeding goes a good bit beyond what is acceptable.
Leave it, though, to Karl Rove to defend, as necessary, a practice that is ay beyond disgusting.