The Congressional Healthcare Bill in America I spent a good deal of this morning and yesterday reading over the proposed American healthcare bill (or at least, a compound version; there appear to be five doing the rounds). I don't want to blog on the details of it immediately. It's also a bill, which may well stall in the Senate or be overtaken by events, and which could yet be critically amended. It is the product of Congress, not the administration per se, and the lawyers have not yet got at it. I had some instant worries about it though. In no particular order, I'll list them; Firstly, it can't allow individuals to choose their doctor and treatment in the long run; instead, it will practically formalise the role of doctors as salaried employees of large medical groups. Sarah Palin is onto something with the idea that this will then allow essentially ideological or non-medical outlooks on, say, euthanasia, abortion, transgender issues, or non-emergency treatments of c...
One Sinner That Repents....
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click here and scroll down to the video of the lecture
The Other Martin
I always assumed--that story has been around for a while--that the British were either in interrogations and feeding questions, or observing some of them. Since the Foreign Secretary has denied that to Parliament a few times, getting friends in America to threaten the Ministers would convince them not to allow the pictures and words out.
The other thing is that the CIA is an irrational and vengeful beast, and the Department of Defense even more so, and they tend to spend their existence messing up, breaking rules, and then covering up for themselves.
They also contain people (I have in my travels in DC and in Oxford years ago met a couple of them) who are frankly terrifying. What's to say they weren't employing them, or their equivalents in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to do some very bad things? Deniability is an article of faith with those people--a matter of loyalty. You wouldn't want someone aggrieved going and doing an A.Q. Khan or such.
If, on top of that, they were torturing people to try and get them to say things that would establish a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam that almost certainly didn't exist, on the orders of the Vice-President's office, they wouldn't want it revealed.
Time reveals everything. Lets wait and see what they are hiding, because it will come out, and hopefully not unnoticed, in the end.
Frankly, looking back on it, we should just have asked Rumsfeld and Cheney where they left the bill of sale for the WMDs they sold Saddam in the previous three decades.
Of course, that's one more motive; people who took orders were sent down for Abu Ghraib. What if it was practice mandated and executed from the top in other places too?
Things always go like this. There is a long skein of dark badness stretching from Algiers to Indochina to Nicaragua and, via Northern Ireland and Spain, into Guantanamo and all the other places.
It's barely under control. Look at what happened in Germany. Schroeder and Merkel seem to have been, at various points, living with a federal security agency which was basically working for someone else and telling them very little. How many of those torture questions were asked as a consequence of interrogations in 'friendly third countries' that the documents would identify? Polish castles, anyone? Saudi Arabia? Rawalpindi? Anyone?
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/05/15/miller/index.html