Blind, Deaf, and Dumb: If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, would Dick Durbin be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor?
6/19/2005 3:23:00 PM
By American Spectator – George Neumayr
If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Dick Durbin would be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor. It would be an occasion for great moral anguish. How did the U.S. sink so low as to adopt such Nazi-like callousness toward disabled prisoners of war? one could imagine him saying. Instead, Democrats — even as they spent part of the week crassly celebrating, with news of Schiavo’s autopsy report in hand, the human rights abuse of euthanasia against the disabled — are in a moral lather over the paucity of proper air conditioning terrorists receive at Guantanamo Bay.
All I have to say is that it’s a good thing that George Neumayr never asked his spouse to pull the plug when his brain died, or we might never have gotten this wonderful bunch of nonesense.
Erik,
The viciousness, callousness, and radical hatred of the left (including folks like yourself), is only exceeded by their utter and complete disregard for human decency, truth, and the value of human life; as well as by an endemic inability to be “funny.” Pathetic!
So pointing out obvious contradictions in the stance of liberals in pro-life and human rights issues is nonsense?
You say on your journal that you have no idea what he’s trying to do – so I hope I clarified.
Let’s keep the facts straight. Terri Schiavo’s brain had not “died” (severely handicapped, yes, but not dead), and she did not die by pulling the plug, but by dehydration and starvation.
Fr. Hans writes: “Let’s keep the facts straight. Terri Schiavo’s brain had not ‘died’ (severely handicapped, yes, but not dead), and she did not die by pulling the plug, but by dehydration and starvation.”
Let’s keep going a little more with the facts. I suppose you could say that she was severely handicapped, being permanently unconscious and insensate. (Oh, consciousness, that little thing.)
The difference between Terri Schiavo and someone brain dead is that she retained some deep brain functioning that permitted respiration and other autonomic functions.
The autopsy didn’t clear up all of the issues, but it cleared up many. Every pathological finding was consistent with a diagnosis of PVS. The areas of the cerebral cortex that control vision were gone, so she could not have “tracked” a balloon. There was no evidence of abuse on the part of her husband.
When the autopsy results were released, I figured that some on the right would at least acknowledge that some of their more strident and extreme statements were wrong. But not so. Maybe I missed something, but I have not heard word one from anyone acknowledging that maybe Terri Schiavo couldn’t see the balloon after all. Instead, the right wing has been backed away from the autopsy results as fast as they can.
During the press conference where the pathologists presented the autopsy results I flipped over to Fox News. They had a couple of talking heads discussing the missing Aruba teen. When Michael Schiavo’s attorney held his press conference Fox News had yet another story on the missing Aruba teen. The propaganda outlet of the Republican party couldn’t savage Michael Schiavo enough, and once the truth emerged they couldn’t back away from the story fast enough.
Terri Schiavo aside, I do think it’s very wrong to trivialize the abusive treatment meted out to prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. There is no doubt that abuse occurred sufficiently gruesome to sicken and disturb hardened FBI agents who then reported it to their superiors.
Dick Durbin had it right – these are actions we would expect from more diabolical regimes and not from Americans. Such behavior severely undermines the credibility and moral authority of the United States when speaking out against human rights abuses at other countries. Additionmally reports of mistreatment of prisoners places by Americans, places other Americans at risk should they become prisoners.
The other night switching channels I saw a sinsister Asian prison camp commandant in a Chick Norris movie laughing menacingly as US POWs were led off to be tortured saying “These aren’t POWs. NO! They are criminals, ha ha ha ha ha!” Wasn’t that what Alberto Gonzalez, our Attorney general also said.
Conservative commenators have said that despite these abuses, Guantanamo Bay is not nearly as bad as the jails of Hitler, Stalin or Saddam. Good because I would like to think that America holds itself to a far higher standard than that.
Isn’t putting Terri Schiavo “aside” the point of the Neumayr’s editorial?
Note 5. Prisoner of War has a meaning Dean.
I have no knowledge of the movie you were referring to in Note 5, but, I do have some basic knowledge of the memo written by Alberto Gonzalez. You, Dean, have reverted to grossly misrepresenting the memo and the law regarding prisoners of way. Oddly, enough, I have written any number of notes that previously corrected your misstatements of the law, YET TO NO AVAIL. (!!!) Imagine that.
First as to Alberto Gonzalez. Mr. Gonzalez was asked by the President to research and summarize the law on the treatment of illegal combatants. Mr. Gonzalez actually delegated the actual legal research to some subordinates. He did review and approve the memo prior to submitting it to the President. The memo WAS NOT a policy memo. The memo did not attempt to describe WHAT POLICY SHOULD BE. The memo was a summary of the law WAS AS IT WAS AS THAT MOMENT IN TIME. The press has completely disregarded this basic fact and misled the public. Alberto Gonzalez did not establish policy or recommend policy, he summarized the law as it existed.
Dean, knows full well that the term “prisoner of war” has a meaning. Firstly the Geneva Convention consists of not one but seven different agreements. International agreements are entered into by NATIONS and they govern relationships between NATIONS. A group of NATIONS entered into a agreement to determine HOW PRISONERS OF WAR would be treated. The Geneva Convention agreements BENEFIT THE SIGNING NATIONS AND THE REGULAR ARMIES OF THOSE SIGNING NATIONS. NO ONE ELSE.
As I noted at the outset a PRISONER OF WAR is someone who is a member of a national army, who wears a uniform and has a recognizable rank in that national army. These individuals are protected as long as they do not commit war crimes.
Illegal combatants are persons who do not belong to a national army. Al-Queda are illegal combatants. These people are nothing more than CRIMINALS who conspire to kill people. The are NOT PRISONERS OF WAR, repeat NOT prisoners of war.
These are important distinctions, Dean knows this but cannot pass up an opportunity to excoriate Bush even if it harms his own country.
Real Prisoner of Conscience, Pavel Litvinov Reproves Amnesty International Scandalously Irresponsible Accusations
By Pavel Litvinov
Saturday, June 18, 2005; Page A19 WASHINGTON POST
Several days ago I received a telephone call from an old friend who is a longtime Amnesty International staffer. He asked me whether I, as a former Soviet “prisoner of conscience” adopted by Amnesty, would support the statement by Amnesty’s executive director, Irene Khan, that the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba is the “gulag of our time.”
“Don’t you think that there’s an enormous difference?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said, “but after all, it attracts attention to the problem of Guantanamo detainees.”
The word “gulag” was a bureaucratic acronym for the main prison administration in Stalin’s Soviet Union. After publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” it became a symbol for the system of forced-labor camps that have been an integral feature of communist countries. Millions of prisoners confined in the gulag had not been involved in violence or committed any crime — they were there because they belonged to a “wrong” social, national or political group or expressed a “wrong” opinion.
The cruelty and scale of the gulag system are described in numerous books, so there is no need to recount them here. By any standard, Guantanamo and similar American-run prisons elsewhere do not resemble, in their conditions of detention or their scale, the concentration camp system that was at the core of a totalitarian communist system.
For example, incidents of desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo by U.S. personnel have been widely reported. But those Korans were surely not brought to Guantanamo by the prisoners themselves from Afghanistan. They were supplied by the U.S. administration — in spite of the obvious fact that most of the prisoners misguidedly found in the Koran the inspiration for their violent hatred of the United States.
By contrast, Russian author Andrei Sinyavsky, who was sentenced in 1966 to seven years’ forced labor for his writing, was approached one evening soon after his arrival in a labor camp by a prisoner who quietly asked Sinyavsky whether he wanted to listen to a recital of the biblical account of the apocalypse. (Possession of a Bible was strictly prohibited in the gulag.) The man took Sinyavsky to the furnace room, where a group of people were squatting in the dark recesses. In the light of the furnace flame, one of the men got up and started to recite the biblical passages by heart. When he stopped, the stoker, an old man, said: “And now you, Fyodor, continue.” Fyodor got up and recited from the next chapter. The whole text of the Bible was distributed among these prisoners, ordinary Russians who were spending 10 to 25 years in the gulag for their religious beliefs. They knew the texts by heart and met regularly to repeat them so that they would not forget. And this happened in 1967, when the gulag had become smaller and the Soviet regime milder than it had been under Stalin.
Amnesty International, with its fact-based, objective and balanced approach to the defense of human rights, has been a source of hope for dissidents everywhere. A central idea of Amnesty has been the concept of prisoner of conscience as a person who neither uses nor advocates political violence. Just to know that you have been adopted as a prisoner of conscience, that somewhere in the world there are people who know your name and are working for your release, gives a prisoner hope.
When I arrived in the United States after serving my term in Siberian exile, I met hundreds of dedicated Amnesty activists throughout the country who wrote letters to leaders of world governments demanding the release of prisoners of conscience. This activity created a special solidarity of human rights activists across national borders. Naturally, communist leaders denounced Amnesty as a CIA front, and right-wing dictators dismissed its members as communist plotters.
It was only natural that Amnesty flourished in the United States and in Western Europe, where human rights are taken seriously and their defense became an official part of U.S. foreign policy, largely due to the efforts of President Jimmy Carter. There were heroic attempts to create Amnesty groups in countries with dictatorial regimes, including the Soviet Union, but most of those attempts were crushed by arrests and forced emigration.
There is ample reason for Amnesty to be critical of certain U.S. actions. But by using hyperbole and muddling the difference between repressive regimes and the imperfections of democracy, Amnesty’s spokesmen put its authority at risk. U.S. human rights violations seem almost trifling in comparison with those committed by Cuba, South Korea, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
The most effective way to criticize U.S. behavior is to frankly acknowledge that this country should be held to a higher standard based on its own Constitution, laws and traditions. We cannot fulfill our responsibilities as the world’s only superpower without being perceived as a moral authority. Despite the risks posed by terrorism, the United States cannot indefinitely detain people considered dangerous without appropriate safeguards for their conditions of detention and periodic review of their status.
Words are important. When Amnesty spokesmen use the word “gulag” to describe U.S. human rights violations, they allow the Bush administration to dismiss justified criticism and undermine Amnesty’s credibility. Amnesty International is too valuable to let it be hijacked by politically biased leaders.
The writer, who was a dissident active in human rights causes in the Soviet Union, now lives in the United States.
The decline of Amnesty International into another bash America public relations organ shows the corruptive power of the Progressive ideology. The once respectable (and much needed) human rights organization has traded their moral credibility for the progressivist cause. Who can take them seriously anymore?
It looks like the Schiavo thread is turning into the “enemy combatant” thread, but before that transformation is complete, did anyone notice that the autopsy results for Terri Schiavo large confirmed Michael Schiavo’s side of the case?
It is interesting to me that a couple of months ago the right wing couldn’t get enough of Schiavo. The most horrible accusations of abuse were thrown at Michael Schiavo. Every rumor and allegation, even from people who had no credibility whatsoever, was taken as absolute truth.
After the autopsy results were released the right wing has backed away from the case as fast as possible. Fox example, during the press conference where the autopsy results were announced, Fox News had a discussion on the missing teen in Aruba. During the press conference with Michael Schivo’s attorney, Fox News had — you guessed it — another segment on the missing teen in Aruba.
Post-autopsy, I have not seen even one instance in which an accuser of Michael Schiavo has backed away from a single accusation. No one says “I guess Judge Greer was right after all; she really didn’t see the balloon.”
RE: No. 6. As others on the blog have pointed out, there are important reasons from an Orthodox Christian viewpoint, for opposing the court’s decision to allow Terri Schiavo to die. Orthodox Christianity holds that life a precious gift from God and that our love for God requires that we protect life even in the most extreme cases.
If we do not protect human life, even in the most extreme cases, then we start sliding down the slippery slope towards sanctioning euthanasia of the disabled or infirm. We become like the ancient Spartans who left sick babies out for the wolves to eat, or the Nazis who locked the mentally retarded into the backs of trucks, released the gas, and drove around until they were all dead.
My friends on this website, have done a much better job of explaining why they wanted to protect Terri Schiavo then any of the grandstanding politicians, pundits and TV preachers, because they have acknowleged that Terri Schiavo was an extreme case. As tha autopsy demonstrate, she was more than just disabled – half her brain had atrophied away. She was cortically blind, had no memory, or cognitive ability. To many reasonable people, myself included, it seemed like she had lost everything that makes a person human.
As has been explained to me, our Orthodox faith teaches that even in such a severe state of decline, life must be protected. However there are good people from other traditions who believe that mercy towards a person in such a severe state of decline requires letting them dies with dignity. They are not murderers, they are not evil people, they simply have a set of ethical guidelines that yields a different result in this extreme situation from what our religion teaches.
What I resent about people like Neumayer, and all the other grandstanding politicians, pundits and TV preachers, is their refusal to acknowlege the ethical complexity of the situation or the severity of Ms. Schiavo’s situation, (they continue speaking of her as if she was just one or two physical therapy sessions away from enjoying ballroom dancing). Their depiction of people who favored letting Ms. Schiavo death with dignity as callous, brutal murderers is vicious and malevolent. Why is it not possible to at least see Michael Schiavo as a man with good motives and intentions in a difficult situation, even if we disagree with his decision, than to continue to depict him as a quasi-murderer?
The people tortured at Abu Ghraib and Gauntanamo Bay were sentient, fully conscious human beings with the ability to feel emotional and physical pain. To compare their abuse to the decsion to allow someone in a vegetative state to die with dignity is outrageous and misleading.
Dean, I have a hard time calling what happened in Abu Ghraib torture. Certainly, it could have escalated into that if allowed to continue. I don’t know enough about the Gitmo situation to really make a definitive decision. You are absolutely correct that we have a God given responsibility to protect human life even in extreme situations. You also point out that extreme situations can make for difficult ethical decisions.
The war or terror is an extreme situation. The President and the Armed Forces have a Consitutionally mandated imperative to protect and defend this country.
What I don’t like are the liberal political hacks who constantly try to depict the situation in Gitmo as if it were ordinary and normal and the people held there as equivalent to folks caught up in a police sweep of an inner city neighborhood and our troops as evil, malicious, hateful goons equivalent to Nazi storm troopers.
There is far more reason to distrust Michael Schiavo’s motives than to distrust the motives of our armed forces.
You are correct on one point–all the hyperbole surrounding both cases makes a difficult situation even harder.
There is no question that both war and euthanasia are Satanic in origin. To avoid being drawn into sin by Satanic temptation in such situations is difficult, even with the weapons of unseen warfare the Church provides for us. The fact is most of us don’t know how to use the weapons. The secular world even denies the need for such weapons. Nevertheless, we have to engage the Satanic enemy in as an effective a way as possible with what we know.
The first two steps of Unseen Warfare as laid out in the book of the same name are a complete distrust of yourself followed by a daring trust in God. He will give us the guidance and the strength to stay the course with as few casualties as possible.
Dean writes: “However there are good people from other traditions who believe that mercy towards a person in such a severe state of decline requires letting them dies with dignity.”
Apparently, this includes most of the people in the country, .
Dean: “As has been explained to me, our Orthodox faith teaches that even in such a severe state of decline, life must be protected.”
I have never heard an adequate explanation of the difference in moral situation between someone who is cortically dead vs. someone who is brain dead. In both cases you have someone whose body is intact. Both are kept alive through medical interventions: a feeding tube in one case, and a ventillator in the other case. In other words, the same argument that one would make for terminating life support in the case of brain death is the same argument that one would make in the case of cortical death. Or the other way, the same argument that one would make for not terminating life support in the case of cortical death works equally well as an argument for not terminating life support in the case of brain death. The only difference is in the interventions used to sustain life.
Another interesting situation was that faced by Tom Delay’s family when his father suffered a serious brain injury. With virtually no discussion the family decided not to give him dialysis when he went into kidney failure. In the absence of any living will they decided unilaterally that he would not want to live in that condition. Delay’s father’s physical condition was worse than Terri Schiavo’s, but if anything he appeared to be more aware. The family noted that when his son Randy came into the room that the father’s heart rate and pulse would increase.
The difference here is that Terri Schiavo was a useful political pawn, whereas Tom Delay’s father was . . . Tom Delay’s father. Terri Schiavo’s reported wishes did not matter, and the father’s presumed wishes did matter — although one of Delay’s family members noted that “There was no point to even really talking about it.” Terri Schiavo’s quality of life didn’t matter, but old man Delay’s did: “Daddy did not want to be a vegetable.”
I wonder what the Orthodox Church had to say about that. Nothing, as far as I know.
No protesters outside Tom Delay’s house. No questions concerning whether Delay’s family would inherit money after his death, thus creating a conflict of interest. No protests about the lack of a living will. No “culture of death” rhetoric. No comparisons to the Nazis. No emergency state legislation. No complaints about the lack of “due process.” No speeches on the floor of the house.
Missourian writes: “Illegal combatants are persons who do not belong to a national army.”
The term “illegal combatant” is not defined in the Geneva Convention.
Missourian: “These people are nothing more than CRIMINALS who conspire to kill people. ”
If they are criminals, then why not have criminal trials? We have a procedure for that.
Missourian: “As I noted at the outset a PRISONER OF WAR is someone who is a member of a national army, who wears a uniform and has a recognizable rank in that national army.”
There are other categories as well.
Michael writes: “I have a hard time calling what happened in Abu Ghraib torture. Certainly, it could have escalated into that if allowed to continue.”
“Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal — that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis — may do a lot to undercut the administration’s case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That’s because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. ‘Was that something that [an MP] dreamed up by herself? Think again,’ says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. ‘That’s a standard torture. It’s called “the Vietnam.” But it’s not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them.'”
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/
Note 15 Who has the credibility problem, Jim? U.S. Military or Amnesty International
Have you considered asking yourself why we even know about Abu Ghraib? It wasn’t because of Seymour Hersh. It was because the American military, our volunteer force, made the misconduct public several months before Hersh gave it any attention.
It was disclosed in several routine reports available to the public. Prosecutions were initiated and the defendants were provided expert and independent attorneys with the power to persue ALL DEFENSES. This means that the defendants had full opportunity to prove that “they were taught” these items. In fact, the cases revealed that the ringleader of the abuse was someone who had done the same thing at a civilian prison. The military’s basic mistake was its failure to investigate this man’s background and it failure to block him from working in a prison. The trials were open and a record was created. This is not the action of a monstrous military gone wrong. This is the action of a military that prosecutes wrongdoers and creates an open public record of those prosecutions.
Today, as we type these words, people are suffering unspeakably in Iraq at the hands of the insurgents,as well as in North Korea, Sudan, Viet Nam and many other places. Every day American and Iraqi soldiers uncover more evidence of horrendous mass graves. The attention given to Abu Ghraib is a cover up of more important and disturbing events going on around the world.
I recently supplied an essay written in the Washington Post by a genuine prisoner of conscience who reported that Amnesty International has INTENTIONALLY overstated their claim against Gitmo SO THAT THEY (AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL) could get the press coverage they wanted. No reasonable person will give them credence until they change leadership, change policies and admit their errors.