Would it be possible to have healthcare for $10 or $20 a week? I know this is very approximate but what if:
A doctor can see 10 patients in a working day.
If the doctor works 5 days per week, and takes of 1 month per year, there are ~225 working days a year subtracting standard holidays.
225 working days X 10 patients per day = 2250 patient visits per year.
If the average person visits the doctor 4 times per year, 2250/4 = 562.5 patients.
If each patient pays the doctor $10 per week, $10 X 52 = $520 per patient per year.
$520/pt X 562 pt = $292,240
If there are two doctors in the practice, $584,488. Subtract 1/3 for staff, 1/3 for facilities and so on, and the doctors split $194,826 between them for a salary of $97,413 each.
Of course there are many additional details, but could it work?
Leon Panetta recently declared that all crimes have a seven year statute of limitations. From the news anus 'The Washington Post'.
"Yet my agency continues to pay a price for enduring disputes over policies that no longer exist," he wrote.
"Those conflicts fuel a climate of suspicion and partisanship on
Capitol Hill that our intelligence officers -- and our country -- would
be better off without," he wrote.
Who the hell does this guy think he is? I'm sure that there are lots of people who would like to have all of their past misdeeds forgiven and forgotten after seven years.
Hey Leon, we have a Constitution that guarantees equality before the law. That includes you, and all of your torturing employees. Do us all a favor and step down. Your statements are contrary to everything America stands for.
This article came out in the news a few days ago, and no one here noticed so I thought I'd throw it out and see who bites.
Army report finds faulty monitoring at Blue Grass Army Depot
BY JEFFERY MCMURRAY- ASSOCIATED PRESS- JULY 20, 2009
LEXINGTON,
Ky. -- An Army inspector general's report concludes a deadly nerve agent
at Kentucky's chemical weapons stockpile was inadequately monitored for
two years, although it found no evidence any workers were exposed or
any agent escaped the storage igloos into the atmosphere.
The report, covering September 2003 through August 2005 at the Blue
Grass Army Depot in Richmond, was obtained under a Freedom of
Information Act request by the Washington-based Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility.
Richard
Sloan, a spokesman for the chemical weapons operation at the depot,
said Monday the Army was preparing a response but had no immediate
comment on the specific findings.
"We have received a copy of
the inspector general's report and will go over it carefully to see if
there's anything additional we can do to provide enhanced safety for
the community and its citizens," Sloan said.
The 51-page
inspector general's report seems to validate some allegations by Donald
Van Winkle, a former weapons monitor at the depot who claimed he was
pushed out of his job after raising safety concerns about the air
monitoring system used in the igloos where rockets and mortars
containing the nerve agent VX are housed.
In December, an
administrative law judge dismissed a whistle blower lawsuit in which
Van Winkle argued the depot retaliated against him for reporting the
violations.
And so on. You can read the rest at cwwg.com.
The issue here is nerve gas. The US is signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention. The CWC is a treaty that mandates that all parties destroy their chemical munitions stockpiles.
The primary holders of chemical weapons have been the US and USSR/Russia.
We started out with about 35,000 tons of chemical weapons. So far, ~63% has been destroyed.
If you read the rest of the above excerpted article, you will see that the assertion is made that the fact that the VX weapons were without monitoring for two years is really no big deal because VX doesn't evaporate very easily (non-volatile). Sadly enough this assertion is absurd. The National Academy of Sciences, in a 2004 report/analysis of chemical weapons, states clearly that the volatility of VX is such that at 25 C (room temperature) 12.6 mg of VX is present in a cubic meter of air. The same report also states that the level of VX in air that is immediately dangerous to life and health is 0.003 mg/m3. Now if we divide 12.6 by 0.003 we get 4200. Thus, if a leak occurred, the concentration of VX would be 4200 times the level necessary to be considered immediately dangerous.
So what you ask does this have to do with race? Most of the facilities that store or destroy these hellish chemicals are located in poor areas. The facilities are Pine Bluff in Arkansas (burning now), Deseret in Tooele Utah (burning now), Anniston Army depot in Anniston Alabama (burning now), Bluegrass Arsenal in Kentucky (under construction), Edgewood Proving Ground north of Baltimore (closed), Newport in Indiana (destruction finished being decommissioned), Umatilla in Oregon (burning now), Pueblo in Colorado (under construction), and Johnston Island (closed and decommissioned).
There has been a good deal of community opposition to these destruction facilities. Pine Bluff, Umatilla, Deseret, Anniston, and Johnston Island all use incinerators. All of the incinerators on the continent are located in poor communities. Bluegrass and Pueblo will use a chemical neutralization process.
The destruction effort at Newport merits special consideration. This facility, located in a predominantly white community, used the neutralization process. The products of this process are still considered to be chemical weapons under the CWC. This material (called hydrolysate) was loaded onto trucks and driven to Port Arthur Texas, where it was burned. Port Arthur was selected after plans to dispose of the waste were rejected by the communities surrounding two other facilities. You have probably guessed correctly. The other communities were predominantly white and the population mounted vigorous protests. So the Army and its contractors decided to burn their mess in a poor community.
Why? Because nobody who 'mattered' (affluent, white, connected) cared. I wonder if anyone here cares.
"We commend the government for halting its reliance on evidence
obtained through torture and other abuse in Mr. Jawad's habeas case,"
said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security
Project and a lawyer for Jawad. "Now it is time to send Jawad home to
Afghanistan because there is no credible evidence against him. Nearly
seven years of unlawful detention is long enough."
Isn't that sweet. Now I see Change we can believe in.
I was just looking over the recently released CIA IG review document and was struck by the number of deletions. The document is here: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/052708/052708_Special_Review.pdf.
I looked at page 7, which seems to be an enumeration of the techniques used. If you look you will see that the entirety of the page is blocked out except for the words 'the waterboard technique'. Given the large black space, I decided to take the measure of what might me hidden behind the redaction. So, I copied out the page and set about measuring the area of the visible text (48 x 8 mm) and the area of the blacked out space (228 x 184 mm). Visually comparing the font size of the visible section to other sections of the document, I selected the indented block on page 9 begining 'Article 16...' and measured the text block. It is 115 x 141 mm, contains 18 lines of text, with an average character count (including spaces and punctuation) of 60.5 characters per line. I then calculated the infomation content of each line by subtracting the interword spaces and came up with the information content ration of .8635, or each line is 86.35% information in the form of letters and punctuation.
So then I went back to page 7, The 228 mm height of the boxwould allow for approximately 35 lines of text. If we subtract a couple of lines for overhang of the box, and a couple more for paragraph breaks lets say we have 30 lines of informtion. Each line being 86% characters and about 60 spaces long makes for 51 characters per line, times 30 lines rquals 1548 characters. So lets round down again and say 1500 characters are hidden by the black out.
So what does that mean? The text 'the waterboard technique' is 22 characters in 24 spaces. If we take a wild guess at the percentage of the total character count that actually describes something evil like water boardng of say 50%, there are 750 evil characters. Since waterboarding is 22 characters if it is taken as a prototypical word size for a concise description of an evil technique there is 750/22 = 34 possibilities for evil techniques to be hiding here, and if we subtract the one we know about we have 33.
I know that there are a lot of assumptions, but I think that the possibility of 33 more techniques should scare anybody. Maybe this is why they are so afraid to release the information as we would know them for the monsters they were, and are.
I've written about the peculiar Texas Law Of Parties which reads in part:
Sec. 7.02. CRIMINAL
RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONDUCT OF ANOTHER. (a) A person is criminally
responsible for an offense committed by the conduct of another if:
(1) acting
with the kind of culpability required for the offense, he causes or
aids an innocent or nonresponsible person to engage in conduct
prohibited by the definition of the offense;
(2) acting
with intent to promote or assist the commission of the offense, he
solicits, encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid the other
person to commit the offense; or
(3) having
a legal duty to prevent commission of the offense and acting with
intent to promote or assist its commission, he fails to make a
reasonable effort to prevent commission of the offense.
(b) If,
in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another
felony is committed by one of the conspirators, all conspirators are
guilty of the felony actually committed, though having no intent to
commit it, if the offense was committed in furtherance of the unlawful
purpose and was one that should have been anticipated as a result of
the carrying out of the conspiracy.
Thus, if GWB was present at his Crawford Texas ranch at the time that any of the crimes were committed against detainees or civilians in military or other government custody the Law of Parties could be used by the Texas AG to indict and try Bush. I have found records that Bush was at Crawford in November and/or December 2001, for most of August of 2002 and 2003, just after Christmas 2003, in April 2004.
At the ACLU site (http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/102405/) is a listing of dates of death of subjects in US custody. Many cases of 'natural' death were listed in August 2003, several in April 2004 and August 2004.
Unfortunately I have turned up few hard numbers on the dates that Bush was in Crawford. If these could be shown to coincide with any of the deaths listed as homicide, Bush would be liable under the Parties law, and the AG of Texas would be obligated (yeah I know) to investigate.
Elsewhere in this site I have talked a little about whistleblowing. So I thought that here I would tell a whistleblowing story that I was involved in years ago.
I was working at a major pharmaceutical company. This company has since been purchased several times and no longer exists.
The company had several successful and valuable drugs in the marketplace, but unfortunately they were short on recent successes and their was little in the pipeline. The drugs that were making most of the money for the company (2) were due to go off patent soon and with nothing else to fuel the company there was of course a tremendous scramble to come up with something new quickly.
The company had an internal project developing a derivative of a drug that was in their intellectual property portfolio and applying it to the treatment of life threatening situation often seen in the emergency room. Thus they had done a lot of hurried studies on the drug and had applied to FDA for permission to use it in the treatment of the acute life threatening condition. Since there were at the time no drugs available to treat the condition FDA granted fast track approval for the commencement of clinical trials.
As part of my work, I had become privy to certain research data in animals that raised some serious safety questions. I inquired and was told that the mechanism of toxicity was assumed to be due to the peculiarities of the animal being used. It was opined that the metabolism of the animal resulted in the formation of a toxic metabolite. The effect of the metabolite was to 'liquefy' the heart of the animal. Being of an inquisitive bent, I proposed certain investigations to try to clarify the issue. At first my proposal was received well. Some days later one of my supervisors took me aside and told me not to do the experiment, write anything down about it or even continue talking about it. I asked why and was told that corporate management had made the decision.
Ultimately, I spoke to the vice president of research and development for the company and was told essentially to shut up if I knew what was good for me.
I took all of this as a signal that the worst would indeed happen, and began applying for other jobs. No luck - I had been blackballed. Since that time I have never worked for a major pharmaceutical company.
After securing a new job and leaving the industry, I was driving along late one night and a news blurb on the radio came on and announced the trial of the drug in question had been called off, as more patients receiving the treatment than the control group had died.
I found this sickening. I tried contacting news outlets and was told 'we'll get back to you'. I tried calling FDA - not interested, they said that bad things sometimes happen in clinical trials. I tried to find the families of the dead patients - no luck. Law enforcement, local and national, didn't respond.
So what does blowing the whistle get you? I have the pride of knowing I was right, the shame of not finding an effective way to do anything about it and the dark feeling of having blood on my hands.
I've scanned through the text, and I am ashamed, appalled, angry and frightened. There is no longer any doubt that our countrymen committed war crimes. The only solution is prosecution. We can not stand by and let this be rationalized by the apologists, justifiers and barbarians. I call on our elected government to arrest everyone involved in these crimes and turn them over for trial to the ICC. The USDOJ and Judiciary branch, indeed the entire government have been too deeply involved in this issue to be able to maintain any pretense of impartiality in the administration of desperately needed justice.
Random comments:
Who is Dr. Bruce Jessen and why is his name not redacted?
Use of smoke as an interrogation method?
Use of induced physical weakness and exhaustion?
Disruption of biorythms?
Another enabler - Tim Flanigan.
Who is Rizzo, it seems he may be another lawyer on the justification team. Found it: CIA General Counsel John Rizzo.
[V]iolent acts aren't necessarily torture; if you do torture, you probably have a defense; and even if you don't have a defense, the torture law doesn't apply if you act under color of presidential authority. CIA interrogators and their supervisors, under pressure to get information about the next attack, viewed the opinion as a 'golden shield,' as one CIA official later called it, that provided enormous comfort. 231
Major Paul Burney, psychologist _redacted. Why are some names released and some not?
LTC Louie "Morgan" Banks.279 - another psychologist.
[T]his is my opinion, even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part ofthe time we were focused on trying to establish a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between AI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link .. , there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more I.mme dl' ate resu Its. 291 - Bush team searches for justification for invasion of Iraq.
Dr. Percival and one ofthe two trainers, Joseph Witsch, had been instructors at the exploitation training for. in July, where they had discussed and demonstrated physical pressures. 315 - another complicit psychologist.
For example, the interrogator told the Committee that there was a discussion with lPRA personnel that military working dogs, already present at GTMO for security, could enhance detainee exploitation.
Two more war crimes: Category III techniques included the daily use of 20 hour interrogations; the use of strict isolation without the right of visitation by treating medical professionals or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC);
Nazi tactics: (U) According to the meeting minutes, LTC Beaver suggested that the IfF might "need to curb the harsher operations while [the International Committee ofthe Red Cross (ICRC;~is around," and that it would be "better not to expose them to any controversial techniques." LTC Beaver explained that "[t]he ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention.,,395 The minutes reflect that the CIA lawyer added his view: In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD has 'moved' them away from the attention of the ICRC. Upon questioning from the ICRC about their whereabouts, the DOD's response has repeatedly been that the detainee merited no status under the Geneva Convention.396
No wonder the CIA is worried. As to whether Geneva Conventions would apply, Mr. Fredman noted that the "CIA rallied for it not to.,,406
Mock executions don't work as well as friendly approaches,
Another new technique: LTC Beaver said that she had learned about the wet towel technique from a Navy doctor who had been assigned to the Hospital at Guantanamo and who described to her its use at the Navy SERE school.
"It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong"
"Any of the techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents."
Talk of "wet towel treatment" which results in the lymphatic gland reacting as if you are suffocating, would in my opinion; shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.408
Would you feel good about discussing your problems with this guy?
BSCT psychiatrist MAl Paul Burney sent an email to LTC Banks, stating that "persons here at this operation are still interested in pursuing the potential use of more aversive interrogation teclmiques ... Were more aversive teclmiques approved for use in the future by appropriate people, the operation would like to have a few task force personnel specifically trained in various techniques.,,410 MAl Burney asked whether LTCBanks knew "where task force personnel could go to receive such training" and whether he knew of"any consultants who could assist ifany ofthese measures are eventually approved.,,411
So they did beat the hell out of them. Another FBI agent reflected upon the failed interrogation in his own email of October 8, 2002, observing that "I think we should consider leaving him alone, let him get healthy again and do something 'different. ",436
Another dirty lawyer for the Spanish:
The October 11, 2002 techniques memo was accompanied by a cover memo and legal brief written by GTMO's Staff Judge Advocate (SJA) LTC Diane Beaver. The cover memo stated simply that ''the proposed strategies do not violate applicable federal law.,,453 LTC Beaver began her analysis of the "aggressive" techniques by stating that the "detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay ... are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.'.457
But I suppose that all of these problems would be obviated if the information was kept secret.
...and that my agents, as well as other [military personnel] will face both legal and ethical problems if they become aware oftheir use. 576
Unbelievable
In addition, the plan stated that MG Miller had approved the use of hospital gauze to restrain the detainee's mouth to prevent him from becoming argumentative and verbally abusive.
Our premier domestic law enforcement agency turns a blind eye. Why didn't they do their job?
Executive Assistant Director Pat D'Amuro who immediately said we (the FBI) would not be a party to actions of any kind that were contrary to FBI policy and that individuals should distance themselves from any such actions.,,632
...treating Khatani like an animal, using a military working dog, and forcing him to pray to an idol shrine.664
The draft SOP also listed "Worship the Gods" where a detainee would
Whats "Bidermans' principles? Can one of our psychologists help?
The training included instruction on "Biderman's Principles," including lessons from a chart that was originally included in a 1957 article about how communists elicited false confessions.802
[The] use of physical and psychological pressures during interrogations, if deemed appropriate, are tools that can be applied in order to establish and reinforce [Biderman's] principles... these principles and associated pressures allow the interrogation system to establish and maintain control of the exploitation process...
use of safety positions;
According to Mr. Mora, the "OLC memo proved a vastly more sophisticated version ofthe Beaver Legal Brief, but it was a much more dangerous document because ofthe statutory requirement that OLC opinions are binding provided much more weight to its virtually equivalent conclusions.,,940
The report, she said, had been "geared toward a particular conclusion[]" and the legal analysis was written to support that conclusion.
''use of smoke pipe ... is also used at the SERE School.,,954
Working Group determined that there was a major issue in law or policy with respect to waterboarding "that cannot be eliminated. ,,970
"making sexual affiliated movements with her chest and pelvis while again speaking sexually oriented sentences.,,1029
The second incident involved a female military interrogator who wiped what she told the detainee was menstrual blood on a detainee's face and forehead. l033
Khatani had also been forced to wear a dog collar and perform dog tricks, and interrogators had placed signs on him such as "liar," "coward," and "dog.,,1048
"These people are scared to death of dogs, and the dogs have a tremendous affect.,,1514
And it wasn't just jihadis.
The IROE stated that the interrogation approaches specified in Army FM 34-52, as well as yelling, light control, loud music, deception, and false flag were "approved for all detainees, regardless of status (security detainees, civilian internees, or EPWs).,,1555
Similarly, the warden of the Hard Site at Abu Ghraib stated that military intelligence made detainees engage in physical training and he saw "detainees holding buckets, arms out, and other drillS.,,1626
the use of power tools, stress positions, and the presence of working dogs were all marked with the word "CAUTION."I721
What is a string simulating sensor?
''touch [the] detainee on [the] head, hands and feet with string simulating sensors.,,1727
The multitude of crises our country is suffering all point to one basic failing of our government, that is a lack of accountability of our elected representatives. It is clear that they feel that they are adequately isolated from the anger of the electorate while they hold office and that they can engage in grotesque abuses of their offices. If they are in the end voted out of office, they simply take up a holding pattern within the patron industry they are beholden to. Karl Rove for instance feels that he is immune to congressional subpoena, and not without reason. If one of us, the electorate, were to be so brazen it is certain that we would be held accountable.
Thus, I propose the following: Let us have a 'Public Official Accountability Act of 2009. This act should carry increased penalties for those who abuse the public trust, say a 10 fold increase in the penalty normally rendered for breaking any given law. So if you are a cop, and you murder a young man in a subway station and you are found guilty by a jury of the electorate, the judge should be obligated to pass a sentence 10 times as harsh for your abuse of power, I realize that this contravenes the long held principle of immunity of public office holders for the consequences of official acts, but then again I remember a day when the United States of America did not officially sanction the torture of prisoners etc. So in the spirit of the new age of expediency we live in let us all be accountable. Call it a tax on avarice.
