Storytime, Kids!

From Soviet Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, in the Washington Post:

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: 'Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

So, what's the moral of this story?

As Digby points out, this very thing is being done by American hands to prisoners in Gitmo as we speak.

So, the United States has a ruling party that embraces this crap after putting on a puppet play of pretend opposition, and an opposition that rolls over because they're too fearful to lose their cozy sinecures stopping the United States from embracing the worst aspects of its own enemy. Whereas Canada has a PM who, from all appearances, couldn't give a rat's ass, an opposition party with a leading candidate who is worrisomely disinterested in the fate of "the other guy" (as seen in his little "gaff" about Lebanon) and willing to equivocate on the value of torture, and intelligence services that by all accounts will serve 'em up at will to keep their access to US intelligence--judging by the Arar case.

So the real lesson is "it's kind of a bad time to be North American." Sorry, kids.