Pouting Baby doesn't understand why Mr. Banana Holder won't do his job. (photo courtesy of Jim White)

Pouting Baby is talking to us again. — JW

I noticed in today’s news that the lawyers for Abu Zubaydah have asked Poland to consider prosecuting Americans who tortured him at secret prisons there:

Lawyers for suspected al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah asked Polish prosecutors on Thursday to investigate allegations that U.S. agents abused him at a now-closed secret CIA prison in Poland.

And it looks like those lawyers have been thinking like Dr. Kaye and Mr. L., because they think the CIA was doing experiments with Abu Zubaydah:

“Abu Zubaydah is the first — in fact he has been described as the guinea pig — for the enhanced interrogation programme. All of the techniques were applied to him,” Joseph Margulies, a U.S. lawyer for Zubaydah, told the news conference.

Here’s what Dr. Kaye and Mr. L. told us about other experiments:

The Defense Department forced all “war on terror” detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called “pharmacologic waterboarding.”

/snip/

“A crucial issue is dosage” Denbeaux said. “Giving detainees toxic doses of mefloquine has mind-altering consequences that may be permanent. Without access to medical records, which the government refuses to release, the use of mefloquine in this manner appears to be grotesque malpractice at best, if not human experimentation or ‘enhanced interrogation.’ The question is where are the doctors who approved this practice and where are the medical records?”

And why is it that Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers want Poland to prosecute instead of the US? Because, as related in another report on the press conference by the attorneys, they have given up on prosecutions happening here.

Here is a clear explanation of who is to blame for the prosecutions not happening:

In his presidential memoir Decision Points, former President George W. Bush admits that he ordered the CIA to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to Bush, when the CIA asked if it could proceed with the procedure, Bush’s response was “Damn right.”

/snip/

On Jan. 15, 2009, at his congressional confirmation hearing, Holder testified that “Waterboarding is torture.” When pressed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) if a president could override the congressional ban on torture, even in an emergency, Holder stood firm: “No one is above the law.…Where Congress has passed a law, it is the obligation of the President or the Commander-in-Chief to follow those laws.…[T]he President does not have the power [to torture].”

Mr. Banana Holder won't do his job.

/snip/

Yet now, Holder refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to even investigate whether the Bush administration broke laws regarding torture.

Way back before he was confirmed as Attorney General, Dr. Murphy tried to warn us about him:

When Eric Holder chose to take Chiquita’s money then, he chose to enrich himself by accepting fees from admitted paymasters for terrorist death squads.

So, Mr. Banana Holder was happy to do his job when that job was getting Chiquita cleared from funding death squads, but now that his job says he should prosecute a former president for torture, he refuses to do it. Why won’t Mr. Banana Holder do his job and prosecute Georgie B.?