University of ideology

Some of you may have seen professor Steven Miles' name in the news off and on over the years. He could fairly be described as a leftist agitator, despite his rather impressive position as a professor of medicine and faculty member in the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota. Today's Minnesota Daily [campus newspaper] has a profile titled: "Professor leads forum discussing military abuse".

“This forum is designed to be a place where conscience and calling embrace the world’s needs,” said Dan Garnaas, a pastor at Grace University Lutheran Church, where the forum was. Miles said he has been researching 35,000 pages of once-classified documents from witnesses’ testimonies of military torture and abuse. He said his interest was sparked last May after seeing photographs of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib on “60 Minutes.”

Doctor Miles is receiving a taxpayer funded salary to do what exactly? To teach medicine, or to comb 32,000 pages of documents looking for abuses by our people? If he's going to spend his time looking for abuse, why doesn't he start with North Korea instead of America? The odds are slightly better he'll find more problems with the regime of Kim Jong Il.

Miles discussed the ignored military abuse reports and labeled them as a series of "missed opportunities".

He described one photograph of seven prisoners naked and bruised with sacks on their heads, surrounded by prison guards with their thumbs up.

“When you add the fact there were nurses around that were not reporting these instances, it turns into a very different picture,” he said.

Let us know when you get to the abuse, won't you?

Other forms of abuse that are not physical also exist, he said.

“Abu Ghraib was built on a landfill, the food provided for the unclothed prisoners had rat feces and the families of prisoners were not notified when serious injury or death occurred.

“Neglecting any of the four basic needs including shelter, clothing, food and medical assistance is abuse,” he said.

It's incomprehensible how this well-educated man could spend his vital medicine teaching time scouring reports for nonsense such as the above, and at the same time ignore the abuses Sadaam heaped upon his people, or the abuses of his likely mentor, Fidel Castro of Cuba, or those of Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

“The media needs to explain why the abuses are important in terms of violations of international law and the consequences of those violations for impairing our ability to credibly advocate for human rights,” he said.

After his presentation, Miles fielded questions, attendees flocked to information tables and a violinist played the theme song from “Schindler’s List.”

For professor Miles to focus his energies on alleged American abuses, instead of those of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia or other enemies of the US, exposes his unconscionable hypocrisy.