Josef Mengele Released from Prison

Did I say "Josef Mengele?"

Silly me.

Josef Mengele was the Nazi "doctor" who allegedly performed "scientific" experiments on inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He died in Brazil in 1979.

I meant "Jack Kevorkian," the Nazi "doctor" who wants to perform "scientific" experiments on inmates, the elderly, and the depressed.

How could I have gotten the two confused?

See "Dr. Death Returns," by Wesley J. Smith in today's National Review online. Additional links are provided by Marc Vander Maas in "Death With Dignity, Redux," on the Acton Institute PowerBlog. Smith writes:

In actuality, most of Kevorkian’s “patients” were not terminally ill, but disabled and depressed. Several weren’t even sick, according to their autopsies. Moreover, Kevorkian never attempted to treat any of the 130 or so persons who traveled to Michigan to be hooked up to his suicide machines to die either by drug overdose or carbon monoxide poisoning.

And as for compassion — forget about it. Kevorkian was never in the killing business to alleviate unbearable suffering. Indeed, over the course of decades he repeatedly explained his ultimate goals in professional journals and in his 1991 book, Prescription Medicide. As Jack Kevorkian articulately expresses it himself, compassion had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Smith quotes the creepy Kevorkian:

I feel it is only decent and fair to explain my ultimate aim….It is not simply to help suffering and doomed persons kill themselves—that is merely the first step, an early distasteful professional obligation (now called medicide) that nobody in his or her right mind could savor. [W]hat I find most satisfying is the prospect of making possible the performance of invaluable experiments or other beneficial medical acts under conditions that this first unpleasant step can help establish—in a word obitiatry.

Kevorkian's desires to engage in human experimentation that would lead to death ("obitiatry") were banned by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

The so-called Nuremberg Code and all its derivatives completely ignore the extraordinary opportunities for terminal experimentation on humans facing imminent and inevitable death...[including] the extraction of medical benefit from the process of judicial execution from those dying of irremediable illness or trauma and from suicide mandated by inflexible religious or philosophical principles or by irrevocable personal choice. Other potential subjects include comatose, brain dead, or totally incapacitated individuals as well as live fetuses in or out of the womb.
(Kevorkian, writing in a 1986 edition of Medicine and Law.)

"Dang that Nuremburg Tribunal!"

Kevorkian then concluded that euthanasia provided the biggest pool of subjects for human experimentation, so he went to the Netherlands to learn more about legalized euthanasia. Upon his return, “inspired by my visit to the Netherlands, I decided to take the risky step of assisting terminal patients in committing suicide.”

Don't expect CBS News' Mike Wallace to make the Nuremberg connections during his upcoming 60 Minutes interview with "Dr. Death," any more than the media exposes the killing of hundreds of thousands in Iraq as a part of the federal government's geo-political experimentation (democide).