This is too weird. What the hell is going on in the US military?:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Since retiring from the U.S. Army in 2000, Dr. John Henry Hagmann has helped train thousands of soldiers and medical personnel in how to treat battlefield wounds. His company, Deployment Medicine International, has received more than $10.5 million in business from the federal government.
The taxpayer-funded training has long troubled animal rights activists, who contend that Hagmann’s use of live, wounded pigs to simulate combat injuries is unnecessarily cruel.
But pigs weren't his only subjects:
During instructional sessions in 2012 and 2013 for military personnel, Hagmann gave trainees drugs and liquor, and directed them to perform macabre medical procedures on one another...
Hagmann, 59, is accused of inappropriately providing at least 10 students with the hypnotic drug ketamine. The report alleges Hagmann told students to insert catheters into the genitals of other trainees and that two intoxicated student were subjected to penile nerve block procedures. Hagmann also is accused of conducting “shock labs,” a process in which he withdrew blood from the students, monitored them for shock, and then transfused the blood back into their systems.
Hagmann claims the techniques he used were all approved:
"The mechanisms and protocols utilized in the training all comply with standard practices for training medical students and are, in fact, utilized in medical schools in Virginia.”...
Hagmann said “the courses and procedures in question were all reviewed and approved” by officials at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, a government-run medical school that trains and prepares health professionals to support the military.
Officials there deny that's the case.
Hagmann thinks he's being persecuted by “animal rights advocates or those with an anti-military agenda.”
Hagmann has drawn fire from animal rights groups for years because he is a leading practitioner of “live-tissue training,” which involves teaching students by using wounded live animals as patients. Often, pigs are the subjects.
Live-tissue training? Nice euphemism there for shooting and stabbing live animals in order to practice medical techniques on them.
Earlier today, PETA sent to U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter a summary of an undercover video it says it took during a 2013 training session by Hagmann’s company. The group also asked the Pentagon to cease contracting with DMI. Goodman said the video depicts gratuitous violence against the wounded pigs, and racist and sexist jokes by course instructors....
U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, an Armed Services Committee member who has introduced legislation to ban live-tissue training, said he was disturbed by the video and charges leveled against Hagmann by the Virginia Board of Medicine.
“It seems like this is a renegade contractor visiting abuse on military personnel and live animals,” said Johnson, a Georgia Democrat. “It’s mind-boggling. It’s like a diabolical mad scientist at work in a horror movie.”
Hagmann practiced emergency medicine in the Army for twenty years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. After retiring he set up a private company, Deployment Medicine Consultants, and gained millions in contracts from the government after 9-11, becoming "the single largest trainer of US military forces in operational medicine throughout world."
I've left out the most gratuitous details from the article.
Suffice to say, the man sounds like a monster.
How did someone like that become "the single largest trainer of US military forces in operational medicine throughout world" without anyone cutting him off as a contractor?
Or are sadism and sociopathic lack of empathy for helpless others, far from being flaws, sought-after traits by the DOD?