The Glasgow car bomber has died. You remember this guy.
I will have more to say about this, because I just finished reading "Mugged By Reality" by the partially reformed Neo-Con John Agresto, an account of Agresto's experience in Iraq as the senior advisor in charge of re-establishing Iraqi higher education. More on that later. Suffice it to say that Agresto has stopped believing -- if he ever did -- that liberal democratic ideals are easy to establish or can be quickly put into place anywhere in the world. His thesis is that in order for enlightened liberalism to take hold, a lot of complex and unusual social conditions must be present.
Against that background, I was taken by this story. They spent nearly a quarter million dollars in medical care on an essentially hopeless case, an individual whose injuries were self-inflicted and aimed at causing death to others.
I don't want to get into all of the terrible problems the U.S. has with its irrational health care system, or the illiberal and unenlightened and medieval policies of the current horrendous American president. Instead, let's focus on the following.
Kafeel had received extensive treatment at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Surgeons grafted on substitute skin made of shark cartilage and cow tendons. It was a system developed to treat the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York.Medical staff dealing with the case privately said that there was little chance of recovery. Ahmed had been in a coma and there were signs of kidney and liver failure. There had also been some criticism of the money spent on the suspected terrorist. The "shark skin" treatment - called Integra Dermal Regeneration Template - alone came to over £20,000, and the total cost of security and medical care is estimated to have been more than £100,000.
Kafeel's parents, Moqbool and Zakia Ahmed, who live in the Indian city of Bangalore, had also pressed for doctors to switch off his life support machine, at one stage saying they would take legal action to enforce this if necessary. Some Muslim groups had claimed that the prisoner was being deliberately kept alive "for medical experiments".
Yesterday a spokesman for the Scottish Executive said: "It was perfectly right that he should have received the appropriate treatment our health service could offer as this reflects the value our society places on human life."
What I find interesting is not that this happened, but that we generally do not find this to be particularly unusual or surprising. Can anyone imagine that sort of treatment being extended by Sunnis to a failed Shiite bomber, or vice versa, in Baghdad? Look at the picture. The guy with the hose is a person that the burning man had moments earlier been trying to kill. In Baghdad, they would have tied the guy's smoldering body to the back of a truck and dragged it through the streets. I know this is going to sound chauvanistic and ethnocentric, but there really is a different core set of values at work here.
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