Sgt. Joseph Hickman has spent much of his working life in the military. He considers himself a patriot. Ronald Reagan is his favorite president. He did a year tour of duty at “Gitmo” (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).

Not a man to shy away from violence, in the course of duty, he led a squad into a cell in Gitmo in response to a possible suicide, and ordered his men to fire at detainees within a distance where the rubber bullets could be lethal. The detainees nicknamed him “Satan.”

He is the last guy you would expect to expose a story of the “war lab” at Gitmo, where prisoners, under the auspices of a secret program, were drugged, beaten, tortured and murdered. However, Sgt. Hickman is also a man of conscious, and he signed an oath to defend the Constitution.

In his book, Sgt. Hickman describes the events surrounding the deaths of four alleged suicides, and the subsequent NCIS investigation.

His book is called “Murder at Camp Delta,” and I checked it out from the Lakeport Library.

Sgt. Hickman, with the help of the law school students at Seton Hall University and documents released due to the Freedom of Information Act, concluded that the investigation was flawed.

In fact, the investigators had not even interviewed the many witnesses involved who could have contradicted the findings of the investigation.

Sgt. Hickman is not a person given to conspiracy theories, but eventually, the facts led inexorably to a government program that went to the “dark side” and violated the Geneva Convention and the Constitution, and that was approved at the highest levels of government.

The illegal program was devised to collect data on how to most efficiently yield intelligence from prisoners, and is reminiscent of the experiments that the Nazis performed on human beings. Detainees were given a medicine which induces short term psychosis, for example.

Obama will not prosecute these crimes because he does not want to set a precedent under which he himself could be prosecuted. Obama knows the insurgents can’t be defeated, so he changed “defeat” to “degrade.” Degrade means that when the insurgency gains momentum, he will simply slaughter as many as he can with air attacks.

We have been in Afghanistan for close to 14 years. The opium output, despite intermittent attempts to eradicate the poppy fields, has doubled since 2000. Ninety percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghanistan. Not only have we left the drug trade to flourish, we have also left thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

I have to conclude, that anyone who does not do everything in their power, within the limits of the law, to stop our senseless slaughter of people in the mid-east, are the moral equivalent of the Germans who remained silent as the Nazis committed their nefarious deeds.

Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.