Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold report: Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information,” according to a declassified Department of Defense (DoD) inspector general’s report that probed the alleged use of “mind altering drugs” during interrogations.
In addition, detainees were subjected to “chemical restraints,” hydrated with intravenous (IV) fluids while they were being interrogated and, in what appears to be a form of psychological manipulation, the inspector general’s probe confirmed at least one detainee – convicted “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla – was the subject of a “deliberate ruse” in which his interrogator led him to believe he was given an injection of “truth serum.”
Truthout obtained a copy of the report – “Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees” – prepared by the DoD’s deputy inspector general for intelligence in September 2009, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed nearly two years ago.
Over the past decade, dozens of current and former detainees and their civilian and military attorneys have alleged in news reports and in court documents that prisoners held by the US government in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan were forcibly injected with unknown medications and pills during or immediately prior to marathon interrogation sessions in an attempt to compel them to confess to terrorist-related crimes of which they were accused.
The inspector general’s investigation was unable to substantiate any of the allegations by current and former detainees that, as a matter of government policy, they were given mind-altering drugs “to facilitate interrogation.”
But the watchdog’s report provides startling new details about the treatment of detainees by US military personnel. For example, the report concludes, “certain detainees, diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions being treated with psychoactive medications on a continuing basis, were interrogated.”
Leonard Rubenstein, a medical ethicist at Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and the former president of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “this practice adds another layer of cruelty to the operations at Guantanamo.”
“The inspector general’s report confirms that detainees whose mental deterioration and suffering was so great as to lead to psychosis and attempts at self-harm were given anti-psychotic medication and subjected to further interrogation,” said Rubenstein, who reviewed a copy of the report for Truthout. “The problem is not simply what the report implies, that good information is unlikely to be obtained when someone shows psychotic symptoms, but the continued use of highly abusive interrogation methods against men who are suffering from grave mental deterioration that may have been caused by those very same methods.”
Shayana Kadidal, the senior managing atty of the Guantanamo Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the report, which he also reviewed, “reinforces that the interrogation system at Guantanamo was a brutal system.” [Continue reading…]
Our nation suffers from pockets of craven, imbecilic and pharmaco-medically uninformed OFFICIAL elements that satisfy their degenerate tendencies by abusing human beings in their custody. In America’s case, the sick are also the dumb, too dumb to cover their tracks or to achieve any reasonable goal with their activities. From Petraeus down, small minds with inferiority complexes are let loose to play out their Napoleonic complexes on captives such as soldiers, prisoners or career seekers. The case of Penn State shows us how these climbers all reached the heights– not despite, but because of their utter moral pingmyism. We had better clean-up our national act before we become so similar to Nazi Germany and the USSR that we come to suffer the same fate. Human manure is put in positions of authority because public leaders deem manure as malleable so that it achieves their needed results in the dumbest but most direct ways. Therefore, what’s the difference between Syria and the US besides degree? There’s still time to hold in public opprobrium these dumb scumbags and shame the leaders who put them there precisely because they are so dumb and immoral. Let Penn State be the Clinton–>Bush–>Obama lesson!