Violence at Guantanamo? Detainees Desperately Fight for their Humanity

The headlines were ablaze with stories regarding the outbreak of violence at Guantanamo, as on April 13 the military mounted raids in the dead of night to force hunger-striking prisoners from the communal living in the prison's Camp 6 into solitary confinement isolation cells in the hated confines of Camp 5.

Considering the way the military has handled the situation at Guantanamo -- forbidding reporters at the island, making nice to the ICRC only to conduct violent raids on detainees as soon as Red Cross officials leave, force-feeding hunger-striking detainees against all medical ethics and protocols -- you'd think the Pentagon thought they had another Koje-do prison camp rebellion on their hands.

Apparently the White House was notified in advance of the nighttime raids on the debilitated hunger strikers, who according to military accounts (which one must take with maximum suspicion), fought back with mop and broom handles and plastic water bottles.

Whatever military police met in terms of opposition, what they certainly encountered were emaciated prisoners, worn down by years of interrogation, isolation, brutality, and now hunger, as they wield the only real weapons they know, their very bodies, choosing death over the hopelessness and torture that is indefinite detention.

The claims of recent violence miss something that is greater than nuance, they miss the total reality of the situation.

Guantanamo is one ongoing violent governmental atrocity, from the ever-present raids of the Emergency Reaction Force (ERF), who forcibly remove detainees from their cells by beating them violently, to violence done to body and spirit by chaining men, submitting them to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, forced drugging (detainees "chemically restrained"), and subjecting them to interrogations according to an Army Field Manual condemned for human rights abuse by nearly human rights group around the world.

Judge Denies Bid for Relief from Abuse

Meanwhile, according to an account in this morning's New Zealand Herald, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan denied an emergency motion for relief from Yemeni prisoner Musa'ab Al-Madhwani. Al Madhwani had said he was being denied safe drinking water by Guantanamo authorities, and being subjected to "extremely frigid" temperatures. A military psychiatrist who knows the situation at Guantanamo very well, retired Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis, told the court the treatment Madhwani was receiving at Guantanamo was threatening Al Madhwani's very life.

Xenakis wrote that after being treated with intravenous fluids following a collapse last week, the prisoner was placed in solitary confinement and has not received daily monitoring of his medical condition.

"Given the gravity of his condition, these failures constitute deliberate indifference to his obvious serious medical needs," Xenakis wrote.

But Hogan denied the motion for judicial relief, saying his hands were tied by the Military Commissions Act and he did not have jurisdiction in the case. You could almost hear Hogan's sneer as he maintained Al Madhwani's health problems were "self-manufactured."

According to the Herald story, "When one of al-Madhwani's lawyers, Darold Killmer, mentioned the alleged mistreatment of other detainees, Hogan responded, 'This is not a class-action.'"

At the hearing Obama's DOJ attorney maintained that no hunger striker had ever died at Guantanamo. He evidently forgot to mention that nearly all of those who have died at Guantanamo in the past seven years had been hunger strikers, all of them supposedly "suicides": Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani in 2006; Abdul Rahman Al Amri in 2007; Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi in 2009; and Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif in 2012. The government has yet to release details of the investigations into all but one of these deaths.

Meanwhile, in an eerie parallel to the struggle by the detainees, defense attorneys for accused 9/11 prisoners on trial at the military commissions have met an Orwellian barrage of double-talk and obstruction. Jason Leopold has a nice summary of the latest news on this front. But whether it is the unprecedented government access to hundreds of thousands of defense emails, monitoring of attorney-client communications, or the disappearance of defense files from government computers, the assault on basic norms of lawful procedure and democratic rights at Guantanamo continues.

What's perhaps worst is the fact that this all happens under the auspices not of the much-maligned Bush-Cheney administration, but under the leadership of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Eric Holder. They are able to do this in part because of the obscene silence emanating from the liberals and Democrats that had spoken out against the Bush regime's abuse of prisoners only a few years ago.

Ghaleb Al-Bihani on Retribution for Speaking Out

In closing, here is an April 15 statement from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Senior Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei. Kebriaei has recently talked to her client Ghaleb Al-Bihani about the hunger strike and his experience of a forced move to solitary confinement:

Rather than deal with the reasons for the hunger strike – the immediate trigger of the searching of Qurans and the long-term desperation caused by more than 11 years of indefinite detention without charge or trial – the government responded over the weekend by escalating violence and retaliation. Rounding up the men in pre-dawn raids and forcing them into single cells is consistent with other tactics the government is using to pressure men to break the strike as well as to stem the flow of information out of the prison. If the men are kept from one another, they cannot report on the situation as a whole to their attorneys and the only means available to tell their side of the story is cut off.

I spoke with my client, Ghaleb Al-Bihani, one of the men on hunger strike, on Friday. When we met at Guantanamo last week, he had lost over 40 pounds and was visibly weak. On the phone, he sounded muted. He told me that he had been forcibly moved from Camp 6, the communal camp where he had been held for years, to Camp 5, a solitary confinement facility, a few days before. He said it was worse in Camp 5 “because of the MPs.” The “MPs” – military police – are the guards used to maintain “order” in the camps, including by forcibly, physically extracting hunger strikers from their cells for force-feeding.

When I asked Ghaleb why he had been forcibly moved, he said it was because he had spoken out about conditions in the camps. The week before, he had given me a declaration to use in the case of another man, Musa’ab Al Madhwani, who has filed an emergency motion about the withholding of clean drinking water from hunger strikers. A federal court in Washington is hearing arguments in that case today.

The forced move, my client said, was because “I spoke to you about Musa’ab’s problem.” He has stayed in his cell since to avoid confrontation with the MPs. He said he didn’t feel comfortable telling me more about the situation in the camps over the phone. He is worried about retaliation.

Instead of pre-dawn raids, violence, brutal force-feeding and withholding safe drinking water, the administration should direct its energy to closing the prison by appointing an official to lead the effort forward and releasing the men it never intends to charge, beginning with the 86 men the administration has itself approved for transfer. There is no more time to waste by pointing fingers and laying blame. President Obama can and should act on his promise to close the prison and finally turn the page on this dark chapter of history.

Cross-posted from The Dissenter/FDL

Gitmo Detainee’s Body Returned to Yemen, New Details on His Death Revealed

crossposted from The Dissenter/FDL

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) said today that the body of Allal Ab-Aljallil Abd al-Rahman Abd (aka Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif) was repatriated to Yemen. The SOUTHCOM statement did not indicate the date or time the body was returned, nor who received the remains.

On November 26, Jason Leopold at Truthout broke the story that Latif’s death would be attributed to suicide. Two days later, Charlie Savage at The New York Times reported that the autopsy would show Latif, who supposedly was found unconscious in his cell on September 8, died from an overdose of psychiatric medication.

Meanwhile, Latif’s body languished at a US Air Force base in Germany, supposedly the object of a dispute between the Yemen and U.S. governments over the former receiving both an autopsy and the results of the full U.S. investigation into the death. The autopsy report was sent to Yemen on Nov. 8. Subsequently, the Yemen government said the body was expected to be sent to them any day, but the U.S. government said the hold-up over release was on the Yemen side. Meanwhile, Latif’s family in Yemen could get very little information about what was going on.

“Acute Pneumonia”

SOUTHCOM’S statement is the first official announcement about the cause of Latif’s death. As terse as it is, it does include somewhat surprising new information.

The medical examiner concluded that the death was a suicide. Mr. Latif died of a self-induced overdose of prescription medication. The medical examiner also concluded that acute pneumonia was a contributing factor in his death.

The revelation that, according to the US military, “acute pneumonia was a contributing factor” to the death raises a host of questions. While pneumonia can develop quite quickly, it is worth noting that Captain Robert T. Durand told Jason Leopold in a statement back on October 8 that Latif had been “medically cleared for transfer to Camp 5″ only a few days before his death. (Thanks to Jason for pointing that out to me.) Camp 5 is a high-security block at the Cuba-based prison, and Latif was reportedly in solitary confinement in a disciplinary wing of the facility.

Even if Latif looked well enough for transfer from the Detention Hospital where he had been held, there is a new question as to how his medical condition went unnoticed when the detainee is checked on multiple times a day, and indeed, per hour. It is also the case that the detainee’s cell is monitored by 24-hour video surveillance. Jason Leopold and I detailed in an article the other day just how difficult it would have been for Latif to have hoarded medications under such a strict regime.

The symptoms of acute pneumonia, moreover, are usually fairly dramatic — shaking, difficulty breathing, coughing — and one wonders why in the day or so before he died he had not been medically attended for pneumonia. How did that go unrecognized? Latif complained in meetings with his attorney that medical care and withholding of medications from hunger strikers in particular was a way Guantanamo authorities tried to control or break prisoners.

Medical abuse?

Other researchers have also documented serious problems with medical care at Guantanamo. In an April 2011 article for PLoS Medicine, Dr. Vincent Iacopino, senior medical advisor to Physicians for Human Rights, and Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and retired US Army Brigadier General, wrote:

Medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the US Department of Defense neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm. The full extent of medical complicity in US torture practices will not be known until there is a thorough, impartial investigation including relevant classified information. We believe that, until such time as such an investigation is undertaken, and those responsible for torture are held accountable, the ethical integrity of medical and other healing professions remains compromised.

The U.S. government has long contended that detainees are treated humanely, and that medical issues are given as much care as that of any U.S. military personnel.

Further information from DoD about the circumstances surrounding the repatriation and the autopsy result has been difficult to obtain, as the voice mailbox at the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD-PA) is “full.”

However, late today, I did receive an email back from an unnamed Duty Officer, Defense Press Office. I had asked SOUTHCOM a number of questions, including what medications Latif supposedly overdosed with; when Latif was diagnosed with pneumonia; why had he been “medically cleared” earlier and by whom; and why the body was finally released and what its disposition would be once in Yemen.

OSD-PA replied, “Jeffrey, the US Southern Command press release represents the extent to which the Department is currently prepared to publicly discuss the matter. Until such time as any future statements by the Department may be made, we refer you to the Yemeni government. Thank you.”

Meanwhile, the message machine at the press affairs office at the Yemen Embassy in Washington, D.C. also says it is “full” and can’t currently take messages. An email query to the embassy had not been returned at time of publication for this article.

[UPDATE, 12/16/12, 8:00 AM: Yemen embassy spokesperson Mohammed Albasha returned my queries early Sunday morning via Twitter. Asked when the family might be receiving Latif's remains, and whether there were any plans for a second autopsy, Albasha replied, "subject is now between the family and the state[.] not sure what or when the next step will be executed."]

In a brief post at Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler notes the irony of the SOUTHCOM press release reiterating the statement DoD always makes, viz. “Joint Task Force Guantanamo continues to provide safe, humane, and lawful care and custody of detainees. This mission is being performed professionally, transparently, and humanely by the men and women of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.”

You could basically take issue with every modifier SOUTHCOM uses to describe JTF-Gitmo’s mission and its treatment of prisoners. Wheeler focuses on the ostensible “transparency”:

It took two and a half months to learn Latif committed suicide. We’re only now learning he suffered from acute pneumonia. And we still do not officially know how badly his head injury–the one the government claims didn’t really exist so they could keep him detained–expressed itself while at Gitmo, much less the drugs he was being given, ostensibly for that and mental health problems.

Let me focus for just a moment on the “safe and humane” claim.

Other Gitmo Deaths in the Light of What Is Known About Latif

Latif’s death and the secrecy surrounding it reminds me of the way other deaths at Guantanamo have been treated. Last February, I noted in a Truthout article that the released autopsies of two purported Guantanamo “suicides” had raised real questions about their treatment and the way they died. (Later, the UN Special Rappporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions announced he was going to look into these cases.)

One detainee, Abdul Rahman Al Amri, was, like Latif, found in his isolation cell at Guantanamo. Al Amri was reportedly discovered with his hands tied behind his back. The autopsy report stated, “Investigation reveals that a razor blade from a razor was used to cut strips from one or more bed sheets and a ligature was fashioned by braiding these strips together.”

But as I reported at the time, there were strict rules around the possession of razors by detainees. How had Al Amri gotten a razor, hidden it from the many searches, and assembled the ligature (out of what were supposedly “tear-proof” sheets, by the way) with all the surveillance (including video surveillance in the cell)?

The revelation reported by Jason Leopold and I in a story the other day --  that Latif claimed in a letter to his attorney David Remes in May 2010 that guards were placing “contraband” article in his cell that could be used for self-harm -- may have some relevance to the Al Amri case.

Latif wrote:

Furthermore, and to make you believe that they want me to die and to kill me; they prevented me from having anything that can help me live normally. They don’t give me books, a blanket, soap, medical supplies that I need for my hearing, eye glasses, tooth paste, medical shoes or a neck pillow. Instead they give me contraband items like a spoon to hurt myself with it right after all the pressure they exerted on me as I mentioned in the beginning of this letter. They even gave me a big pair of scissors. It was given to me by the person responsible for camp five. This made me ask for the police.

Could Al Amri have been given a razor while guards looked the other way? Like Latif, Al Amri was a hunger striker and considered a troublemaker.

So was Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, who was found dead in an isolation cell in the psychiatric ward, where surveillance is supposed to be if anything even stricter. Al Hanashi was said to be depressed, and upset that he was not allowed a walker. He supposedly strangled himself to death with the elastic from his underwear — except, as I reported, the kind of underwear in use at Guantanamo at this time did not have elastic bands. Not surprisingly, the actual ligature for the “suicide” was never provided to medical examiners. Naval investigators provided an sample for the autopsy they said was similar to what Al Hanashi used. Where was the original ligature?

Of course, there was also the incredible reporting by Scott Horton at Harper’s, which relied on reports by former Guantanamo Army guard Joe Hickman and other guards to show that the official government story about the deaths of three Guantanamo suicides in June 2006 was not coherent. (Investigators at Seton Hall School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research also examined critically the government report.)

While I have FOIA requests for the NCIS investigations of both the Al Amri and Al Hanashi deaths, nothing has been released as yet. The Al Hanashi request is nearly a year old now.

On November 28, the ACLU filed FOIA requests for the autopsy reports for the last three prisoners to die at Guantanamo: Latif, along with Awal Gul, and Hajji Nassim (also known as “Inayatullah”). The three died on September 8, 2012, February 2, 2012, and May 18, 2011, respectively. While not much has been written about the latter two cases, there are important lingering questions about these deaths as well. Gul’s family did not accept the verdict of death by heart attack, which Nassim’s death seemed especially strange, as he supposedly hanged himself outside in the recreation yard, where there are plenty of guards present.

Little bit by little bit we are learning more about the death of Adnan Latif, but there is much more to learn. I hope the release of Adnan Latif’s body and its final internment will help bring his family some emotional release. They want to know what happened to their brother and son. They deserve to know. The American people, too, deserve to know what happened as well.

But on one level we already know, whether by his own hand or by his horrendous treatment and the living death assigned him via the Obama policy of indefinite detention, Guantanamo certainly killed Adnan Latif.

The Struggle to Close Guantanamo

Next month, the Guantanamo prison will go into its 11th year of holding so-called “war on terror” prisoners. Since Obama’s reelection, human rights groups have started to put pressure on President Obama to hold true to his January 2009 promise to close the prison.

In an Twitter exchange with me last month, Zeke Johnson, Director of Amnesty International USA’s Security with Human Rights Campaign, said prisoners like former British resident Shaker Aamer could be transferred out of Guantanamo under the NDAA’s section 1028. Johnson said Congress should “withdraw [the] AUMF (incl from NDAA) and ‘global war’ idea.”

Furthermore, Zeke wrote, “all detainees must either be charged with recognizably criminal offenses and prosecuted fairly in civilian court without the death penalty, or released to countries that will respect their human rights. And there must be accoutntability for torture & other abuses (investigation, prosecution and remedy).” Johnson indicated more regarding AI’s position could be accessed at their website.

Recently, AI has announced its Write #4Rights campaign. It is asking people to get involved in the case of Guantánamo detainee Hussain Salem Mohammed Almerfedi. Almerfedi, like Latif, a Yemeni cleared for release by both Bush and Obama administrations, has been held for over nine years. Originally, AI meant to highlight Latif as part of their campaign, but that was not to be.

How many more like Latif will die, victimized by a cruel and insane system, by what the assistant commandant of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Ft. Huachuca once called “America’s ‘Battle Lab’ in the war on terror.”

New Revelations Suggest DoD Cover-Up Over Detainee Drugging Charges

Two new revelations, and a critical analysis of the recent Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General (IG) report on the drugging of DoD-held detainees, reveals a cover-up of such drugging by the Pentagon and possibly other government agencies.

A recent attorney's affidavit charges that at least one Guantanamo detainee was involuntarily drugged before his plea hearing at the military commissions. In addition, a declassified Guantanamo medical standard operating procedure (SOP) describes how scopolamine was administered to all detainees rendered to the US Cuban-based prison. Scopolamine has a long history as a supposed "truth drug."

The IG report held that it could not find evidence that detainees were administered "mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogation of detainees." However, as reported in a July 2012 article at Truthout, which obtained the report by the Freedom of Information Act, the IG held that some detainees had been drugged with powerful antipsychotics and other medications that "could impair an individual's ability to provide accurate information."

Some of these detainees were interrogated even though they were "diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions, and being treated with psychoactive medications on an ongoing basis," the IG said.

The IG also concluded that some detainees had been involuntarily administered drugs as "chemical restraints ... used to control behavior or restrict the patient's freedom of movement." In addition, at least one prisoner, supposed "dirty bomber" José Padilla, held in isolation at a Navy brig in South Carolina, was tricked into believing he had been given a "truth drug."

But while the IG report was spurred by a June 2008 Washington Post article reporting a number of former detainees' complaints of drugging and a subsequent letter to the IG from three US senators, the IG report never interviewed any of the detainees mentioned in the Post story.

The IG interviewed only three detainees, all of whom were still held at Guantanamo. "We did not attempt to interview detainees who had been repatriated," the IG stated, which would include any of the detainees who had previously made public statements to the press that they had been forcibly drugged.

Drugs Placed in Detainees' Food

One of the detainees making such accusations was former Australian detainee David Hicks. Hicks detailed those charges in a book published last year, "Guantanamo: My Journey." The book is not for sale in the United States and the Australian government went to court to seize any profits Hicks could make from book sales in Australia.

In July 2012, the Australian government dropped its case against Hicks. Possibly this was because of revelations that could have come out in court over Hicks' torture in US custody.

One such document that had been prepared for by Hicks' defense team has been released. According to an affidavit by New York attorney Josh Dratel, who represented Hicks with military commission authorities, DoD "periodically sedated [Hicks] for non-therapeutic reasons."

A military prosecutor in Hicks' case confirmed one example of such drugging to Dratel in July 2007.

"David says the guards forced him to eat a meal which contained a sedative before you read him the charges," Dratel said he told the government prosecutor. To which the latter replied, "That was done to protect the officers reading the charges from any of the detainees' reactions."

Dratel's affidavit was first reported by Natalie O'Brien at the Sydney Morning Herald. Truthout has obtained a copy of Dratel's affidavit, which can be downloaded.

Human rights attorney and contributing editor to Harper's Magazine Scott Horton told Truthout, "The administration of drugs for non-medical purposes on prisoners held in wartime raises very serious issues under the Geneva Conventions - which establish a presumption that such use of drugs is generally unlawful and may rise to the level of a grave breach, or war crime - as well as other international agreements."

"The disclosure surrounding Hicks appears at first blush to be a criminal violation by US authorities," Horton said, "but it would be important to ascertain the reasons the US had for doing this before making any final judgment."

An Australian senator from South Australia has said that the new revelations backing Hicks' claims of forced drugging mean the government "can no longer put off" a formal inquiry into Australia's role in Hicks' incarceration and treatment by US authorities.

Scopolamine Patches for Rendition

While it has been assumed that some sort of medication was given to detainees who were subjected to the Bush-era program of extraordinary rendition, an October 2003 nursing SOP declassified a few years ago documented the use of scopolamine patches on all detainees rendered to Guantanamo.

The SOP describes the sequential steps of medical in-processing on all detainees. Only at step ten are nurses instructed to "remove the scopolamine behind each ear (used to prevent airsickness during transit)."

The stated rationale for the use of scopolamine - that is, for airsickness - is not repeated for other medical instructions in the SOP, including the administration of two other drugs during in-processing, mefloquine and Albendazole, raising questions as to why nurses had to be informed of the use of the scopolamine patches.

A separate SOP for "Out-processing Procedures" for detainees being flown out of Guantanamo Bay prison camp (revised July 2005) states, "A scopolamine patch will be placed on each detainee 4 hours before the flight" out of Cuba. There is no indication that any medical reasons might contravene this procedure.

The IG report on drugging of detainees never mentioned the use of scopolamine.

While DoD has studied scopolamine patches for motion sickness in military personnel, they are not the first-line medication used by DoD for this purpose. As far back as 1956, a military study complained that scopolamine: "gave the most distressing side effects of all the prophylactics used. For continued use, meclizine was the most satisfactory."

US Army psychiatrist, Brigadier General Stephen Xenakis (retired) confirmed military policy as regards medications for motion sickness.

“Military doctors recommended meclizine for motion sickness during my career & not scopolamine because of the side effects,” Xenakis told Truthout. “I have seen psychotic reactions to the drug," he said.
At times, the military has noted the effectiveness of scopolamine for some people in treating motion sickness. One NATO study described scopolamine's "high variability between subjects in both effectiveness and incidence of side effects." The side effects included lowered heart rate, blurred vision, impaired attention and alertness, and memory problems.

According to US Coast Guard instructions on "Antimotion Sickness Medications," the scopolamine patch is contraindicated in patients due to variability of effectiveness and associated medical precautions for some users. Scopolamine patches "should be used only after other methods of motion sickness control have proven unsatisfactory," the Coast Guard directive states.

The Coast Guard instruction, still in effect today, further states, "Uncommon but potentially severe side-effects [of scopolamine] include disorientation, hallucinations, and urinary retention."

Scopolamine has a very long history of consideration as a potential truth drug, going back over 80 years. Readers of 1960s military thrillers may remember discussion of the drug for interrogations in old Alistair MacLean novels.

According to a CIA account, the drug was ultimately rejected for use as a "truth drug." The reasons given for such rejection are interesting given the later use of the drug on "war on terror" detainees.

"Because of a number of undesirable side effects, scopolamine was shortly disqualified as a 'truth' drug," the 1961 CIA document states. "Among the most disabling of the side effects are hallucinations, disturbed perception, somnolence, and physiological phenomena such as headache, rapid heart, and blurred vision, which distract the subject from the central purpose of the interview. Furthermore, the physical action is long, far outlasting the psychological effects."

According to government documents, scopolamine was one of a number of drugs, including mescaline and LSD, which were investigated as part of a US Navy research program called Project Chatter. Chatter ran from 1947 until 1953 and "focused on the identification and testing of such drugs for use in interrogations and in the recruitment of agents."

Mefloquine as "Pharmacological Waterboarding"

The nursing SOP that mentioned scopolamine was first noted by Army public health physician Remington Nevin in an August 2012 article in a peer-reviewed medical journal examining DoD's purported medical rationale for another use of another drug, mefloquine.

The "empiric" use of mefloquine - an antimalarial drug that has long been controversial for its serious neurological and psychological side effects - on all incoming detainees at Guantanamo was the subject of a series of Truthout articles by Jason Leopold and this author.

Mefloquine has been connected to a number of serious side effects, including damage to the vestibular system, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, hallucinations, bizarre dreams, nausea, vomiting, sores, and homicidal and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The drug was previously sold under the brand name Lariam.

Nevin told Truthout in December 2010 that the high dosage of mefloquine Guantanamo detainees were forced to take upon arriving at the prison facility was akin to "pharmacologic waterboarding."

In Nevin's article for the August 2012 edition of Tropical Medicine and International Health, he wrote, "the troubling possibility that the use of mefloquine at Guantánamo may have been motivated in part by knowledge of the drug's adverse effects ... points to a critical need for further investigation to resolve unanswered questions regarding the drug's potentially inappropriate use."

As in the case of scopolamine, the IG report never mentioned the use of mefloquine.

Limiting the Investigation

One reason scopolamine, mefloquine or even the drugs put in David Hicks' food were never mentioned by the DoD inspector general was that the investigation was carefully limited to the purported use of "mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogations."

The IG report states that its report was a response to "a tasking to the Inspector Generals of DoD and the Central Intelligence Agency from Senators Biden, Hagel and Levin." DoD's IG does not reproduce the April 24, 2008, letter from the senators, though an online version of the letter still extant at TPM Muckraker clearly describes the tasking precisely.

"We are deeply concerned about the allegations reported in the April 23rd Washington Post article entitled Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned regarding the alleged use of drugs on detainees to facilitate interrogations," the senators wrote. "They are the most recent in a series of allegations relating to the abuse and mistreatment of detainees in United States custody."

Pointing out as well that John Yoo, working for the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), had apparently approved of the legality of "the forced administration of mind-altering drugs to facilitate interrogation," Sens. Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel and Carl Levin wrote, "The allegations reported in the Washington Post article warrant a thorough investigation by the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency."

The letter twice mentions the use of drugs "to facilitate interrogations," but the 2008 Washington Post article, written by Joby Warrick, did not limit itself to the use of drugs during interrogations. Warrick explained, "Other detainees, in interviews or in statements provided by their attorneys, described pills and injections being forcibly administered for reasons that were not always clear to them."

But an analysis of government documents shows that the dichotomy between using drugs to facilitate interrogations and using drugs to shape the detention environment are not counterpoised.

In a "Background Paper on the CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques," sent to the OLC in December 2004, the CIA explained that detention conditions "may be a factor in interrogation."

The CIA document noted, "Detention conditions are not interrogation techniques, but they have an impact on the detainee undergoing interrogation."

The DoD's own 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures describe the detention environment to which incoming prisoners are to be exposed. New prisoners are to adhere to a "Behavioral Management Plan" for at least the first six weeks, whose purpose is to "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator."

While the 2003 SOP never mentions the use of drugs to "enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization" of detainees, certainly the use of drugs such as scopolamine and mefloquine, among others, could help accomplish this purpose, and do so without technically being used to "facilitate interrogation." This would be one purpose, for instance, of Yoo's argument for the use of mind-altering drugs.

The DoD IG never mentions Yoo or his recommendation in their report. Nor do they mention that the current Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation allows for the use of drugs for interrogation-related purposes.

The AFM, revised in 2006, states that the only drugs forbidden for use are those "that may induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage." The earlier version of the AFM had prohibited drugs that caused "chemically induced psychosis," but this language was dropped in the new manual.

Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Truthout that no further changes have been made to the AFM since its last rewrite in 2006, meaning the changes in drugging prohibitions still stands.

CIA and Drugging of Detainees

The DoD IG report was clear it was not addressing charges of CIA drugging, which was to be investigated by the CIA Inspector General. Truthout has filed a FOIA request for the CIA IG report.

Claims of the CIA's use of drugs on detainees rendered to its secret black site prison and "enhanced interrogation" torture program have been the subject of foreign investigations, even as in the United States, the DOJ has closed the book, it claims, on prosecuting CIA crimes.

But the truth about what was done under the CIA's program has leaked out over the years. In terms of its use of drugs, at Harper's Horton reported in November 2010 that German prosecutors told him that torture victim Khaled El-Masri, himself a German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, had been given drugs by CIA jailers.

"By studying El-Masri's hair and skin samples," Horton wrote, German prosecutors "were able to confirm allegations that he was drugged and subjected to a bizarre starvation regimen."

The investigation into the illegal CIA kidnapping was shut down after a deputy US ambassador intervened with German Foreign and Justice ministry officials to register Washington's disapproval of any prosecution of its CIA torturers, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.

"I expect this would have figured in the prosecution that the German prosecutors were preparing before the United States shut down the case through threats and political manipulation," Horton told Truthout.

Historically, the CIA had approved the use of drugs in interrogations and to influence detention conditions that bear upon interrogation. In a declassified interrogation manual from the early 1960s, the CIA explained that the function of using drugs, "is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation."

"Once this shift has been accomplished," the manual reads, "coercive techniques should be abandoned both for moral reasons and because they are unnecessary and even counter-productive" for interrogation purposes.

Special Operations Command and the IG Report

In an interesting aside to the IG report, a letter to the DoD Inspector General from Col. William Melendez, deputy director for intelligence, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) noted that USSOCOM "cannot agree or disagree with the report findings" because its forces involved in any interrogations in Iraq and Guantanamo were under authority of Central or Southern military commands (CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM, respectively). The letter was included in an appendix to the IG report itself.

According to Colonel Melendez, SOCOM "did not contribute to the completion" of the IG report, raising questions as to what degree Special Operations forces' interrogation practices were investigated by DoD's inspector general.

Speaking of the recent reports concerning the drugging of detainees, Horton told Truthout: "The new evidence points to the use of drugs for nonmedical purposes as a far broader practice, which is troubling. It is hard to imagine this practice being undertaken without high-level authorization, particularly because it is at least arguably illegal, and the medical personnel involved would not likely have risked their professional licenses without getting some formal assurances that they would be protected."

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted without permission. Original URL: http://truth-out.org/news/item/11640-new-revelations-suggest-dod-cover-up-over-detainee-drugging-charges

Are Politics Why IMAP Won't Publish Until 2013 Their Report on Doctors and Torture?

In 2010, the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP), along with the Soros-financed Open Society Institute (OSI) convened a Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers. On June 1, 2012, I received an email notification that the TF report "is now complete." But much to my surprise, the report was not due for release, however, until "early 2013."

Entitled "Doing Harm: Physician Participation in Interrogation and Torture, it is the result of two years of analysis by the Task Force, which was comprised of human rights, legal and medical experts," the email said. "They analyzed the role that health professionals played in the torture and interrogation of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. This topic has never been investigated in such depth and contains original research, analysis and policy recommendations."

IMAP has published a brief excerpt from the introduction to the report at their website. Here it is in toto:

“Everyone concerned with the integrity of medical professionalism and respect for human rights considers the participation of physicians in the interrogation and torture of military prisoners to be an egregious and alarming violation of the precepts of medical ethics and international conventions. Medical oaths and international declarations unambiguously prohibit and condemn such behavior. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of 9/11, these violations occurred at the detention camps in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. How did physicians and other health professionals come to participate in these activities? Why were accepted principles and codes ignored? What we can we learn from these events to prevent future occurrences? These are the central questions this report addresses—and although their significance is self-evident, they are by no means simple to answer.”

The Task Force Includes a Guantanamo Official

Initially, the task force membership was not public, but at the insistence of Jason Leopold and myself, IMAP published the list of members on their website. It's a formidable listing of experts in medical abuse and torture and medical ethics. It includes anti-torture candidate for presidency of the American Psychological Assocation, Steven Reisner; physicians Vincent Iacopino and Brig. Gen. (ret.) Stephen Xenakis, who wrote a PLoS research article last year concluding that military medical personnel at Guantanamo "neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm" of detainees; Physicians for Human Rights Chairman of the Board Robert Lawrence; former American Psychiatric Association president Steven Sharfstein; ethicist George Annas; Deborah Popowski from Harvard's International Human Rights Clinic, and a number of others.

Interestingly, the IMAP TF included a former Guantanamo medical official, Captain (ret.) Albert Shimkus, Jr., who had been Chief Surgeon for JTF-160 at Guantanamo until mid-2003, and commanding officer at the Naval Base Hospital during the same period. Shimkus was not a doctor, but a nurse practitioner. Currently he teaches National Security Affairs at the U.S. Navy War College.

Of much importance to me, and presumably my readers, he was the official who signed off on the medical SOP that dosed every detainee entering Guantanamo with treatment-level doses of the anti-malaria drug mefloquine (also known as Lariam).

The unprecedented use of the drug, whose controversial history of side effects was already a subject of debate and research within the Department of Defense and CDC, was criticized by some public health experts. It was also the subject of an investigation by the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, published the same time as Jason Leopold and I issued the first of our Guantanamo mefloquine reports. The bulk of the public health field, however, stayed quiet on the subject; none came out in support of the measure, however.

More recently, government documents show that anti-malaria drugs were once used by the CIA as chemical "incapacitants." It remains an open question whether mefloquine was used in such a fashion on the Guantanamo prisoners, but the fact that two suicides at the facility were tested specially for the presence of meflqoquine at autopsy years after the administration of mefloquine raises questions about use of the drug on these detainees, and in general on all the prisoners.

The TF members I spoke to were nonplussed by the presence of Shimkus on the panel. None of the TF members had reacted strongly to the mefloquine revelations, although two members, Iacopino and Dr. Scott Allen, did say "the questionable use of mefloquine for malaria prevention at Guantanamo underscores the need for transparency of detention policies and procedures” at the prison facility. At the time they gave this quote to Leopold and myself, we were unaware that they were on the IMAP TF panel with Shimkus, and they did not reveal that to us.

Another TF panel member told me that by April 2011, the TF had only met twice. Shimkus was present at both meetings, and seemed "regretful and decent."

Captain Shimkus has always been responsive to my queries to him about the Guantanamo-mefloquine story, although responsive doesn't mean fully open. He explained there were things that were classified and he was unable to talk about, or was told specifically not to talk about. In addition, he never seemed "regretful" about anything he did or policies undertaken from a medical standpoint at Guantanamo. He disagreed with the conclusions of Drs. Iacopino and Xenakis about medical neglect and/or cover-up at Guantanamo, and he maintained, in more than one interview, that he consulted on the mefloquine SOP and it was undertaken for public health reasons and was nothing more than that.

The Politics of Delay

According to IMAP's tax return covering 2009, IMAP spent over $70,000 on a project looking at "Medical Professionalism and Dual Loyalty," a task force of military/department of defense experts; legal and human rights experts, and medical experts; to develop institutional mechanisms for preventing involvement of health professionals in interrogation and detainee abuse." This certainly seems a noble undertaking.

By 2010, according to IMAP tax records, it would seem this project metamorphosed into the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers, with expenses over $92,000. And now the TF has completed its work, but the report won't be published until 2013. On June 12 I wrote to IMAP Chief Operating Officer, Michael Pardy, and asked him why the big delay.

Pardy wrote back the next day, explaining, "The publication date is tentative. We are moving it along as quickly as possible."

I felt that was still too vague for reporting purposed, so I wrote back:

OK, but for the purposes of an article I'm writing, the announced tentative publication date is still early 2013, is that correct? I really don't understand if the report is "done," that the publication could take so long. Either you are much more poorly funded than I thought (and I don't believe that is the case), or it appears to me the publication is being held back until after the election for political purposes.

Also, I was wondering if you could say if the report intends to cover at all the issue of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCT] run by the Department of Defense?

I have yet to get a reply. Other task force members I asked about the delay in publishing, or the BSCT issue either didn't know, or did not answer my query. One person did say that the medical-ethical controversies over use of doctors and the force-feeding of detainees would be addressed in the report.

There is nothing in the delay in publishing that is nefarious, necessarily. And who really cares, in the end, what IMAP publishes or not, as the details are meant for medical journals and the medical or public policy elite, and not read by the general public?

But the question of medical ethics in the context of the US military's "war on terror" and DoD and CIA history in relation to torture and interrogation, including use of doctors and psychologists in the interrogation of detainees, in the monitoring of torture, and the construction of individualized torture protocols, is of high relevance and interest to the public at large.

I suspect, as I mentioned in the email to Pardy, the delay is due to the elections, with the intent to bury the problematic torture issue since it embarrasses the administration before its more liberal or human rights supporters. The embarrassment stems from President Obama's policy of non-accountability for the Bush-era torture program. His administration does not support the "looking back" at these issues that would bring about prosecutions, more investigations, or other forms of accountability. And the administration's supporters and backers pretty closely toe the party line on such things.

But it is sickening to think that human beings suffer in isolation and under indefinite detention, endure brutal ERF beatings, not to mention ongoing interrogations under the Army Field Manual's Appendix M protocols, in part because it would be politically inopportune to highlight their abuse before November 2012. In essence, the issue of detainee abuse is subordinated to the exigencies of American electoral politics.

Appendix M, by the way, includes, besides isolation, use of sleep deprivation and forms of sensory deprivation, which the manual advocates using in combination with the techniques that induce "debility" in prisoners (for instance, dietary manipulation), as well as use of techniques that produce emotional abuse ("Ego Down") and fear-generating treatment or manipulation of phobias, all with the intention of breaking-down the detainee... for what? Guantanamo is a "strategic interrogation center," according to government sources, and the interrogations there are not about operationally imminent intelligence, e.g. the so-called ticking bomb.

The answer is: for production of intelligence agents for use by the government, as well as the production of more false confessions, and cooperation with show trials, just as, for instance, Stalin used such torture when similar forms of prisoner abuse and interrogation was used by the NKVD once upon a time. It is possible as well that certain forms of experiments are conducted on these prisoners under the auspices of field trials of various instruments, procedures, or detention policies.

IMAP should heed its supposed call for change in the area of medical ethics and quickly publish their findings for the public. At the very least, an Executive Summary of the report could be published online. There is no excuse not to do this.