Chalk up up another WAR CRIMES practice used by the "administration"
of your WHITE HOUSE WAR CRIMINAL.

Accounts by many since-released captives held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
contain similar descriptions of instances where drugs of unknown names
and uses were rountinely administered to prisoners to get them to
reveal secrets. Often the detainees signed false confessions just to
have the U.S. interrogators stop giving them hypodermic shots that
caused severe mental disorientation and physical pain and sickness.

Again, the illegal use of drugs to force prisoner compliance was
"cleared" by a memorandum authored by former Justice Department lawyer
John Yoo, now a university law professor.

Naturally, neither the U.S. Departments of Defense and Justice or the
Central Intelligence Agency admit any illegal treatment of war
captives.

----------------------------------

"Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned"

"U.S. Denies Using Injections for Coercion"

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 22, 2008; A01

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as
this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle.

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman
captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an
interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according
to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S.
officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some
peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to
go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.' "

Nusairi, now free in Saudi Arabia, was unable to learn what drugs were
injected before his interrogations. He is not alone in wondering: At
least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay
and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or
witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court
documents.

Like Nusairi, other detainees believed the injections were intended to
coerce confessions.

The Defense Department and the CIA, the two agencies responsible for
detaining terrorism suspects, both deny using drugs as an enhancement
for interrogations, and suggest that the stories from Nusairi and
others like him are either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of
routine medical treatment.

Yet the allegations have resurfaced because of the release this month
of a 2003 Justice Department memo that explicitly condoned the use of
drugs on detainees.

Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices,
the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a
decades-old U.S. ban on the use of "mind-altering substances" on
prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they
did not inflict permanent or "profound" psychological damage. U.S. law
"does not preclude any and all use of drugs," Yoo wrote in the memo.
He declined to comment for this article.

The memo has prompted new calls for the Bush administration to give a
full accounting of its treatment of detainees, and to make public
detailed prison medical records. Legal experts and human rights groups
say that forced drugging of detainees for any nontherapeutic reasons
would be a particularly grave breach of international treaties banning
torture.

"The use of drugs as a form of restraint of prisoners is both unlawful
and unethical," said Leonard Rubenstein, an expert on medical ethics
and the president of Physicians for Human Rights. "These allegations
demand a full inquiry by Congress and the Department of Justice."

Scott Allen, a physician and co-director of the Center for Prisoner
Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I, noted that there are no
accepted medical standards for the use of drugs to subjugate
prisoners. Thus, any such use in interrogations "would have to be
considered an experimental use of medicine."

So far, the evidence is limited to the accounts of detainees who
describe similar episodes in which they were forcibly given drugs and
experienced unnatural physical effects ranging from extreme drowsiness
to hallucinations. U.S. military officials have acknowledged using
only therapeutic drugs, such as vitamins and vaccines, on Guantanamo
Bay detainees.

"Our policy is, and always has been, to treat detainees humanely,"
said Navy Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. "The use of
medication to manipulate a detainee has never been an approved DOD
interrogation technique." While declining to comment on specific
claims, Gordon said medical care was provided "based solely upon a
detainee's need," adding that the interrogations did not affect or
influence medical treatment.

Former U.S. intelligence officials have acknowledged using sedatives
to subdue some terrorism suspects as they were being transported from
one facility to another, but likewise insist that drugs were never
used as interrogation tools. "Any suggestion that the agency's
enhanced interrogation techniques included the administration of drugs
is simply wrong," said a senior intelligence official who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, citing secrecy concerns.

Several former military and intelligence officials familiar with the
detention program said they were unaware of any systematic use of
drugs to manipulate behavior. Alberto J. Mora, a former Navy general
counsel who opposed the Bush administration's decision to use
aggressive interrogation tactics, said he recalled no discussions
about the use of drugs.

But Mora said he understood why some detainees are concerned. "They
knew they were being injected with something, and it is clear from all
accounts that some suffered severe psychological damage," Mora said.

The injections left a searing impression among some former detainees,
said Emi MacLean, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights,
which represents dozens of current and former detainees. She said the
stories merit investigation in light of the Yoo memo and the record of
previous CIA experiments with truth serums as well psychotropic drugs.

"Many speak about forced medication at Guantanamo without knowledge
about what medication they were being forced to take," MacLean said.
"For some released [military] detainees, the forced medication they
experienced was the most traumatic part" of their captivity.

Nusairi is among a handful of former detainees who directly allege the
use of drugs in interrogations at the military prison in Guantanamo.
Others described being forcibly given sedatives that knocked them out
or made them groggy before being transferred, or being forced to take
pills or receive shots for unclear reasons and suffering unusual
symptoms afterward. At least one detainee has alleged in a written
statement through his attorney that he was drugged after being
"renditioned" or transferred by U.S. officials to a prison in Morocco.

Nusairi, in prison interviews in 2005 with Anant Raut, his attorney,
described a six-month period in which he says his captors subjected
him to drugs and temperature extremes to extract information about al-
Qaeda connections they believed he had.

"They thought he was hiding something," said Raut, who represented
Nusairi and other Saudi detainees in 2005 and 2006 while working for
the Washington office of the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. "He was
injected in the arm with something that made him tired -- that made
his brain cloudy. When he would try to read the Koran, his brain would
not focus. He had unusual lethargy and would drool on himself."

It was during one such episode, in an interrogation room Nusairi
remembers as ice-cold, that he became so desperate for sleep that he
signed a confession professing to involvement in al-Qaeda, according
to his attorney's notes. The interrogator watched him sign his name,
and "then he smiled and turned off the air conditioner. And I went to
sleep," Nusairi said, according to the notes.

After the confession-- which Nusairi later said was a lie -- the Saudi
remained at Guantanamo Bay for another three years before being turned
over to his home country, which released him. "He signed the
statement, and they declared him an enemy combatant," Raut said, "yet
they released him anyway with no explanation." The Saudi Embassy
declined to comment.

Medical ethicists and experts in international law say such accounts
raise serious questions. While the Geneva Conventions do not
specifically refer to drugs, they ban any use of force or coercion in
interrogating prisoners of war, said Barbara Olshansky, a law
professor at Stanford University and the author of a book on military
tribunals. "If you're talking about interrogations, you're talking
about very specific prohibitions that mean you cannot use any force,
at all, to interrogate someone," Olshansky said. "The law is beyond
clear."

The Bush administration's legal advisers arrived at a different
conclusion after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In legal
opinions, Yoo and other administration lawyers contended that harsh
interrogation techniques such as waterboarding and slapping did not
constitute torture and were legal if authorized by the president in a
time of war.

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. Mourad Benchellali, a
French national who was held for three years at Guantanamo Bay, said
that prison workers sometimes described the medications as antibiotics
or vitamins, yet they frequently left him in a mental fog.

"These medicines gave us headaches, nausea, drowsiness," Benchellali,
who is now living in France, said in an e-mail. "But the effects were
different for different detainees. Some fainted or threw up. Some had
reactions such as pimples." He also described periodic injections,
often administered by force, that left him feeling nauseated and light-
headed, and noted, "We were always tired and always felt groggy."

A different type of injection seemed to be reserved for detainees who
were particularly uncooperative, Benchellali said, describing episodes
that four other former detainees also cited in interviews or legal
documents. "The injection would make them crazy," he said. "They would
have a crisis or dementia -- yelling, no longer sleeping, soiling
themselves. Some of us suspected they were given LSD."

J. Wells Dixon, another Center for Constitutional Rights attorney who
represents detainees, said the government appears to have administered
drugs to detainees whose extended captivity made them distraught or
rebellious. "Many of these men have become desperately suicidal,"
Dixon said. "And the government's response has been to administer more
medication, often without the consent of the prisoners."

As a matter of routine, the medical officials administering the shots
were accompanied by specially equipped guards, known as the "Immediate
Reaction Force" team, to subdue anyone who resisted, several detainees
said. Ruhel Ahmed, a British citizen who has since been released to
his home country and freed, the guards wore padded gear and "forced us
to have injections."

"You are not allowed to refuse it and you don't know what it is for,"
said Ahmed, who added that he was given about a dozen injections,
which "had the effect of making me feel very drowsy."

Not all detainees viewed the shots with suspicion. Moazzam Begg, a
British citizen captured in Afghanistan, said in an interview he
believes that poorly trained prison workers gave him legitimate
medications but at incorrect doses. Once, while being treated with
pills for a panic attack, he began to hallucinate. "I saw things
moving when they were not," he said. "I talked to myself. I cried,
laughed and sat immobile in a corner for hours. All of this was noted
by the MPs and recorded."

Even the existence of an involuntary medication program, including the
involuntary sedation of detainees during transfers, raises troubling
ethical issues, said Allen, of the prisoner rights center. "The
involvement of physicians and other health professionals in such a
program would be a profound betrayal of medical trust and needs to be
investigated further."

Relatively little is known publicly about the treatment of CIA
detainees, who until recently had no access to outside lawyers.
However, the use of drugs by the CIA was discussed during a 2004
internal investigation conducted by the inspector general for
coalition forces in Afghanistan.

In February of that year, the inspector interviewed the commanding
officer of a facility in eastern Afghanistan shared by military and
intelligence teams. Using standard Army acronyms, the inspector asked
whether the "OGA"-- the Army acronym for "other government agency," as
it calls the CIA -- had been able to "practice their TTP [tactics,
techniques and procedures] at your facility."

The commander's reply: "No, they can't use drugs or prolonged sensory
deprivation in our facility."

It was unclear from the context whether the reference involved
interrogations. The Pentagon and CIA declined formal comment, but a
senior U.S. official familiar with detainee programs, speaking on the
condition of anonymity, said the commander's mention of drugs must
have been a mistake or a reference to a different agency than the CIA.

[Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/21/AR208042103399.h...