Last week the Washington Post reported that Guantánamo and CIA detainees alleged that they were given strange psychoactive drugs by force. Jeff Stein of CQ had reported a similar things a few weeks ago. I wrote about this in my piece Involuntary Drugging of US Detainees. In response to the Post article, Almerindo Ojeda wrote a letter to the Post detailing additional evidence that the provision of health services and interrogations at Guantánamo have been intimately linked, with health providers serving the abusive interrogation regime.
Almerindo is the Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas at the University of California at Davis, where they have a wonderful archive, the Guantánamo Testimonials Project with testimony from many sources on the conditions at the prison. The Project — by typing out many handwritten documents, transforming them into searchable text ,and carefully organizing them– is one of the premier sources for such materials as detaneee or FBI accounts of abuses there. My colleagues and I use it all the time.
In any case, the Post did not print Almerindo’s letter. He has thus revised it slightly and given me permission to post it here:
A recent article in the Washington Post (Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned, 04/22/08), quotes Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. J.D. Gordon as saying that interrogations at Guantanamo do not affect or influence medical treatment of the detainees held there. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise.
Attached to a recent motion on behalf of Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan are medical records stating that, on 8/28/02, an ointment was applied to Mr. Hamdan’s lower back and then covered with moleskin–a treatment which the attending medic described as a “special request for medical attention per FBI“. In addition, a medical record for the same detainee dated 2/19/04 carries the annotation “no rec time per Intel“–or “no recreation time per Intelligence” (I understand that exercise is an important component treatment of sciatica, which Mr. Hamdan suffered from then).
Moreover, one of the “counterresistance techniques” approved on December 2, 2002 by then Secretary Rumsfeld against Guantanamo detainees was the use of isolation facilities for up to thirty days. Here, and for selected detainees, “the OIC [or Officer in Charge], Interrogation Section, will approve all contacts with the detainee, to include medical visits of a non-emergent nature.” Although blanket permission to use this and other techniques was rescinded by then Secretary Rumsfeld a month later, their use was still allowed on a case-by-case basis and with approval of the Secretary of Defense (see memos 16-23 in The Torture Papers, by Greenberg and Dratel).
Similarly, section 30-6-d of the 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures posted recently by Wikileaks reads as follows:
Detainees who are on self-harm precautions [i.e. those at high risk for suicide or other self-injury] that are scheduled for interrogation will have their clinical status and risk assessment verified by the licensed Behavioral Health staff prior to leaving the block. Detainees on self-harm precautions are generally not clinically stable enough to leave the block.
So the needs of interrogation may trump the reasons for placing a GTMO prisoner in a mental health ward. And this as a matter of standard operating procedure.
Almerindo Ojeda, Director
Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas
University of California at Davis
http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu
April 28th, 2008
Scott Horton today warns that Alabama is the scene of another of those political prosecutions whereby the Injustice Department collaborates with the local GOP to prosecute people for the crime of being Democrats. Former Gov. Don Siegelman is already serving a long term in prison for this crime. The new victim is Sue Schmitz, 63-year-old retired social studies teacher whose real crime is being a Democratic member of the Alabama legislature, a legislature that the Alabama GOP, in cahoots with the Federal government and the corrupt Alabama press, is trying to take over. Horton quotes the AP on Schmitz’s crime:
“We charge that Representative Schmitz’s only substantial ‘work’ was to work her official position in the Legislature to land a job through the postsecondary system,” U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in a statement.
Schmitz was employed from January 2006 until October 2006 by the CITY Skills Training Consortium, an arm of Alabama’s troubled two-year college system. The federally funded program operated at 10 sites statewide to help at-risk youth referred by juvenile courts develop academic, behavioral and social skills. The indictment claims Schmitz made as much as $53,403 annually as a program coordinator despite rarely showing up and doing virtually nothing for the money.
And here’s Horton’s explication:
Let’s just pause and look at what’s going on here. A massive federal case has been launched, at a likely taxpayer cost in excess of $2 million, against a social studies teacher, who it is alleged (on the basis of sharply disputed evidence) was not putting in as many hours as she should have in teaching her classes. This has to count as one of the more absurd (if not malicious) cases I’ve seen in recent years. And remember, this is a Justice Department that can’t spare an FBI agent to look into, or a prosecutor to handle, a gang rape case involving Jamie Leigh Jones, or any of the dozens of other cases involving rape, assault and homicide in Iraq. They’re not “priorities.” On the other hand, bringing charges against Democratic office holders has been a very high priority from the day Bush took office, and it continues to be so today.
More than this, note how party connections flavor the U.S. Attorney’s interest in cases of feather bedding. Recall that a Missouri criminal attorney conducted a detailed investigation into the service of Mark Everett Fuller as District Attorney in Coffee and Pike Counties. His study, presented in a sworn affidavit and backed up with documentation, showed that Fuller was an absentee district attorney. He drew his salary for the job, but he spent his time out of state, largely in Colorado, attending to the business that he owns and operated and which continues to provide most of his income–Doss Aviation. The affidavit was submitted to the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department. No investigation of its allegations occurred. The allegations of “feather bedding” in the case involving this Republican official were many times greater than the one charged against Schmitz. But what happened? Nothing. The U.S. attorney was not interested. As a prosecutor told Time’s Adam Zagorin, different rules apply with respect to the “home team.” Fuller went on to be the judge designated to handle the highest profile political prosecution in the country, involving former Governor Siegelman. Now we’re seeing more evidence of the two distinct flavors of justice dispensed by Republican prosecutors in Alabama: one marked with a “D” and the other with a “R.”
What was done to Siegelman and is being done now to Schmitz is an outrage, a danger to us all. If it an happen to them, it can happen to anyone. But let us also remember that these and worse tactics have long been used against radical and minorities, far removed from the levers of power.
Richard Nixon had an enemies list, which inspired outrage. What actually inspired outrage was that the list consisted of liberals and Democrats; Noam Chomsky was the only radical on it. Nixon was using the tactics of repression traditionally reserved for radicals and minorities against the elite. We see that happening again. It poses a great danger to all of us if mainstream figures can be thrown in jail for opposing the woul-be dominant party. But, as we support Sielman and Schmitz, let’s not forget the many others, less connected to positions of power and influence, who also end up imprisoned on false charges.
February 1st, 2008
Valtin at Daily Kos provides additional details on the story of the FBI threatening to have a suspect’s family tortured in Egypt in order to get a confession. The brief documenting the torture was briefly posted online then removed and replaced with a redacted version. The court claimed the redactions were to protect the suspect. Not surprisingly, they were rather to protect the FBI by hiding the accounts of the torture.
Valtin has excerpts from both briefs, illustrating what officials were trying to hide. Go read it.
October 31st, 2007