My April 29, 2008 KPFK interview on Beneath the Surface with Michael Slate on the Involuntary Drugging of US Detainees can now be listened to here. KPFK is the Pacifica station for Southern California.
Add comment May 5th, 2008
I will be interviewed on KPFK, Pacifica Radio for fouthern California, tonight at around 5:45 Pacific time, 8:45 Eastern time. the topic will be my recent article The Involuntary Drugging of US Detainees. Tune in at Los Angeles, 90.7F and Santa Barbara 98.7 FM. or listen online at www.kpfk.org and click “listen live.”
Add comment April 29th, 2008
The New York Times today reminds us of the truly horrifying conditions at the Guantanamo prison. The Times reports on claims that solitary confinement in their 8′ by 12′ metal cells with no windows and nothing to do but read the Koran for 22 hours a day is literally driving many detainees insane. This situation is being raised by lawyers for detainees indicted for war crimes as the lawyers claim that their clients are unable to concentrate and aid the defense in preparation for their upcoming trials.
By many definitions, treatment that drives people insane would constitute “torture.” But, when the US ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, they adopted reservations to the treaty that restricted the definition of torture to potentially exclude such cases. Thus they stated that
[I]n order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.
Given this definition, the question of whether confinement at Guantanamo is torture depends upon whether one can make a good argument that this confinement is among
procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.
One certainly could argue that behavior, such as that described in the Times, [e.g., ‘I'm talking to the ceiling now,'] constitutes a profound disruption of the senses, making it “torture,” even according to the restricted US definition.
In its defense, the US, according to the Times, is apparently distorting statistics of the rate of mental illness there. An additional tactic used by military health representatives I have heard is to claim that many of the emotional problems among detainees are do to what are called “personality disorders.” This is clever because personality disorders, by definition, have been present for many years, thus predating imprisonment in hell, er, Guantanamo.
As the military confirms, the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees are housed in extremely harsh conditions invoving near permanent isolation for years on end:
According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American [supermax] prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.
Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.
But, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world that is Guantanamo and other US national security detention facilities, nothing is as it seems. The military are trying to prove the Humpty Dumpty correct that “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. “It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.” Thus, as described by an attorney, while at Guantanamo,
Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States.
The military prosecutor claims, however,
that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.”
The literary genre of prison memoirs from Stalinist concentration camps among others is full of accounts of people able to “communicate through walls.” Never before have I heard a claim as brazen as that this flaw in the system of total isolation did not make being locked up alone for years on end in an 8′ by 12′ cell for 22 hours a day “solitary confinement.”
This article does not even mention the existence of another “camp,” the super-secret Camp 7 the existence of which was only admitted by the military to the Associated Press last February. While details about conditions at Camp 7 are unavailable, we can only assume that they are even more brutal than those at Camps 5 and 6 that are described in this Times article.
This past February the American Psychological Association amended their 2007 anti-torture resolution to unequivocally condemn the use of prolonged isolation as unethical. Unfortunately, the APA regularly condemns torture in the abstract but to date has not had a word to say about real, existing, US torture. The APA could give this resolution some concrete meaning by issuing an amicus brief supporting the attempts of these detainees to be moved to less harsh settings, where interaction is allowed. Further, the APA resolution’s states that:
Psychologists are absolutely prohibited from knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques at any time and may not enlist others to employ these techniques in order to circumvent this resolution’s prohibition.
If this resolution means anything, it means that psychologists are forbidden from participating in any way in activities at Guantanamo’s Camps 5 and 6, where prolonged isolation is the rule. It is time for the APA to speak loud and clear to state, consistent with its own resolutions, that psychologists may not participate in any capacity in these facilities.
However, the APA has consistently asserted that psychologists, rather than aiding abuse, are playing a vital role in protecting detainees. As their military-dominated task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security [PENS] asserted in 2005:
It is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation- or information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes. While engaging in such consultative and advisory roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations, doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants.
After three long years of revelations about the abuses occurring in US detention facilities and psychologists roles in those abuses, APA leaders are still making this ridiculous claim that psychologists aiding detainee interrogations are primarily protecting detainees.
For years APA members have been pushing for a policy that would bar psychologist participation at Guantanamo, the CIA’s “black sites,” or other facilities outside the reach of the Constitution and international law. [APA members should go here and sign a petition calling for a referendum putting that policy into effect.] However, this policy change, while highly desirable, would be less critical if APA would actually enforce the policies it already has in place that, by any reasonable interpretation, clearly ban participation in Camps 5 and 6, as well as Camp 7. Unfortunately, the APA has a long history of talk against torture, but they have taken few steps to walk the walk. They appear to be dragging their feet until the Bush administration is long gone before taking any position on the well-known abuses of this administration. Perhaps this time they’ll act on the sides of ethics and of human decency and speak out when it might make a difference.
Here is the New York Times article:
Detainees’ Mental Health Is Latest Legal Battle
By William Glaberson
Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.
But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Mr. Hamdan has essentially been driven crazy by solitary confinement in an 8-foot-by-12-foot cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”
“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”
His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Mr. Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.
Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for madness. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.
Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells.”
In response to questions, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in American prisons. Commander Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said with data showing that more than half of inmates in American correctional institutions had mental health problems.
With their filings, Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers are setting the stage for similar challenges to the procedures of Guantánamo in some 80 expected war crimes cases, lawyers for other detainees say. “The issue of mistreatment of prisoners, the miserable lives they live in these cells, will come up in every case,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for 35 detainees.
The case of Salim Hamdan is already a landmark because the Supreme Court used an earlier case against him to strike down the Bush administration’s first military commission system in 2006. But that case, like most of the legal battles over Guantánamo, did not affect conditions there.
Detainees lawyers argue that the effects of intense isolation have gradually turned the prison camp into something of a highly fortified mental ward. Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers say his place as one of the best-known detainees has not spared him.
In more than six years of detention, Mr. Hamdan has had two phone calls to his family and no visits. He has been disciplined, legal filings say, for having a Snickers bar that was given to him by his lawyers and for possessing too many socks.
“Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse,” he wrote his lawyers in February. “Why, why, why?”
At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.
In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.
Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.
The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Mr. Hamdan’s condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers recited some prosecution arguments.
The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.” They said that Mr. Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine.
Speaking generally, Commander Storum said, detainees are enemy combatants held safely. “We are holding the right people,” she added, “in the right place, for the right reasons, and doing it the right way.”
Prosecutors have said Mr. Hamdan, now about 39, helped Mr. bin Laden elude capture after the 2001 terror attacks. He is charged with transporting weapons for Al Qaeda and being a bin Laden bodyguard and driver.
In recent weeks, his case has drawn wide notice because the defense asserted that senior Pentagon officials exerted improper influence over military prosecutors and pressed cases for political reasons. Hearings on that issue, also scheduled for next week, may expose the internal workings of the military commissions. The former chief Guantánamo prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis, who has become a critic of the way the war crimes system is run, is slated to testify for Mr. Hamdan.
But the claim about Mr. Hamdan’s mental health could expose the workings of Guantánamo. According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.
Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.
Michael E. Mone Jr., a Boston lawyer, visited a client last month in Camp 5, where Mr. Hamdan is held. Mr. Mone said his client, an Uzbek detainee, asked why he could not be held in a place where he could see the sun.
This winter, lawyers for Abdulghappar Turkistani, a detainee in Camp 6, received a letter describing life there. “Losing any contact with anyone,” he wrote, “also being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being.”
Reporters are not permitted to interview detainees, and some international groups, like Amnesty International, have been denied access to detainees.
In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture. But the Red Cross usually keeps its conclusions private.
As a result, much of what is known about current conditions at Guantánamo comes from lawyers, who visit regularly under tight restrictions. Many describe the men as depressed or delusional. Some, they say, show obvious signs of what some of them call Guantánamo psychosis.
Four detainees are believed to have committed suicide in 2006 and 2007, but the military has never released the official details.
Some of the men are increasingly paranoid and some are losing touch with reality, said Rebecca P. Dick, a Washington lawyer who visited two Afghan detainees in March. “One client said, ‘I’m talking to the ceiling now,’ ” Ms. Dick recalled.
Six detainees, according to military officials, are now on hunger strikes. They are fed liquid nutrition through tubes inserted in their nostrils daily.
Mr. Stafford Smith said one of his clients, a hunger striker, was fixated on a mathematical formula that he believed proves that he will be the next to die.
Another detainee, Mr. Stafford Smith said, has smeared feces on his cell walls. “When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me he had no idea,” Mr. Stafford Smith said.
Last month a lawyer for nine detainees who are members of China’s Uighur ethnic minority told a Congressional committee that one of them, Huzaifa Parhat, said that life at Guantánamo was like having already died. The lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said Mr. Parhat asked the lawyers to pass on a message. He told them to tell his wife to remarry.
Military officials often dismiss such descriptions as accounts by gullible lawyers manipulated by terrorists trained to make false claims of mistreatment.
Detainees’ lawyers say the military methodically understates the mental illness at Guantánamo for public relations reasons.
In military commission proceedings in recent weeks, there have been hints that some of the men facing charges may be deteriorating psychologically.
A military lawyer for a Sudanese detainee said her client appeared frantic and asked that he be evaluated.
When a judge asked a Saudi detainee the name of a lawyer, the detainee’s answer was: “I have been here for six years. Thank God I can even still remember the names of my own family.”
But Mr. Hamdan’s case is the first in the current system to try to air fully the claim that Guantánamo is warping the minds of the men held there.
Commander Mizer said Mr. Hamdan talked unendingly about his desire to moved to Camp 4, the only place at Guantánamo where detainees are permitted to live communally. Camp 4 is believed to house 50 or fewer detainees who officials classify as highly compliant. Mr. Hamdan blames his lawyers for failing to get him out of Camp 5, Commander Mizer said, and will talk only about that. “He refuses to talk about his case,” he said.
The trial is now set to begin on May 28. But twice in recent months, Commander Mizer said, Mr. Hamdan has said he was dismissing Commander Mizer from the case. “He said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ ” Commander Mizer said.
There is only one subject, he said, that Mr. Hamdan discusses: Getting out of his cell in Camp 5 at Guantánamo Bay.
1 comment April 26th, 2008
[UPDATED, with new title]
A major article in the Washington Post today collects the accounts of US detainees who, in large numbers, report that they were the recipients of unknown psychotropic drugs. Earlier this month Jeff Stein’s CQ article discussed this topic. The Post now goes further in collecting the evidence and making the case that involuntary psychotropic drug use on detainees, including as an interrogation aid, was a common practice. Further, the Post, by placing this on page A1 is making a statement about their belief in these claims which automatically catapults the issue of detainee drugging to a major place in the list of Bush administration abuses.
The drugging was extremely traumatic for many detainees:
“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….
‘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.”
As the Post describes, often the drugs seemed be used as part of the interrogation process:
“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.’ “
Such treatment, like many of the other “interrogation” techniques supposedly necessary to obtain accurate intelligence, often led to false confessions instead:
“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.”
Other detainees describe being administered drugs as part of what appeared to be punishment:
“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.’ “
While both the military and the Defense Department deny the reports, as the Post carefully notes, these reports are especially plausible as it is known that the CIA conducted a decades-long research program to develop truth serums and pharmacological approaches to manipulating human behavior. And, as discussed below, the CIA in 2003 was actively discussing the use of drugs in interrogations. Further, as both CQ and the Post point out, the recently released Yoo torture memo went out of its way to provide legal cover for the use of drugs in interrogations.
In recent years it has become clear that psychologists have been pivotal actors in the Bush administration interrogation abuses, as they designed, conducted and standardized “enhanced interrogations amounting to torture. As Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban explained:
“I… discovered that psychologists weren’t merely complicit in America’s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA.”
At this point it is unknown if psychologists are involved as among those “health” professionals who involuntarily administered drugs. But we should remember that, thanks partly to military support, a number of psychologists can now legally prescribe drugs. And some of those prescribing psychologists were with the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCTs] at Guantanamo. It also should be remembered that in 2003 the American Psychological Association co-sponsored with the CIA an invitation-only Science of Deception Workshop that discussed, among other topics, “What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?” CIA consultant torturers James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were among those invited to attend, as were several of their superiors. Given these new revelations, the APA thus needs to speak openly and forthrightly about this conference, how it was organized, who attended and how they were selected, and what was discussed there. It is long past time for these actions of the psychological association to be openly discussed among the APA membership and the broader public.
This story constitutes further evidence that health professionals, likely including physicians as well as the psychologists previously know about, were central agents in the Bush administration’s abusive detention and interrogation program. As the Post discusses, this behavior is a clear violation of medical ethics, going well beyond these professions’ guiding “do no harm” standard. It is now incumbent upon Congress to investigate these serious allegations. Additionally, associations of health professionals need to make clear, unequivocal statements that participating in these activities is unethical and will not be tolerated.
Such statements are, however, but a first step toward dealing with these perversions of the health professions. The health professions need a truth and reconciliation process to explore the actions of health professional, psychologists included, in aiding the varied abuses of detainees that are coming to light. This process must explore the actions, not just of individual professionals, but of professional associations in looking the other way at, or perhaps even actively aiding these abuses.
As a first step toward such a process we need an committee of health professionals, human rights advocates, and retired intelligence professionals concerned about detention abuses to hold testimony and create a detailed account of what is available in the public record on health professional involvement in these abuses. The inclusion of intelligence professionals would help penetrate the fog of denial that surrounds classified intelligence activity. This committee also should examine and make recommendations for policy and structural changes in professional organization to reduce the likelihood that these organizations will turn their backs on future abuses.
The health professions failed to come to terms with the extent of their involvement in the CIA’s earlier mind-manipulation research, making them less alert to their potential roles in the contemporary “war on terror.” Now that these professions are directly implicated in publicly-exposed detention abuses, they cannot afford again to avoid clarifying their ethical responsibilities. To fail face squarely these abuses will change the image of the health professions for decades to come. Rather than be known as those that improve human welfare and “do no harm,” these professions will be known as those that do the harm demanded by the powers that be. Should that eventuality come to pass, these professions will suffer greatly. But so will all of us who rely upon health professionals to care for our welfare.
Here is the Post article [Check out also the online graphic accompanying the article.]:
Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned
U.S. Denies Using Injections for CoercionAdel 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.
1 comment April 22nd, 2008
Many of the detainees at Guantanamo have reported forcibly receiving unknown drugs. There have been persistent rumors that drugs were used at the CIA black sites. Yet hard evidence has been lacking. Jeff Stein of CQ has put together these stories with the fact that the recent Yoo memo explicitly justified the use of drugs to aid interrogations.
It should be noted that, even by the U.S.’s limited understandings [the "U.S. Reservations"] of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, use of mind-altering substances can be torture:
United States understands that, in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from… (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.
Further, use of such drugs constitutes a “grave breach” of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, otherwise known as a war crime.
Here is Stein’s article:
Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs on terrorist suspects that are designed to weaken their resistance to interrogation. All that’s missing is the syringes and videotapes.
Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s instantly infamous 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects.
Yoo advised top Bush administration officials that interrogators could employ mind-altering drugs if they did not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”
Yoo had first rationalized the use of drugs in a 2002 memo for top Bush administration officials.
But this latest revelation shows Yoo reiterating conditions on the use of drugs a year later, despite the rising resistance to harsh interrogation techniques by military lawyers and the FBI.
“The new Yoo memo, along with other White House legal memoranda, shows clearly that the policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs was being laid,” says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.” “The recent memo on mood-altering drugs does not extend previous work on this area,” he said. “The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs.”
“Yes, I believe they have been used,” Jeffrey S. Kaye, a clinical psychologist who works with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, told me.
“I came across some evidence that they were using mind-altering drugs, to regress the prisoners, to ascertain if they were using deception techniques, to break them down,” said Kaye.
Yet the situation remains unclear.
No ‘Truth Serums’
The Pentagon’s use of sedatives to help calm shackled and hooded prisoners during long “rendition” flights from the Middle East to Guantanamo has been widely reported,
But hard evidence that U.S. interrogators today are employing hallucinogens, like the LSD the CIA tested on unwitting subjects for at least 20 years beginning in the 1940s, has yet to surface.
Michael Caruso, the chief federal defender appointed to represent al Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla, asserted in a motion last year that his client “was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations.”
But he could offer no proof.
It could have been a placebo. A 1963 CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, advocated the use of placebos, as well as the real thing, on prisoners.
But Michael Gellers, a psychologist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at Guantanamo, who had objected to harsh interrogation methods, told me “he never saw anything related to drugs.”
“I never saw that raised as an issue,” he said.
In any case, hallucinogens don’t make subjects “tell the truth.”
“Their function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation,” the KUBARK manual explains.
Yet there is tantalizing evidence that the use of such drugs since 9/11 has been, at a minimum, seriously contemplated, if not implemented.
On July 17-18, 2003, for example, the CIA, the RAND Corp. and the American Psychological Association hosted a workshop entitled the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory.”
One session focused on the question, “What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?”
Desperados
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, top Bush administration officials pushed military commanders for intelligence about any other impending attacks, as Philippe Sands, an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London, details in a forthcoming piece in Vanity Fair.
Sands demonstrates that the offending interrogations weren’t conducted by a few bad apples, as the White House and Pentagon have long maintained.
They were reacting to pressure from above, to go to “the dark side” and “take the gloves off,” as Vice President Cheney put it.
But they didn’t know how, December 2006 study by the Intelligence Science Board, a wing of the National Defense Intelligence College in Washington, D.C., suggested.
Under pressure, interrogators started to “‘make it up’ on the fly,” the study said.
“This shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods,” it said, “at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light.”
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo, who tried to throttle the excesses, told Vanity Fair that prison officials and interrogation managers drew inspiration from Jack Bauer, the fictional action-hero of FOX’s counterterror drama, “24,” who uses torture and drugs on terrorists.
“It was hugely popular,” Beaver said. Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”
Beaver makes no mention of drugs in the piece.
She may not have seen or heard about their use, says Ewe Jacobs, the director of Survivors International, which specializes in the psychological and medical treatment of torture survivors.
“The Guantanamo camps were isolated from one another,” he says.
FBI interrogators and naval investigators, fearing involvement in illegal acts, were told to leave the island.
Professor Miles says, “I suspect that most of the use of interrogational drugs was by CIA and Special Ops interrogators, and thus still remains classified.”
We just don’t know - yet.
The CIA kept its MKULTRA, a mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, and other drug-testing programs secret for more than 20 years.
In the early 1970s, when then-CIA Director Richard Helms got wind of congressional investigators sniffing around, he ordered its records destroyed - a precursor of the agency’s recent destruction of interrogation videotapes.
But it turned out that Helms missed a box.
A disenchanted State Department official, John D. Marks, who had resigned over Vietnam, got hold of the remaining files and produced an astonishing book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”
Many more books, some by persons who said they were victims of the mind-altering experiments, were produced.
Few believed them. Their tales sounded looney absent patient records (which Helms had ordered destroyed) of the drug experiments (many carried out in a secret wing of Georgetown University Hospital).
Likewise, few believe Padilla. Even fewer will believe the other prisoners, a number of whom are deranged from prolonged interrogation - if they ever get out.
We may never know the truth.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
1 comment April 6th, 2008
Dealing as we do so often with torture and abuse of national security detainees, we have devoted insufficient attention to the horrifying abuses of our criminal justice system. Among the most horrifying are the supermax prisons designs to break human souls through total isolation and deprivation. Alternet has an article reminding us of these conditions in these concentration camps:
Torture in Our Own Backyards: The Fight Against Supermax Prisons
By Jessica Pupovac
In supermax prisons, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement is the norm. How did our prison system become so cruel?
Imagine living in an 8-by-12 prison cell, in solitary confinement, for eight years straight. Your entire world consists of a dank, cinder block room with a narrow window only three inches high, opening up to an outdoor cement cage, cynically dubbed, “the yard.” If you’re lucky, you spend one hour, five days a week in that outdoor cage, where you gaze up through a wire mesh roof and hope for a glimpse of the sun. If you talk back to the guards or act out in any way, you might only venture outside one precious hour per week.
You go eight years without shaking a hand or experiencing any physical human contact. The prison guards bark orders and touch you only while wearing leather gloves, and then it’s only to put you in full cuffs and shackles before escorting you to the cold showers, where they watch your every move.
You cannot make phone calls to your friends or family and must “earn” two visits per month, which inevitably take place through a Plexiglass wall. You are kept in full shackles the entire time you visit with your wife and children, and have to strain to hear their voices through speakers that record your every word. With no religious or educational programs to break up the time or elevate your thoughts, it’s a daily struggle to keep your mind from unraveling.
This is how Reginald Akeem Berry describes his time in Tamms Correctional Facility, a “Supermax” state prison in southern Illinois, where he was held from March 1998 until July 2006. He now works to draw attention to conditions inside Tamms, where 261 inmates continue to be held in extreme isolation.
Once exclusively employed as a short-term punishment for particularly violent jailhouse infractions, today, 44 states hold “supermax” facilities, or “control units,” designed specifically to hold large numbers of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. A concept that spread like wildfire in the 1990s, today an estimated 20,000 prisoners live in these modern-day dungeons, judged to be “unmanageable” by prison officials and moved from other penitentiaries to the nearest supermax.
Life in supermax institutions is grueling. Inmates stay in their cells for at least 23 hours per day, and never so much as lay eyes on another prisoner. While many live under these conditions for five years, others continue, uncertain of how to earn their way out, for ten, 15, or even 20 years.
The effects of such extended periods of isolation on prisoners’ physical and mental health, their chances of meaningful rehabilitation, and, ultimately, on the communities to which they will eventually return are coming under increasing fire, from lawyers, human rights advocates and the medical professionals who have treated them. Bolstered by growing concern over the U.S.’ sanctioning of torture, and the effect that has on the country’s international standing, their calls to action are gaining ground. In 2000, and again in 2006, the United Nations Committee Against Torture condemned the kind of isolation imposed by the U.S. government in federal, state and county-run supermax prisons, calling it “extremely harsh.” “The Committee is concerned about the prolonged isolation periods detainees are subjected to,” they stated, “the effect such treatment has on their mental health, and that its purpose may be retribution, in which case it would constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
“Sending someone to a supermax is punishment”
Defense attorney Jean Maclean Snyder, who has represented several Tamms prisoners, says the U.N. declaration is dead-on. “It is suspected that many [Tamms] prisoners have been sent there in retaliation for filing lawsuits about prison policies; because serious mental illnesses cause them to be disruptive; or simply because wardens at other prisons do not like them,” she wrote in 2000, shortly after the original declaration was issued. Allan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Office in Chicago, IL thinks that the ambiguity surrounding how and why inmates are sent to supermax facilities constitutes a violation of due process. “Sending someone to a supermax is punishment,” Mills told AlterNet, “and before someone gets punished, they have a right to a fair hearing.” “Just like if you were to get a traffic ticket, you have a right to say ‘I didn’t do it’ and bring witnesses, and the police would have to come and testify against you,” he said. “The same should go for prisoners who are being subjected to this horrendous long-term confinement.” Mills claims he has “tracked a pattern of prisoners being sent to Tamms because of them filing grievances or lawsuits and being jailhouse lawyers.”
Assistant Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) Director Sergio Molina told AlterNet that, “Their behavior is their input,” and although he claims the decision to transfer an inmate to Tamms is made on a “case-by-case basis,” he wasn’t able to expand further on the process.
Reginald Berry says he believes he was sent there for being “influential,” among the general prison population. A former five-star leader of Chicago’s infamous Vice Lords gang, he says he had the opportunity to turn in the “pistol” in a murder case, in return for a five-year sentence. However, he says, cooperating with the police against a fellow Vice Lord would have been “against the code,” — so instead he fought a first-degree murder charge in court and wound up with a 33-year jail sentence.
At first, life in Illinois state penitentiaries — he was transferred to several over the years — was manageable, since, in his words, “the animals were running the zoo.” Through what he describes as a vast web of corruption and incompetence, “the guys who was the beast of the place were being rewarded by the warden,” and were granted preferential job placements and access to coveted programs. “Might made right.”
Following a series of prison riots and attacks on staff in the early 1990s (neither of which Berry had ever witnessed or been involved in) the Illinois General Assembly decided to construct the Tamms Closed Maximum Security Facility, or “CMAX.” With a price tag of $72 million, Tamms CMAX opened its doors on March 10, 1998. The prison is capable of housing up to 500 of the department’s “most disruptive, violent and problematic inmates,” according to an IDOC brochure. IDOC also claims it costs approximately $60,000 per inmate per year to keep the facility running, a figure over three times higher than the per-inmate annual cost at other IDOC facilities.
Berry says that although he heard supermax rumors swirling throughout the jailhouse, he never imagined that he would end up in one. As he tells it, he hadn’t been involved in a violent altercation for years. Nonetheless, “they came back and punished all the guys they had given fringe benefits to, and I had been one of those brothers.” Days after the Tamms facility opened, ten police officers in full riot gear came to his cell and escorted him out. One of those guards offered him what would be his last cigarette for the next eight years, before putting him on an IDOC van and sending him off to Tamms.
“Many of these inmates have become psychotic”
The moment he arrived at Tamms, Berry says, he knew “it was a different world.” All his belongings were immediately confiscated, right down to his underwear. He was then cavity searched before being escorted, in full shackles and leg irons, to his cell. “Imagine if you’ve been smoking 20 years,” he says. “Overnight you can’t smoke no more, overnight you can’t talk to your kids no more.” The coffee was gone. Work and educational programs were gone. Human interaction was out of reach. Guards barked orders and harassed him.
After about a month of sitting in his cell, he began to hear other inmates’ mental health slipping. “You get these guys and they don’t know how to acclimate so they start cutting themselves up,” he recalled, adding that some would go so far as “taking a pen and sticking it all the way up into their penis,” or even worse, attempting suicide.
One expert on the effects of solitary confinement, Dr. Terry Kupers, who consults prison agencies on mental health services, says it is not uncommon for “psychiatric symptoms [to] emerge in previously healthy prisoners … in this context of near-total isolation and idleness.” Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Stuart Grassian concurs. In 2005 he told the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons that he had evaluated of “scores of inmates” who “psychiatrically deteriorated during the course of their confinement in solitary.” “Many of these inmates,” he said. “have become psychotic, and many have engaged in self-injurious and self-mutilatory behavior.”
Annibal Santiago, who has been incarcerated at Tamms since 1998, describes how it feels from the inside: “The mentally ill prisoners drive the normal prisoners crazy by screaming, crying, yelling into the pod at all hours of the day and night for days non-stop, by banging on toilets, doors, walls, and/or by shaking or kicking the doors so hard that it sounds like rumbling thunder, flooding the wing with toilet water, and by throwing feces at other prisoners or inserting feces into the air vents so that the whole wing receives a dose of the smell for months.” “The constant bombardment of unrelenting stress takes its toll like a flurry of well-placed punches on a tired boxer’s head,” he wrote in a survey compiled by Tamms Year Ten Campaign, and activist group working to shut down the facility.
The Innocent Victims
Berry says that when he was first sentenced, he told his wife, Denise, that he would understand if he had to let her go. “I told her, you didn’t commit this crime, you had no part of it and I love you enough not to punish you with the hardships that’s to come,” he recounted. But she didn’t. When he was transferred to Tamms, six hours south of Chicago, she moved the family to nearby Springfield so that they could visit as often as possible. Since the Illinois General Assembly approved funding for Tamms with IDOC’s claim that it would serve as nothing more than a temporary, one-year-long “shock treatment” for problem inmates, Mrs. Berry thought it would be temporary move. However, two years later, when it became clear that IDOC had no intention of transferring Berry in the foreseeable future, the family moved back to Chicago. Denise says she wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to see her husband deteriorate so rapidly at Tamms, after having spent ten years in the general prison population. It was particularly hard for his teenage son, who watched as his father grew emaciated from a meager diet and lack of exercise and saw dark circles form under his eyes from lack of sunlight. “What I had a problem with, being an inmate’s wife,” Denise says, “was how they degraded the inmates.” She described her husband being shackled and forced to sit on a small cement stool for the duration of their visits. When officers would deny him a trip to the restroom, encouraging him to instead prematurely end their visit, she says it made her feel like an accomplice to his suffering.
Berry says one thing that kept him going was keeping his family at the forefront of his mind. It bothered him that Tamms prisoners were only allowed to keep 15 pictures in their cells. “Every time my wife sent me pictures, she’d send me sets of 24, and I’d say, ‘ok, I got to decide right here which ones I want,’ because if you get caught with more than that they can give you a ticket and send you back down to seg [disciplinary segregation, a unit in which inmates have only one shower and one yard visit per week].” Inmates remain in ’seg’ for a minimum of 90 days and are not allowed visits for the duration. Once, says Berry, in what would be a devastating error, he tried to mail a picture to his son rather than throw it away. Because in the photo his son’s hat was tilted to one side, the officers gave Berry a disciplinary ticket, allegedly for participating in gang-related activity. “My heart dropped to my knees,” he says, “I told them, ‘ya’ll let this picture in here!’”
The violation earned him a ticket to “seg” for six months — months that were tacked onto his sentence, which had been reduced for “good time.” The decision meant that Berry’s sentence would effectively be extended, forcing him to miss his youngest son’s college graduation. “I was thinking, ‘You missed the eighth grade graduation, you missed the high school graduation, you’ve got to make this college graduation,” Berry recalls. According to Denise, prison officials told her that if she could get proof that the people in the picture — Berry’s brother, Michael, his oldest son, Reggie Jr, and Willie Ware Jr., his nephew — were not affiliated with gangs, they would reconsider his punishment. “I had to obtain their birth certificates,” she says. Denise went to 28th Ward Representative Anazette Collins’s office, as did the three men, with their IDs. Their efforts proved futile. In the end, she says, “all this was compiled and sent to Tamms and they did nothing.”
Berry’s son, Joe, graduated in May of 2006. Berry got home four months later. “I missed my son’s graduation,” he said, “and it crushed me.”
Long-Term Effects
A 2007 Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP) report lists family ties as integral to rehabilitation and successful re-entry into the general community. However, for many Tamms inmates, the lack of phone access, a prohibitive visitation process, and the distance from Chicago, where two-thirds of Tamms inmates are from, makes it nearly impossible to maintain those ties. The scheduling and approval process at Tamms requires weeks of planning and multiple rounds of paperwork. If a visitor arrives late for their appointment, they are forced to begin the process all over again. With no public transportation near the site, the process become more than some people can handle — or realistically afford.
The BoP also cites access to educational and vocational programs — especially for minority populations — as another key element in prisoner rehabilitation. Yet no such opportunities exist in supermax prisons, other than upper-level, self-guided study for the few inmates who have “earned” it.
According to a March 2008 study published in Prisons Journal, “the rapid expansion of the supermax has occurred despite no empirical evidence substantiating its effectiveness or value.” Yet Tamms is just one portion of the billions of dollars that have been invested in supermax prisons. IDOC officials confirmed that they do not collect separate recidivism [or return] statistics for Tamms prisoners — an alarming admission for prisoners, their families, and the broader community that many critics say points to a massive cover-up surrounding the human cost of supermax facilities.
As Paul Beachamp, a Tamms prisoner since 2002, puts it, “What happens when you lock up a dog in a cage for years at a time and constantly harass the dog and treat it bad while it’s in the cage? Do you actually think that dog will act right once you let it out?” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Corrections and Rehabilitation, issued a similar warning before a Senate hearing in 2006. “The experiences inmates have in prison — whether violent or redemptive — do not stay within prison walls, but spill over into the rest of society,” he said. “Federal, state, and local governments must address the problems faced by their respective institutions and develop tangible and attainable solutions.”
Meanwhile, a range of alternative responses have yet to be explored. A 2006 national survey of 601 prison wardens, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice and administered by the Urban League, showed 62.5% of wardens agreeing or strongly agreeing that “staff training” would be an “effective alternative to supermax prisons.” It was the number one choice selected in the survey. Other popular alternatives, in order of preference, were to “use segregation cells in each prison facility,” “provide targeted rehabilitative services,” and “provide opportunities for spiritual development.”
Prison activists across the country are working to shed light on this. Enlisting the support of lawmakers and lawyers who share their concern over the treatment of supermax prisoners — and the rationale behind it — they are fighting for legal precedents that would bring more services to supermax prisons, grant prisoners more mobility and opportunity and, ultimately, shut the facilities down. The Tamms Year Ten Campaign is one such coalition; it recently persuaded the Illinois House of Representatives to hold a hearing, scheduled for April 28th, to consider arguments for and against the effectiveness and legality of Tamms.
Reginald Berry is part of that movement in Chicago, organized under the banner of the Tamms Ten Year campaign, which works to draw attention to the 88 prisoners who have been at Tamms since the day it opened its doors. Today, in addition to raising awareness of conditions inside supermax prisons, he’s also working to cut off the “school-to-prisons pipeline” in his community by sharing his experiences in Tamms with Chicago teenagers, through an organization he founded, “Saving Our Sons.”
Berry’s work is one of the reasons he counts himself among the lucky ones. After spending eight years in a facility where he was told he would have to “relinquish everything, even your personality,” Berry has done more than survive; he has thrived, and he is fighting back. Within the current debate over state-sanctioned torture abroad, his voice is an important reminder of the cruel, unusual, and too-often ignored contradictions of our own criminal justice system.
Jessica Pupovac is an adult educator and independent journalist living in Chicago.
4 comments March 24th, 2008
Steven J. Reisner is again running for American Psychological Association President on a platform of removing psychologists from abusive interrogations of “enemy combatant” detainees. Please give him your #1 nomination when you receive your nomination form. His campaign statement can be read here and is available as a pdf here. It can also be read at www.ethicalapa.com/Reisner_statement.html. Here is an email he recently sent out. Please help to distribute it widely:
Dear Colleagues,
Because of a printing error, the APA Presidential nomination ballots are in the mail again, and once again, I am asking for your support. Please put STEVEN J. REISNER on the first line when you receive the new ballot.
And, if it is possible, please spread the word to other psychologists, groups and listservs.
The issue remains the same: the APA must take a principled stance against our nation’s policy of using psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations of detainees and ‘enemy combatants’ at centers like Guantánamo and secret CIA black sites, that operate in violation of international law and the Geneva conventions.
For thousands of years, health professionals have been guided by the ethical precept, “Do no harm.” At the time the ethics code of the American Psychological Association was written, wise psychologists went even further, adding a further obligation: “to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons.”
Unfortunately, the recent record of the APA has been to undermine this fundamental principle. When the US government called for harsh interrogation strategies for detainees, psychologists answered the call. When psychologists’ roles in these abuses were exposed, the APA leadership first denied that these things actually took place. Even now, the APA defends its policy by claiming that APA should not interfere in the legitimate practice of other psychologists. While I agree wholeheartedly with this value, I do not believe it extends to a supposed ‘freedom’ for psychologists to participate in abusive detainee interrogations, or in any interrogations that take place in conditions where human rights and international law are being flagrantly violated
When, as recently as last week, the President of the United States re-asserted the right to continue to use waterboarding; when just this week, a sitting Supreme Court Justice publicly referred to such techniques as “so-called torture” (“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t…stick something under the fingernail, [or] smack him in the face.” — Antonin Scalia, BBC interview, 2/12/08), we, the health professionals dedicated to human health and welfare, must take a stand. Now is the time for us to reassert the humane standard that has guided health professionals in times of conflict: “Do no harm.”
But since 2002, our ethics code has permitted violations of those standards when they conflict with law or military regulation. In fact, guidelines drafted for Army psychologists providing psychological support for detainee interrogations reminds them: “The Ethics Code is always subordinate to the law and regulations.”
Right now, doing harm, violating the rights and welfare of others, abusing detainees are all legal (“We’ll make sure professionals have the tools necessary to do their job, within the law.” — President Bush, BBC News, Feb. 14, 2004). This is precisely the reason that a clear ethical standard is so important, so that psychologists may remind their superiors that they are required to adhere to the humane standard that has guided health professionals in times of conflict: “Do no harm.”
Many good psychologists have resigned or are withholding their dues because of this issue. Among them is Ken Pope, who wrote in his recent resignation letter from the APA: “APA’s creation of an enforceable standard allowing psychologists to violate these fundamental ethical responsibilities in favor of following a regulation, a law, or a governing legal authority clashes with its ethical foundation, historic traditions, and basic values…This new enforceable standard, in my opinion, contradicts one of the essential ethical values voiced in the Nuremberg trials. Even in light of the post-9-11 historical context and challenges, I believe we can never abandon the fundamental ethical value affirmed at Nuremberg.”
It is time for us to turn the APA around. It is time for the APA to join the other health professional organizations around the world, including the World Medical Association, the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and the American Psychiatric Association, in upholding the United Nations Principles of Medical Ethics and in saying ‘no’ to participation in unethical interrogations and human rights violations.
I am asking for you to help me reverse the APA’s direction and restore our fundamental principles.
Please put STEVEN J. REISNER first when you receive the ballot in the mail. Please remember, these are substitute ballots, so even if you voted once, you must vote again!
And please, spread the word to other APA members, listservs, and groups.
My nomination statement can be read here or downloaded as a pdf here. It can also be read at http://www.ethicalapa.com/Reisner_statement.html For a detailed history of the issue of psychologists, interrogations, and the APA, please see the ‘Commentary on the APA’s FAQ on Interrogations,’ prepared by the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology: http://tinyurl.com/ys3fjy
Thank you again for your time and your vote!
Steven Reisner, Ph.D.
Steven Reisner, Ph.D.
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
225 West 15th Street, Apt C
New York, NY 10011
phone 212-633-8391
email: sreisner@psychoanalysis.net
Remmeber to read Steven’s full campaign statement here or download as a pdf here
1 comment February 17th, 2008
A new world-wide study finds a U-shaped curve of happiness, with those of us in “midlife” (40-60) more likely to be depressed than the young or old, the Guardian reports:
Happiness is being young or old, but middle age is misery
by Alok Jha
People are most likely to become depressed in middle age, according to a worldwide study of happiness. The team of economists leading the work found that we are happiest towards the beginning and end of our lives, leaving us most miserable in middle years between 40 and 50.
The results, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, showed that people’s levels of happiness followed a U-shaped curve, a pattern that was remarkably consistent in the vast majority of countries the researchers looked at, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe.
For both men and women in the UK, the probability of depression peaked at around the age of 44. In the US, men were most likely to be unhappiest at 50, while for women the age was 40.
Andrew Oswald, from the University of Warwick, and David Blanchflower, from Dartmouth College in the US, led a study of more than 2 million people from 80 countries to find if happiness was related to age.
They found that the signs of mid-life depression were consistent across many groups of people, irrespective of socio-economic status, whether they had children in the house, were divorced, or were facing changes in jobs or income.
“Some people suffer more than others but in our data the average effect is large,” said Oswald.
“What causes this apparently U-shaped curve, and its similar shape in different parts of the developed and even often developing world, is unknown.
“However, one possibility is that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations. Another possibility is that cheerful people live systematically longer.”
A third possibility is that older people might compare their lives with their peers’. Seeing their friends die could mean people value their remaining years more highly.
Oswald added: “It looks from the data like something happens deep inside humans. For the average person in the modern world, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year.
“Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period. But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old. Perhaps realising that such feelings are completely normal in mid-life might even help individuals survive this phase better.”
A total of 72 countries were found to follow the U-shaped pattern of happiness. In the eight countries that did not seem to follow the pattern - mostly developing countries - Oswald said that the available data had been less robust, so discerning patterns had been difficult. He added that shorter lifespans might skew the results of a country.
Add comment January 29th, 2008
According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Guantanamo prisoners lie to mental health professional (the article refers to “psychologists,” “psychiatrists,” and “psychtechs” so it is hard to know who is really involved), in order to avoid receiving worse treatment:
Gulf News UAE:Prisoners forced to lie to doctors
by Habib Toumi
Manama: Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are invariably telling psychologists that they were fine in order to avoid stricter detention conditions, Juma Al Dossary, Bahrain’s most famous inmate at the US centre, has said.
Quoted by his lawyer Joshua Bryan-Colangelo, Al Dossary said that he and the other detainees were providing positive answers to weekly questions by psychologists about their mental condition.
“Al Dossary said that all detainees have learned to report that they are fine because otherwise they will be held under even stricter conditions,” said Bryan-Colangelo who visited his client last month.
“Two psychiatrists visit Al Dossary once a week to spend a few minutes with him and ask the same questions about his condition,” the lawyer said, raising doubts about the ‘mental health care’. He said that the ‘psychtech’ saw him every day and asked the same questions: “Are you eating well?, Are you sleeping well?, Do you think about hurting yourself? and, Do you think about hurting others?”
The lawyer charged that the attention that his client was receiving at Guantanamo was ‘inadequate’.
Add comment January 23rd, 2008
I have written recently about efforts in the California legislature to get health professionals, psychologists included, out of interrogation of enemy combatants. Senator Ridley-Thomas has introduced a resolution that would request the military and CIA to remove all California licenses health providers from involvement in interrogations. [For arguments in favor of the Resolution, see the Physicians for Human Rights letter to the Senate committee.] There was a hearing on Monday (January 14) at which proponents of the Resolution spoke. At this hearing the California Psychological Association (CPA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) together proposed a revised resolution. While appearing to be a slight modification, the APA-CPA revisions would completely gut the Resolution.
In particular, by inserting three words [bolded below], the APA/CPA entirely change the meaning of the critical Resolved clause. Rather than follow the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association and state that involvement in interrogations is in conflict with the ethics of a health profession, they would turn this into another vacuous statement against torture, as if everyone, even those who order it, doesn’t claim to be against torture:
Resolved, That the Legislature hereby requests the United States Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to remove all California-licensed health professionals, including, but not limited to, physicians and psychologists, from participating in any way in prisoner and detainee interrogations that involve torture, in view of their respective ethical obligations, the record of abusive interrogation practices, and the Legislature’s interest in protecting California health professionals from the risk of criminal liability; and be it further
The APA-CPA revision would make this Resolution even weaker than APA resolutions, which condemn not only torture, but the similar but legally distinct “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Notice also that, in order to make this change palatable, they totally distort the fundamental guidelines of the World Medical Association, as you can see from the language they want remove, here indicated by strikeout:
WHEREAS, The World Medical Association (WMA) issued guidelines stating
that physicians shall not use nor allow to be used their medical knowledge or skills, or health information specific to individuals, to facilitate or otherwise aid any interrogation, legal or illegal; and
WHEREAS, The guidelines issued by the WMA also statethat physicians shall not participate in or facilitate torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures of prisoners or detainees in any situations;
In the category of the humorous, if it wasn’t an indicator of how closely allied with the military the APA is, is that they remove the word “military” from a phrase pointing to the clear record that psychologists participated in abuse
WHEREAS, Evidence in the public record indicates that certain
militarypsychologists, working on behalf of the United States government, participated in the design and implementation of psychologically abusive interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq, and elsewhere, including sleep deprivation, long-term isolation, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nudity, induced hypothermia and other temperature extremes, stress positions, sensory bombardment, manipulation of phobias, force-feeding hunger strikers, and more.
Also in the category of macabre humor is the APA’s wish to revise history and strike “psychologists” from the list of professionals reported to have participated in abuse:
WHEREAS, in 2002, for the first time in American history, the Bush administration initiated a radical new policy allowing the torture of prisoners of war and other captives with confirmed reports from the International Red Cross, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet (British medical journal), military records and first-person accounts stating that California licensed physicians,
psychologists, and nurses have participated in torture or its cover up against detainees in U.S. custody
They are correct, of course, that it was not only military psychologists who participated in abuse, as CIA and CIA consultants are also known to have participated in torture and abuse. Yet they add the word military when they suggest adding a largely false statement [only one psychologist, Michael Gelles, is clearly documented to have objected to abuse, and Gelles was a civilian, not a "military" psychologist at the time] about psychologists objecting to abuse:
while evidence in the public record also indicates that certain military psychologists objected to the use of such methods
Here is the entire revised CPA-APA draft of the Resolution. Language they want removed is indicated with strikeout, while that they added is bolded:
RESOLUTION: MILITARY TORTURE AND HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
(Draft: 1-3-08)WHEREAS, the citizens of the United States of America and the residents of the State of California acknowledge January 15th as the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and mark the third Monday in January as a federal and state holiday to commemorate his life work as a Civil Rights leader, activist and an internationally acclaimed proponent of human rights who warned: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it,” and
WHEREAS, in 2002, for the first time in American history, the Bush administration initiated a radical new policy allowing the torture of prisoners of war and other captives with confirmed reports from the International Red Cross, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet (British medical journal), military records and first-person accounts stating that California licensed physicians,
psychologists, and nurses have participated in torture or its cover up against detainees in U.S. custody; andWHEREAS, in honor of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a broad coalition of medical, human rights and legal organizations are petitioning the State of California to warn its medical licensees of the legal prohibitions against torture and the risks of prosecution, and are demanding that the U.S. Government remove California doctors and psychologists from
interrogation andtorture of detainees; andWHEREAS, Dr. King challenged Americans to remain true to their most basic values, stating: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy,” and
WHEREAS, Californians to Stop Medical Torture are carrying petition signatures to the California State Senate, asking that the Senate warn California licensed physicians, psychologists, nurses and other health care workers of possible future prosecution for participation in torture — cruel and degrading practices that have become a national shame;
WHEREAS, Health professionals licensed in California, including, but not limited to physicians, osteopaths, naturopaths, psychologists, psychiatric workers, and nurses, have and continue serve nobly and honorably in the armed services of the United States; and
WHEREAS, United States Army regulations and the War Crimes Act, relative to the treatment of prisoners of war, state in Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions and in the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) require that all military personnel report and not engage in acts of abuse or torture; and
WHEREAS, the CAT defines the term torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity”; and
WHEREAS, in 2002, the United States Department of Justice reinterpreted national and international law related to the treatment of prisoners of war in a manner that purported to justify long-prohibited interrogation methods and treatment of detainees; and
WHEREAS, Physicians and other medical personnel and psychologists serving in noncombatant roles are bound by international law and professional ethics to care for enemy prisoners and to report any evidence of coercion, or abuse of detainees; and
WHEREAS, The World Medical Association (WMA) issued guidelines stating
that physicians shall not use nor allow to be used their medical knowledge or skills, or health information specific to individuals, to facilitate or otherwise aid any interrogation, legal or illegal; and
WHEREAS, The guidelines issued by the WMA also statethat physicians shall not participate in or facilitate torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures of prisoners or detainees in any situations; andWHEREAS, The ethical policy of the American Medical Association (AMA) prohibits physicians from conducting or directly participating in an interrogation or monitoring interrogations with the intention of intervening; and
WHEREAS, AMA policy also states that “[t]orture refers to the deliberate, systematic or wanton administration of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatments or punishments during imprisonment or detainment. Physicians must oppose and must not participate in torture for any reason … Physicians should help provide support for victims of torture and, whenever possible, strive to change the situation in which torture is practiced or the potential for torture is great”; and
WHEREAS, United States Code section 2340 states that (1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control; (2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from: (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
WHEREAS, In May 2006, the American Psychiatric Association stated that psychiatrists should not “participate directly in the interrogation of persons held in custody by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities, whether in the United States or elsewhere,” and that “psychiatrists should not participate in, or otherwise assist or facilitate, the commission of torture of any person. Psychiatrists who become aware that torture has occurred, is occurring, or has been planned must report it promptly to a person or persons in a position to take corrective action”; and
WHEREAS, In August 2006, the American Psychological Association stated that “psychologists shall not knowingly participate in any procedure in which torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment is used or threatened” and that “should torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment evolve during a procedure where a psychologist is present, the psychologist shall attempt to intervene to stop such behavior, and failing that exit the procedure”; and
WHEREAS, In June 2005, the House of Delegates of the American Nurses Association issued a resolution stating all of the following: “prisoners and detainees have the right to health care and humane treatment”; “registered nurses shall not voluntarily participate in any deliberate infliction of physical or mental suffering”; “registered nurses who have knowledge of ill-treatment of any individuals including detainees and prisoners must take appropriate action to safeguard the rights of that individual”; “the American Nurses Association shall condemn interrogation procedures that are harmful to mental and physical health”; “the American Nurses Association shall advocate for nondiscriminatory access to health care for wounded military and paramilitary personnel and prisoners of war”; and “the American Nurses Association shall counsel and support nurses who speak out about acts of torture and abuse”; and
WHEREAS, In March 2005, the California Medical Association stated that it “condemns any participation in, cooperation with, or failure to report by physicians and other health professionals the mental or physical abuse, sexual degradation, or
WHEREAS, In November 2004, the American Public Health Association stated that it “condemns any participation in, cooperation with, or failure to report by health professionals the mental or physical abuse, sexual degradation, or torture of prisoners or detainees,” that it “urges health professionals to report abuse or torture of prisoners and detainees;’ and that it “supports the rights of health workers to be protected from retribution for refusing to participate or cooperate in abuse or torture in military settings”; and
WHEREAS, The United States military medical system in Guantanamo Bay,
Afghanistan, Iraq, and other United States operated foreign military prisons failed to protect detainees’ rights to medical treatment, failed to prevent disclosure of confidential medical information to interrogators and others, failed to promptly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings, failed to report acts of psychological and sexual degradation, and sometimes collaborated with abusive interrogators and guards; and
WHEREAS, Current United States Department of Defense guidelines authorize the participation of certain military health personnel, especially psychologists, in the interrogation of detainees as members of “Behavioral Science Consulting Teams” in violation of professional ethics. These guidelines also permit the use of confidential clinical information from medical records to aid in interrogations; andWHEREAS, Evidence in the public record indicates that certain
militarypsychologists, working on behalf of the United States government, participated in the design and implementation of psychologically abusive interrogation methods used at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq, and elsewhere, including sleep deprivation, long-term isolation, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nudity, induced hypothermia and other temperature extremes, stress positions, sensory bombardment, manipulation of phobias, force-feeding hunger strikers, and more, while evidence in the public record also indicates that certain military psychologists objected to the use of such methods; andWHEREAS, Published reports indicate that the so-called “enhanced interrogation methods” of the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly include similar abusive methods and that agency psychologists may have assisted in their development; and
WHEREAS, in August 2007 the American Psychological Association prohibited psychologist participation in nineteen techniques associated with “enhanced” interrogation methods, also referred to as “no-touch torture” and “torture light”; and
WHEREAS, Medical and psychological studies and clinical experience show that these abuses can cause severe or serious mental pain and suffering in their victims, and therefore may violate the “torture” and “cruel and inhuman treatment” provisions of CAT and the United States War Crimes Act, as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2006; and
WHEREAS, The United States Department of Defense has failed to oversee the ethical conduct of California-licensed health professionals related to torture;
WHEREAS, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Commit yourself to the noble struggle for human rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in.” Therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate and the Assembly of the State of California jointly that the Legislature hereby requests all relevant California agencies, including, but not limited to, the Board of Behavioral Sciences, the Dental Board of California, the Medical Board of California, the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, the Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine, the California State Board of Pharmacy, the Physician Assistant Committee of the Medical Board of California, the California Board of Podiatric Medicine, the Board of Vocational Nursing and Psychiatric Technicians, the Board of Psychology, and the Board of Registered Nursing, to notify California-licensed health professionals via newsletter, email, and Web site about their professional obligations under international law, specifically Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and the amended War Crimes Act, which prohibit the torture of and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in United States custody; and be it further
Resolved, That the Legislature hereby requests all relevant California agencies to notify health professionals licensed in California that those who participate in torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment may one day be subject to prosecution; and be it further
Resolved, That the Legislature hereby requests the United States Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency to remove all California-licensed health professionals, including, but not limited to, physicians and psychologists, from participating in any way in prisoner and detainee interrogations that involve torture, in view of their respective ethical obligations, the record of abusive interrogation practices, and the Legislature’s interest in protecting California health professionals from the risk of criminal liability; and be it further
Resolved, That the Secretary of the Senate transmit copies of this resolution to the United States Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and all relevant California agencies, including, but not limited to, the Board of Behavioral Sciences, the Dental Board of California, the Medical Board of California the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, the Bureau of Naturopathic Medicine, the California State Board of Pharmacy, the Physician Assistant Committee of the Medical Board of California, the California Board of Podiatric Medicine, the Board of Vocational Nursing and Psychiatric Technicians, the Board of Psychology, and the Board of Registered Nursing.
If this attempt to gut this important legislative initiative is to be stopped, California psychologists, other health providers, and all citizens concerned about human rights will have to organize a massive lobbying campaign. Letters, phone calls, and personal meetings with State Senators and Assembly members are critical. Remember to be polite and to focus upon why this matters to the citizens and government of California. The legislature is not interested in internal conflicts within the health professions. Many are not concerned about foreign affairs. But they are very interested in kinds of activities the health providers licensed by the state are engaged in.Remember also that they may know little or nothing about these issues. Explain succinctly and to the point.
3 comments January 16th, 2008
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