CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) and VoteVets.org have obtained a memo from a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator suggesting that they avoid giving PTSD diagnoses and instead give Adjustment Disorder R/O [rule out] PTSD. We need to find out if this is widespread.
Add comment May 15th, 2008
The US military has announced that it has dropped charges against[ one of] the so-called “20th hijacker,” Mohammad al-Qahtani. Back in 2006, Bill Dedman of MSNBC asked Can ‘20th hijacker’ ever stand trial? Evidently the answer is “no.” The reason is partially that al-Qahtani was tortured, as bioethicist Steven Miles describes. But being tortured doesn’t spare one from trial in Bush’s America. But al-Qahtani has the unique distinction that his torture is described in detail in the leaked log of his interrogation, the only interrogation log to become public so far.
As anyone reading this blog regularly knows, al-Qahtani’s interrogation is notable because a psychologist, Maj. John Leso, is documented as being present at the interrogation. Also notable is that in the two years since this became public knowledge the American Psychological Association has failed to take action against Maj. Leso, an APA member, despite at least four ethics complaints being filed against him dating back to the summer of 2006. Evidently the APA is against torture, except when it is documented to have occurred.
Here is a BBC account of reasons for the dropping of charges:
Why has the US dropped 9/11 charges?
By Adam Brookes
BBC News,The American government has given no reason why charges against the man it has alleged was the “20th hijacker” in the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US have been dropped.
Mohammad al-Qahtani has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, following his detention in Afghanistan.
In February, he was charged with conspiracy, terrorism, and murder in violation of the laws of war, among other offences.
The US alleges he attempted to come to the United States in order to take part in the 9/11 attacks, but was stopped at the airport on his arrival.
An immigration officer suspected he intended to stay in the US illegally, and refused him entry.
The charges were dropped “without prejudice” - which means they could be brought again at a later date.
Five other men were charged alongside Mr Qahtani.
They include Khaled Sheikh Mohammed - the man accused of organising the 9/11 attacks.
Their trials before military commissions - the special military courts in Guantanamo Bay - are slated to go ahead.
Torture claims
As well as his military lawyer, Mr Qahtani is represented by a civilian lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights - a New York-based legal rights organisation.
The CCR said in a statement it believed the charges against him had been dropped because Mr Qahtani had been tortured.
“The government’s claims against our client were based on unreliable evidence obtained through torture at Guantanamo,” it said.
“Using torture to string together a web of so-called evidence is illegal, immoral and cannot be the basis for a fair trial.”
Published reports in 2006 described Mr Qahtani’s interrogation.
The reports - based on leaks from the Pentagon - said he had been subjected to stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures, humiliation and other highly coercive practices.
Some lawyers believe military officers did not want to face a discussion of these interrogation techniques in court, nor to have their case collapse publicly because the evidence obtained using such techniques might be ruled inadmissible.
Controversial commissions
However, proceedings against the five other suspects, including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, appear to be going ahead.
It has been frequently reported, and is widely believed by civilian and military lawyers, that similar interrogation techniques were used in these cases, too.
So how are they able to go ahead, if the case against Mr Qahtani is dropped?
Lawyers suggest that in those cases there may be other evidence - obtained independently, and not tainted with the threat of inadmissibility.
One lawyer who is not directly involved with the Guantanamo detainees called the failure of the case against Mr Qahtani a “huge setback” for the US government and the entire legal process at Guantanamo Bay.
“Yet again, we don’t know what is really happening in this system,” he said. “Transparency is zero.”
The military commissions process remains extremely controversial.
A case before the Supreme Court - Boumediene vs Bush - challenges its very legality under the constitution. The Court is expected to rule in the next two months.
1 comment May 13th, 2008
Glenn Greenwald in Salon shows how the Pentagon/TV Networks’ psyops program against the American public included 2005 reports denying the reality of Guantanamo, after Amnesty International described it as “the gulag of our time.” A group of so-called independent “military analysts” went to GTMO.
They spent a grand total of 3 hours and 55 minutes at the Guantanamo detention facilities, with almost one hour of that devoted to lunch with the troops. That was the sum total of their grand tour of the detention facility: less than 3 hours. And then the propaganda campaign to malign and dispute the extensive, amply documented findings of Amnesty was unleashed in full. [Emphasis from Greenwald]
AS one of these “analysts,”Gen. Don Sheppard, said:
“Did we drink the ‘Government Kool-Aid?’ — of course, and that was the purpose of the trip.”
This “analyst” witnessed a show-interrogation and reported on CNN how wonderful the interrogations were at GTMO:
NGUYEN: Let’s back up for just a moment, because you said you said watched an interrogation.SHEPPERD: Yes.
NGUYEN: Kind of explain to us how that played out. And were there any instances of abuse or possible abuse?
SHEPPERD: Absolutely not. These — when I sat and watched them, I want to be very careful in describing them. And I don’t want to describe how we watched or anything of that sort. But basically, you’re able to observe interrogations. They have various ways of monitoring the interrogations and what have you and letting you see what’s going on. With the interrogations that we watched were interrogators, there were translators that translated for the detainee and there were also intelligence people in there.
And they’re basically asking questions. They just ask the same questions over a long period of time. They get information about the person’s family, where they’re from, other people they knew. All the type of things that you would want in any kind of criminal investigation. And these were all very cordial, very professional. There was laughing in two of them that we…
NGUYEN: Laughing in an interrogation?
SHEPPERD: … in the two of them that we watched. Yes, indeed. It’s not — it’s not like the impression that you and I have of what goes on in an interrogation, where you bend people’s arms and mistreat people. They’re trying to establish a firm professional relationship where they have respect for each other and can talk to each other. And yes, there were laughing and humor going on in a couple of these things. And I’m talking about a remark made where someone will smirk or laugh or chuckle.
NGUYEN: All right. General Don Shepperd, we appreciate your time and that look inside Gitmo, with you being there on this tour. Thank you for that. [Emphasis from Greenwald]
Of course, American Psychological Association Presidents Ronald Levant and Gerald Koocher both went on similar demo tours and returned to tell us all they learned. But American Psychiatric Association President Sharfstein was along with APA President Levant and had no trouble realizing what was happening. Apparently, the wool can only be pulled over the eyes of those willing to shut them and turn off all critical faculties.
Add comment May 9th, 2008
The Society for Community Research and Action [ SCRA: American Psychological Association Division 27] has written a strong and moving letter to the APA leadership expressing SCRA concerns regarding the APA’s position on psychologists participating in interrogations. The letter can be downloaded in pdf format here or read below:
Society for Community Research & Action
The Division of Community Psychology (27) of the American Psychological AssociationApril 18, 2008
Norman Anderson, PhD
CEO, APAAlan Kazdin, PhD
President, APAStephen Behnke, PhD
Director, Ethics Board, APAGentlemen:
We, the Executive Committee of Division 27 [Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)], are writing to you with the purpose of opening a dialogue regarding the involvement of psychologists in interrogations at military detention centers and CIA black sites. We appreciate the steps that APA has taken of late, including the closing of the loopholes in the 2007 resolution, the banning of psychologists’ participation in specific interrogation techniques as well as their involvement in setting up detention conditions for interrogation purposes, and the writing of letters to the White House.
We propose 3 steps that APA can take to put its values more closely in line with those of its members:
(1) Do not allow psychologists to work for a governing legal authority in settings that violate basic human rights. That is, affirm the referendum sponsored by Withholddues.com.
(2) Follow up on reports of ethical violations by psychologists who participated in interrogations in the military detention centers and CIA black sites.
(3) Change Standard 1.02 of the Ethics Code to be consistent with human rights as well as to be enforceable by APA.Members of our division are quite concerned about APA’s position on psychologists involved in interrogations. Several prominent, lifelong members of our division have resigned from APA over this issue. We are sure that you have followed these resignations closely. However, we want to emphasize that many members have joined the dues withholding movement, many more are thinking of resigning, and, most importantly, our student members are deeply disturbed by APA’s policy and wonder if they will join or remain within the APA. As you look to recruit graduate student members of APA and retain them as they become early career professionals, we would encourage you to act in ways that resonate with these young people, who are the future of our profession.
The values of Division 27 and community psychology are consonant with many of the positive initiatives with which APA has been involved. We are a group that has at the heart of its mission to act in support of social justice-related issues. We are interested, from a psychological perspective, in the individual, but we do not believe that a focus on the individual is
superordinate to a consideration of the organizations, communities, and societies within which the individual operates. We value context, multi-culturalism, and human rights.(1) Affirm the referendum sponsored by WithholdAPAdues.com: “Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”
It is difficult for us to understand a role more diametrically opposed to the values and mission of community psychology than one that exists in settings where foreign prisoners have been detained in violation of international law, human rights, and the U.S. Constitution. We believe anything other than a client-protective role for psychologists in such settings goes against all widely-held psychological knowledge, research, and ethics. The detention centers and CIA black sites are settings that violate human rights, international law, and the constitution in respect to indefinite detention. There should be no setting that widely violates these principles, on or off of the U.S. mainland, where psychologists engage in strategizing to create individual interrogation plans. We are deeply troubled that psychologists assist in planning methods of interrogation that involve escalating fear and anxiety in the prisoner (e.g., “fear up harsh” in the Army Field Manual, the guide for military interrogations) or to further increase depression (e.g., the technique of “ego down” also in the Army Field Manual). That the battery of interrogation techniques used by the CIA is sufficiently harsher than the Army Field Manual only adds to the problematic nature of the involvement of psychologists.Given that the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Psychiatric Association (ApA) has prohibited its members from engaging directly in such interrogations, we would like the American Psychological Association to further consider making a decision to do the same. However, we believe that the APA could and should take a stronger moral stand by supporting the referendum sponsored by WithholdAPAdues.com (stated above).
(2) Follow up on reports of ethical violations by psychologists committed in military detention centers and CIA black sites.
We understand that formal reports regarding the actions within military detention centers, of some APA-member psychologists, have been made as early as the Fall of 2006. Several were bolstered by official Department of Defense logs of interrogations that have made their way through the media to the public. We would appreciate an update on the status of these reports. We understand that steps may be required to protect anonymity; our greater concern is finding out the progress the committee has made on these cases up to the current date, and that those submitting the reports feel their concerns have been thoroughly investigated and acted upon.
Our desire to ensure the follow-up on these reports is not so much to see a psychologist charged with violations as to see APA demonstrate a willingness to investigate possible misconduct to the furthest extent possible. We believe following-up on ethics code violations demonstrates APA’s sincere intention to investigate possible misconduct to the fullest extent possible. It also shows that all psychologists should be accountable for violations and that the
APA will acknowledge these violations when they occur. The Department of Defense has admitted activities including psychologists’ participation in the reverse-engineering of harsh SERE tactics for the use on detainees in interrogations. By following through on reports of
ethics violations, the APA can ensure that it will acknowledge possible harm caused by psychologists.(3) Change Standard 1.02 of the Ethics Code to be consistent with human rights as well as to be more easily enforceable by the APA Ethics Board.
In 2005, the Council of Representatives (COR), specifically members associated with Divisions for Social Justice (DSJ)-a group to which SCRA belongs-requested that the APA Ethics Board change the language of 1.02 and its potential loopholes, as they relate to interrogations in military situations. Language in the APA 2007 resolution helps make clear that psychologists may not violate the restrictions in that particular resolution by appealing to a “I was following orders” Nuremberg-type defense. Nevertheless, Standard 1.02 itself must be changed. Our understanding is that recommendations have been provided to add language to 1.02 that would be consistent with and anchored in human rights documents. Suggestions have also been provided to recognize “civil disobedience” as is included in equivalent sections of the ethics code of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA). Moreover, language was recommended suggesting the APA could provide support for members in resolving such conflicts and even provide informational support for certain justified cases of whistle blowing. Yet regardless of COR, DSJ, and member recommendations in 2005 and 2006, we are aware of no progress that has occurred to make the suggested changes to the Code itself. Our division is quite concerned by this. We would like to discuss how the necessary changes can be facilitated by the Ethics Committee and how our division can assist in this work.
As the current Ethics Code stands, there is an inherent contradiction between Principle A: Beneficence and Nonmaleficence and Standard 1.02 when psychologists are involved in the interrogation situations cited above. How do APA psychologists “do good and avoid harm” when they are confronted with certain military regulations asking them to work against the mental health and well-being of foreign prisoners of war? But, equally important, the inherent contradiction in our current ethics code might result in problems similar to those we are currently confronting, but which we cannot now imagine. For example, the average psychologist would not have predicted that our current government would create illegal detention centers and CIA black sites. We need an Ethics Code that pre-empts government policies that we have not and could not have imagined. We need an Ethics Code that all psychologists can consult with pride-an Ethics Code that makes clear that the protection of well-being for all people is paramount in the work we undertake.
In conclusion, we want to emphasize that we are pleased that APA has taken positive steps to address members’ concerns about psychologists’ participation in military detention centers and CIA black sites. Again, as community psychologists, we value collaboration. Thus, we propose collaboration and dialogue-among the APA, the military, human rights groups, protesters and other stakeholders, including individuals who have survived abusive conditions by governments throughout the world-in order to move forward the agenda addressed in this letter.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
G. Anne Bogat, PhD
President,
Division 27, Society for Community Research and Action
Signing on behalf of the Division 27 Executive Committee
bogat@msu.eduDivision 27 office: 16 Sconticut Neck Road #290
Fairhaven, MA 02719
1 comment May 9th, 2008
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
As if in response to my posting earlier today on the horrors of Guantanamo driving detainees insane, David Luban at Balkinization reminds us that our concern for the horrors of a Guantanamo driving many of its inmates mad shouldn’t dilute from our outrage at a domestic criminal justice system that does the same to hundreds of thousands.
My colleague James Forman has several times remarked that virtually everything wrong with Guantánamo is wrong on a far greater scale in the domestic criminal justice system. That doesn’t mean that outrage about Guantánamo should be any less – but it certainly means that we ought to be equally outraged about a Madness Archipelago that drives hundreds of thousands of inmates insane.
In January David and I were at a workshop at Harvard Law School where I made a similar pint. I’m glad he’s reminding me. As I’ve focussed upon detainee torture and abuse over the last few years, I’ve often felt guilty that I had insufficient energy to take on the horrors of our criminal justice system with the same passion. Or is it that there isn’t as clear a focus as psychologists aiding and abetting torture? I’m not sure.
Add comment April 26th, 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
The University of Michigan has released a press release on a new pilot study of Katrina victims which finds that those who lost a house were five times as likely to suffer serious psychological distress. They also found that blacks, the poor, and those who were born in Louisiana suffered more distress. However, these categories were undoubtedly overlapping, so, in addition to traditional caveats, one should be extra careful drawing causal conclusions. It should also be noted that the small scale of the study (N=144) means that the five-fold figure should not be taken very seriously except as an indicator of a large effect.
On te other hand, the study is based on systematic probability sampling in order to represent the population and includes follow-up with many who moved away.
Here is the press release:
No place like home: Katrina’s lasting impact
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—New Orleans residents who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina were over five times more likely to experience serious psychological distress a year after the disaster than those who did not.
That is one of the findings from a study presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in New Orleans.
The study, conducted by University of Michigan researcher Narayan Sastry and Tulane University’s Mark VanLandingham, examines the mental health status of pre-Katrina residents of the City of New Orleans in the fall of 2006—one year after the hurricane. It also describes and analyzes disparities in mental health by race, education and income.
Based on a pilot survey that drew a stratified, area-based probability sample of pre-Katrina dwellings in the city, the study is one of the first to provide data representative of the pre-hurricane population. It was designed by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.
A total of 144 individuals participated in the pilot study, including many who moved away from the area after the disaster and had not returned a year later. More than half the study participants were black, nearly two-thirds had a high school diploma or less education, and nearly 60 percent were unmarried. Nearly three-fourths were employed in the month before the hurricane hit.
According to Sastry, who is affiliated with RAND and with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), about 60 percent of study participants had no psychological distress at the time of the interview, while about 20 percent had mild-to-moderate mental illness and another 20 percent had serious mental illness.
To assess mental illness, respondents were asked a series of questions from a widely used measure of general psychological distress. How often during the past 30 days, they were asked, did you feel nervous, hopeless, restless or fidgety, depressed, that everything was an effort, and worthless”
Blacks reported substantially higher rates of serious psychological distress than whites, Sastry and Van Landingham reported. Almost one-third of blacks were found to have a high degree of distress, compared to just six percent of whites. Those with higher incomes and more education were much less likely to experience serious psychological distress, and those born in Louisiana were much more likely to have serious distress.
The researchers also examined how the extent of housing damage was related to psychological distress a year after the disaster. They found that those who lost their homes were five times more likely than those who did not to have serious psychological distress. In all, about 66 percent of the respondents reported that their homes were badly damaged or unlivable.
“Our findings suggest that severe damage to one’s home is a particularly important factor behind socioeconomic disparities in psychological distress, and possibly behind the levels of psychological distress,” Sastry said. “These effects may be partly economic, because, for most families who own their home, home equity is the largest element of household wealth.
“Apart from the financial losses, severely damaged or destroyed housing may prevent people who want to return to New Orleans from doing so because they lack a place to live. This affects their social ties, their employment, and many other factors.
“The magnitude and permanence of a housing loss suggests that for many people, the psychological consequences of this experience could be profound and lasting.”
Sastry and VanLandingham emphasize that these findings are preliminary, and that a larger study is now being planned.
Add comment April 21st, 2008
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