Forced Drugging of Guantánamo Prisoners: A Crisis for Health Professionals

A major article in Tuesday's Washington Post collects the accounts of U.S. detainees who, in large numbers, report that they were the recipients of unknown psychotropic drugs -- a topic recently discussed by Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly. The Post has gone further in collecting evidence, making the case that involuntary psychotropic drug use on detainees, including as an interrogation aid, has been a common practice. The Post ran the story on the front page -- a strong statement that catapults the issue of detainee drugging to a top slot in the long 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 Guantánamo 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, the drugs were often used as part of the interrogation process:

"(Adel al-Nusairi) is among a handful of former detainees who directly allege the use of drugs in interrogations at the military prison in Guantánamo. 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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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.