More Evidence of Medical Experimentation at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
22 December, 2010

In an investigative report for Truthout, my colleagues Jason Leopold and the psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye have followed up on an important story they published three weeks ago, “Controversial Drug Given to All Guantánamo Detainees Akin to ‘Pharmacologic Waterboarding’” (which I cross-posted here, with commentary). In that article, they revealed how, in the months following the opening of Guantánamo on January 11, 2002, every single prisoner was forced to “take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called ‘pharmacologic waterboarding.’”

All Guantánamo Prisoners Were Subjected to “Pharmacological Waterboarding,” by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
3 December, 2010

In one narrative of the “War on Terror,” President Bush scrapped the protections of the Geneva Conventions — including Common Article 3, which prohibits “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” — for prisoners at Guantánamo, and established the prison as an offshore interrogation center to protect the United States from further terrorist attacks. This narrative is distressing enough, as it involves a deliberate attempt to discard domestic and international laws and treaties so that prisoners seized in wartime — mixed up with a handful of terrorist suspects — could be held indefinitely and subjected to torture, but it is not, in fact, the most compelling explanation of the purpose of the detention policies implemented in the “War on Terror.”