Despite the all too often discouraging statistics, sometimes they do it right. On national security and intelligence matters, I've found myself increasingly relying on CQ.
Today the national security editor, Jeff Stein, looks at another aspect of the Yoo torture memo that has received scant attention.
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.
There have been reports of detainees being sedated, and Jose Padilla's attorney argued in a motion last year that Padilla had been drugged with something, possibly LSD, during his interrogations. But hard evidence has yet to surface, and if it has happened, it's probably been done under highly classified programs. Meaning we may never know for certain the full extent of what was done in the name of national security.
The Yoo memos (and there is still the October 23, 2001 memo, the one in which the OLC "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," that hasn't yet been released) provide a critical--an nauseating--window into how this administration restructured our legal system to fit the Cheney vision of a unitary executive. Given how much of what Yoo laid out in the memos we've seen was enacted by the administration, it seems a pretty safe bet that drugging detainess was on the list, too.
Here's yet another reason for Congress to, as Marty Lederman has argued, put a moratorium on "considering any administration legislative proposals until all of the memos have been disclosed and (appropriately) repudiated by the Department of Justice." That goes doubly for FISA.
