US May Have Drugged Detainees in Violation of Nuremberg Code

The Washington Post's Joby Warrick reports today that

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.

Warrick's WaPo article gives a vivid account from Adel al-Nusairi, one of the detainees who has come forward.

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.

Nusairi and other detainees' allegations that they were drugged have enormous ramifications.

"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."

Medical experimentation on detainees is a violation of the Nuremberg Code. Physicians for Human Rights elaborated on this in a statement today:

The Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg Code establish standards for the protection of individual rights in human experimentation, which are largely codified in US law. They absolutely prohibit human experimentation without the consent of the subject. These ethical rules, the Nuremberg Code in particular, were created in response to human experiments conducted by German health professionals on prisoners during World War II. The doctors involved in those human rights abuses were later convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It is all the more telling, then, that one of the Yoo memos released this month contains justifications of drugging:

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.

George Bush has recently acknowledged that he knew his senior advisors approved the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation techniques. Did the Bush advisors also approve a program of drug experimentation on detainees? Is the President directly implicated in violations of the Nuremberg Code's prohibitions on human experimentation?