Did Paul Wolfowitz Authorize Human Experimentation at Guantánamo?

[Panaconda]

How Paul Wolfowitz Authorized Human Experimentation at Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington
October 24, 2010

Last week, Truthout published an important article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which authorized human experimentation on detainees in the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo followed some little-noticed maneuvering in Congress in December 2001, when the requirement of “informed consent” in any experimentation by the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.

The article — which involved over a year of research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former officials to open up to them — not only adds to Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable track record as a chronicler of the development of human experimentation in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” torture program (which he has also revealed as part of an obsession with human experimentation reaching back to the 1950s), but also confirms the existence of an important new front in the struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of torture, and the requirement that those who authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.

Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about their article the day after its publication, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and their work on human experimentation added to a compelling catalog of the many reasons why the acceptance of torture must continue to be opposed, which I developed during the week: namely, that it is not only illegal, morally corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture program continued work in the field of human experimentation that the US took over from the Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the part of senior officials, who pretended that the program was designed to prevent future terrorist attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was actually being used to extract false confessions about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that could be used in an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

...

http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/10/24/how-paul-wolfowitz-authorized-human-experimentation-at-guantanamo/

Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program

Thursday 14 October 2010
by: Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye


In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning to torture and other brutal techniques for interrogating "war on terror" detainees, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules against human experimentation, an apparent recognition of legal problems regarding the novel strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.

Wolfowitz issued a little-known directive on March 25, 2002, about a month after President George W. Bush stripped the detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions. Bush labeled them "unlawful enemy combatants" and authorized the CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.

Despite its title - "Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research" - the Wolfowitz directive weakened protections that had been in place for decades by limiting the safeguards to "prisoners of war."

...

One former Pentagon official, who worked closely with the agency's ex-general counsel William Haynes, said the Wolfowitz directive provided legal cover for a top-secret Special Access Program at the Guantanamo Bay prison, which experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling subjects and to achieve "deception detection."

...

http://www.truth-out.org/wolfowitz-directive-legal-cover-human-experimentation-detainees64184

[dionysus]

1. we'll know 24 working hours from now.

[benlurkin]

12. 24 business hours.........didn't see that coming, did ya?

Heh. Where's Will Pitt on this?

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. When are we convening IMT?

Oh never mind...

[Sonoman]

6. Oh, get over it.

Look forward and think about the future.

That's gonna be my plea with IRS.

I don't know how to do the 'sarcasm' thingie.

Sonoman

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Here

: sarcasm. :

No spaces though

[Sonoman]

10. Thanks, I'll try it.

:sarcasm:

I see posts with bold lettering and such, but I have no idea how they accomplish that.

You know, I have recently become a member of this Democratic Underground, after just cruising around for maybe a year. I have been hearing about this from a guy I know in Marin. And I have observed your cool sense of humor.

I thought you might get a kick out of this. I wish I had enough posts to put this on the site.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4587193&mesg_id=4587437

Sonoman

[EFerrari]

16. You type sarcasm with a colon on each side or

you can click on the smilies look up table just above the subject line of the posting form.

: sarcasm : (without the spaces)

[defendandprotect]

3. K&R .... I doubt Congress will be asking any of those questions ... ???!!!!

[katandmoon]

4. Obama's DOJ: Lalalalalalalalalalalala We can't hear you!!!!

[Radical Activist]

5. There's an ongoing investigation.

I wish the progressive media would cover it more so that we'd hear what's going on, but I guess cynicism sells better.

[votingupstart]

7. i have a feeling politics (gasp) will keep this quiet

just a quick thought -- with an unsure congressional makeup in the near future and with the WH needing the cooperation of the right side of the aisle. I cant see them making or encouraging a big stink out of this because it will look (as it should) like an attack on the legality of the previous administrations actions. once the threat of dragging people before a court for past actions is put out - i think you will find very little support from the right ( who will most likely use it as a rallying ($$) call)

i don't know i could be completely wrong - just a quick thought

[katandmoon]

18. Obama's DOJ is already on record as giving all Bush war criminals a pass.

[katandmoon]

17. Really? Of Wolfowitz? We both know Obama's DOJ will never prosecute him.

[Radical Activist]

19. Let the facts come out.

Then the process can advance either in the courts or in Congress. Sadly, all of this should have been done by Congress after Democrats took control in 2006.

[laurel46]

25. I like you radical activist.

Your comments are level headed and I look forward to your logical and thoughtful input.

No offense panaconda, I was reminded of posts in other spots that don't give links to the hard evidence. I look forward to investigating what human experiments went on but have not had the time to go to the links yet.

edit; looking forward is not the best way to describe it but I hope you get my meaning.

[chervilant]

27. No duh!!!!

And, let's not hold our breaths for Pelosi to put impeachment back on the table. At the very least, Bush, Cheney, and their criminal brigade should be stripped of their pensions, their 'secret service' protection, and all of the other "emoluments" of their prior offices. Furthermore, Pelosi and the other members of the House and Senate should impeach, if only to assert that they recognize and abhor the criminality of these despicable miscreants.

Oh, look, no lips are turning blue...

:sarcasm:

[gratuitous]

9. Great, Dr. Spit-Comb authorizes human experimentation

Remember how horrible it was for all us dirty fucking hippies to compare Bush to Hitler? Oh, it was just over the line! How could we say that about our commander-in-chief during wartime? Why, it was practically treason, it was.

And once again, with a depressing and tiresome sameness, it turns out that once again we were right.

[BeFree]

13. The hits keep coming

And once again we have proven to be the true Americans.

What will they throw at us next? Another 9/11?

[Raksha]

26. I compared Bush with Hitler on another discussion board just a few hours ago

on a topic about Julian Assange's revelations. I said that's what the history books of the future are going to say, unless they are written by RW revisionists. I didn't get any flak about it, not even from the conservocrud on that board. In the same post, I also referred to the years 2000-2008 as "the Fourth Reich." Didn't get any flak about that either.

[Odin2005]

11. OMG!

:grr:

[AlienGirl]

24. It's dismaying, but hardly surprising.

[leftstreet]

14. K&R

I need a shower

[leveymg]

15. What's interesting about this is that the directive was issued 3 days BEFORE the capture of the

first of three "high value" al-Qaeda detainees who were actually waterboarded and drugged. Abu Zubaydeh was captured on March 28, 2002 at a safehouse in Pakistan, and subjected to torture involving the withholding of pain medication administered after he was shot several times in the groin. He was subsequently tortured in various ways -- waterboarded 83 times, cold celled and subjected to weeks of sleep deprivation and sensory overload -- after Bush Admin officials issued a different series of memos okaying the abuses. KSM, waterboarded 183 times, was captured a year later. Their waterboarding and forced administration of mind-rendering drugs occurred at CIA prisons in other locations, not at Gitmo.

Not sure whether there was much experimentation involved, as these techniques had already been fully tested by the MK-ULTRA and Artichoke programs in the 1950s as effective at altering memories and destroying recall, which seems to have been the effect.

[butterfly77]

20. Kicked&Recommended!

[TBF]

21. K&R nt

[WinkyDink]

22. Can we FINALLY invoke HITLER?? Prescott is smiling in Hell.

[maryf]

23. sick

K&R for having the stomach for continually diving into the darkest of mankind's deeds and exposing them to the light of truth...