LSD Mystery: In 2002, Justice Dept. OK’d Dosing DetaineesAfter reporting yesterday that lawyers for Jose Padilla accused government interrogators of forcing their client to take drugs similar to LSD or PCP, more than a few people wondered if I had been slipped a couple tabs myself.
“I’m aware that this sort of thing is all too credible to those of us – excuse me; those of you – who hold the belief that the Bush Administration is the sum total of human evil in the universe,” wrote Moe Lane at RedState.com. “But stuff like the TPMuckraker article is just silly, and unless you’ve got funny brain chemistry, it’s preventable silliness. Get a grip.”
One has to admit, the author has a point. Giving detainees drugs like LSD and PCP seems stupid to the point of absurdity.
So I was surprised to discover that in 2002, Justice Department lawyers carefully considered the issue and advised the White House that it was okay. In their view, it was acceptable to force detainees to ingest “mind-altering substances,” as long as it was not intended to cause months-long bouts of serious mental illness.
How do we know that? Because in August 2002, the Justice Department gave then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a 50-page document saying so. And a follow-up document in 2004 reaffirmed it.
The now-infamous 2002 “Bybee Memo” was leaked to the press in 2004, at which time the administration quickly disavowed it. (In December 2004, Justice released a new version of guidance for detainee treatment.)
For nearly two years, the Bybee Memo was the administration’s guiding document for how detainees were to be treated. The document which replaced it does not appear to substantively alter its conclusions on forced drug use by detainees.
In the 2002 Bybee Memo, then-Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee (now a federal appellate judge) concluded that giving detainees “mind altering substances” (that’s “a commonly used synonym for drugs,” he noted for the squares in the White House) was legal, as long as doing so did not cause “prolonged mental harm” by “disrupt[ing] profoundly the senses or personality,” and was not intended to do so.
Bybee wrote that conditions such as months-long bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder or even chronic depression could be considered “prolonged mental harm.” As for what constituted a “profound disruption” of senses or personality that would cause such long-term suffering, he included:
– “the inabliity to retain any new information or recall information about things previously of interest to the individual.”
– “deterioration of language function, e.g., repeating sounds or words over and over again”;
– “impaired ability to execute simple motor activities, e.g., inability to dress or wave goodbye”;
– inability to recognize and identify objects “such as chairs or pencils” despite “normal visual functioning”;
– “the onset of ‘brief psychotic disorder,'” in which a detainee “suffers psychotic symptoms, including. . . delusions, hallucinations, or even a catatonic state [which] can last for one day or even one month”;
and more. (“These examples, of course, are in no way intended to be an exhaustive list,” Bybee noted.)
Oh — and for this to constitute torture, the government handler who’s forcing drugs into the detainee has to “specifically intend to cause prolonged mental harm,” according to Bybee.
So is it crazy to think the U.S. government might force hallucinogens into detainees? Absolutely. Which means it’s doubly crazy that senior U.S. Department of Justice officials explicitly considered the matter, and decided it was okay to do so.
