A report from the Deputy Inspector General of the Department of Defense, obtained by Truthout under a Freedom of Information Act request, confirms that detainees in the custody of the U.S. military were drugged with antipsychotic and other medications that “could impair an individual’s ability to provide accurate information.” Detainees were also subjected to “chemical restraints,” and lied to about the nature of the medications being administered.
Report → Related Items:
DoD Report Reveals Some Detainees Interrogated While Drugged, Others “Chemically Restrained” (Truthout)
US Forcibly Injected Gitmo Detainees With ‘Mind Altering Drugs’ (Antiwar.com)
Note from Kermit Cole, “In the News” editor;
Reading this, and the above articles and interviews covering it, I am struck by the illuminating parallels with what ordinary citizens face in pursuit of questions of “truth,” “lies,” and “reality” once these concepts are pursued though a medicalized framework. Medical ethicists speak of the need to join with a patient’s “story” in the interest of providing ethical medical care: how much harder it is when the “story” is part of the diagnosis and, especially, under suspicion.
This is an old story that has played out in hospitals, gulags, and now enemy combatant detention centers. It is not less important for the fact that it is ongoing. I look forward to the discussion about it here.
Every instance of forced drugging, whether it be in Gitmo, or in the general ‘mental health system’, is an instance of the political abuse of psychiatry.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there were and probably still are psychiatrists working in the interrogation programs.
Psychiatrists willing to use government force have an uncanny ability to sleep at night after dishing out torture. And an uncanny disrespect for the human right of people to own their own bodies.
People are just bags of flesh, brains in vats, to be drugged to these people. People willing to engage in forced psychiatry don’t view their forced subjects as equal human beings deserving of dignity and human rights.
This is a good instance of reporting.
For people who don’t want to be in an elderly nursing home, people who don’t want to be in a psychiatric facility, children who don’t want to be in foster ‘care’, and people who don’t want to interrogated at gitmo, there’s always raping their brain to shut them up and make them pliable, thanks to our friends in psychiatry.
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