63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read - Jesse Ventura [32]
I simply find this appalling that the United States of America would engage in the practice of torture. We’re supposed to be the country everyone else looks up to. When you participate in this kind of behavior, forget that! When it happens to us, we’ll have no reason to bitch, because if we practice torture the other side will too. The laws of humanity ought to be higher than the laws of war, don’t you think?
The card they’re playing, from Rumsfeld on down, is that somehow Guantanamo isn’t on this earth, because it’s not in the U.S. or I guess anywhere outside our base in Cuba. Is this some sort of Land of Oz? We treat Charles Manson better than we do the detainees at Guantanamo, and yet the detainees have never been convicted of anything. They never stood trial, never had their day in court. But I guess Manson’s different because he’s an American citizen.
55 & 56
DRUG ABUSE
A Medical Experiment on the Detainees
If you thought government experiments in behavior control ended in the 1970s, guess again. It’s recently come out that the Pentagon forced all the detainees at Guantanamo prison to take high doses of a drug called mefloquine. Supposedly it’s used to combat malaria, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. Our military brass knew that mefloquine had severe side effects, like suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and anxiety.
To me, this shows the continuing influence of those “experts” we brought here from Germany after World War Two. Here you have doctors stating that you need to know the complete background of the patient before using this substance—and they’re injecting these people with this drug as soon as they’re checked in!
The first document here, from 2002, shows that “standard inprocessing orders for detainees” included 1,250 mg of mefloquine, five times higher than the dose given to people as a preventative. And it’s being given not for its intended purpose, but to study its intended side effects! I’m speechless. What ever happened to the physician’s oath to “do no harm”?
In 2010, Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Policy & Research released a study about all this, and I’m including the Executive Summary.
Drug Abuse: An exploration of the government’s use of mefloquine at Guantanamo
Seton Hall University School of Law
Center for Policy and Research
Executive Summary
Mefloquine is an antimalarial drug that has long been known to cause severe neuropsychological adverse effects such as anxiety, paranoia, hallucinations, aggression, psychotic behavior, mood changes, depression, memory impairment, convulsions, loss of coordination (ataxia), suicidal ideation, and possibly suicide, particularly in patients with a history of mental illness. A prescribing physician must exercise caution and informed judgment when weighing the risks and potential benefits of prescribing the drug. To administer this drug with its severe potential side effects without a malaria diagnosis and without taking a patient’s mental health history is not medically justified. Yet as a matter of official policy, the standard operating procedure implemented by the United States military at Guantanamo Bay was to administer high doses of mefloquine to detainees whether or not any use of the drug was medically appropriate and without consideration of the detainees’ mental health.
It is clear that the military employed a medically inappropriate treatment regime at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO). It is less clear why, although the available evidence supports several possible conclusions. In view of the continued and unexplained refusal of the government to release full medical records for all detainees, it is not possible to determine whether