The interrogation manual, FM 2-22.3, has got an odd prohibition:
Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.
Now, who the fuck would be intentionally inducing hypothermia in a person?
The list is pretty short:
- Modern medical experimenters sometimes induce hypothermia in volunteer research subjects. This is done under very carefully controlled circumstances.
- Dr. Sigmund Rascher the fuck, at Birkenau, Dachau and Auschwitz, intentionally induced hypothermia in concentration camp prisoners. This was to learn how to help German soldiers on the Eastern Front, and German pilots in the North Sea. A young homosexual man in the camps was put through a freeze/bake cycle as part of this.
- We the fuck, our military and intelligence services, have intentionally induced hypothermia in prisoners, as an interrogation technique.
Muhammed al-Qahtani was the victim of the "First Special Interrogation Plan," specifically at Guantanamo. Interrogators kept a careful, extensive, and especially grim log of the interrogation. It has long been suspected that this log was a part of interrogation research on al-Qahtani. They were refining the techniques for later use on others.
On December 7, 2002, Qahtani nearly died of the treatment. The interrogation log says his hospitalization involved low blood pressure. An FBI email reveals, however, that at about this time, a Guantanamo prisoner was hospitalized with hypothermia. I fairly strongly suspect that Qahtani's hospitalization also hypothermia, and that this was hidden in the interrogation log. So much for research protocol.
Physicians for Human Rights has published a White Paper today, Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program."
The first report to reveal evidence indicating that CIA medical personnel allegedly engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture. In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime—illegal experimentation on prisoners.
The PHR paper has three specific findings about our torture experimentation (emphasis mine):
- Medical personnel were required to monitor all waterboarding practices and collect detailed medical information that was used to design, develop, and deploy subsequent waterboarding procedures;
- Information on the effects of simultaneous versus sequential application of the interrogation techniques on detainees was collected and used to establish the policy for using tactics in combination. These data were gathered through an assessment of the presumed "susceptibility" of the subjects to severe pain;
- Information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish the "enhanced" interrogation program’s (EIP) sleep deprivation policy.
In season three, episode seven, Carmela Soprano visits a therapist, Dr. Krakower. The Doctor lays it out to Carmela:
Dr. Krakower: One thing you can never say: You haven't been told.
The citizens of Germany, in 1941, did not know specifically about the medical experimentation on concentration camp prisoners.
We, today, in the United States of America, do know about our medical experimentation on torture victims.
What are our responsibilities about it?
One thing we can never say: we haven't been told.