63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read
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II. Mefloquine Was Given to Detainees Without Regard for Necessity or Contraindications
Upon a detainee’s arrival at GTMO, military personnel administered 1250 mg of mefloquine to each detainee as part of standard in-processing orders, according to GTMO Medical Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).48 This is corroborated in practice by government medical records for two detainees.49 Very few medical records have ever been released for GTMO detainees, and those the government has released are heavily redacted and may be incomplete.50 Based on the documents that are available, however, it is clear that detainees have been given a high dose of this powerful anti-malarial drug that potentially causes severe neuropsychological side effects. Since the dosage far exceeds the recommended dose for prophylactic purposes, the only medical justification would be particularized reason to believe the detainees were suffering from malaria. Further, while at least some detainees were tested for malaria, the mefloquine was seemingly administered in advance of and without regard to the results of the test. In any event, there does not appear to have been any individualized assessment of medical and psychological history prior to mefloquine administration for the purpose of avoiding administration to detainees with contraindications to mefloquine, which would render the administration of the drug inappropriate even if malaria infection were confirmed.
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B. The Standard In-processing Orders Form
Mefloquine was given to each detainee as a matter of standard procedure without waiting for the results of any test for malaria. This is further made clear by an examination of the “Standard In-processing Orders” form, presumably applied uniformly for all detainees.64 The form includes administration of mefloquine at the 1250 mg dosage, split into two distributions: “750 mg PO [taken orally] now, 500 mg PO in 12 hours.”65
The form is structured as a checklist, with numbered items circled as they were completed. The first item on the list is “1. Mefloquine,” followed by the dosage.66 On both ISN 693’s form and ISN 760’s form, number “1.” is circled, indicating the mefloquine dose was administered.67
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C. No Malaria In Cuba
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is no malaria in Cuba.90 “Malaria is not a threat in Guantanamo Bay,” according to an official memorandum on the “Department of Defense Operational Use of Mefloquine.”91 U.S. military personnel and contractors are not prescribed any anti-malarial medication for assignment to GTMO.92
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ENHANCED INTERROGATION
The Paper Trail on the CIA’s Destruction of 92 Torture Videos
On April 15, 2010, a FOIA lawsuit filed by the ACLU managed to pry out of the CIA a series of documents related to the destruction of ninety-two videos of “enhanced interrogation” of al Qaeda detainees, in particular Abu Zabaydah, who’d been transferred to a “black prison” in Thailand in 2002. He ended up being waterboarded eighty-three times in a month, deprived of sleep for days on end, subjected to extreme cold while being held naked in his cell, and forced to listen to near-deafening levels of music.
What you’re about to read is an inside look at how and why the CIA decided that these videos had to be wiped out—even though the many redactions made by the Agency make you wonder what else is being covered up. The first memo is from October 2002, when the CIA began discussing the sensitivity of these “interrogation sessions.” The next document describes the destruction of the ninety-two video tapes that took place on November 9, 2005.
The next day, two emails were sent to CIA Executive Director Dusty Foggo by someone who’s never been identified. (Foggo later got convicted of bribery in the scandal involving California Congressman Duke Cunningham). The emails show, among other things, that the CIA interrogator was the very one who wanted the tapes destroyed.
All this is pretty self-explanatory. Clearly they could never allow the American people to see what they’re doing to these detainees so you destroy the evidence. But what looms even larger is that there was evidence, and of such a nature that required it to be destroyed. That tells you how bad it must have been.
The destruction of the tapes was approved by Jose Rodriguez Jr., who headed up Clandestine Services for the CIA. In November 2010, federal prosecutor John Durham announced he was not going to charge Rodriguez for authorizing the videotapes’ disappearance. Rodriguez’ attorney called his client “an American hero, a true patriot who only wanted to protect his people and his country.”
You be the judge.
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AN ORDERED BEHEADING
Decapitation of a Detainee by U.S. Forces in Iraq
And you think these officially sanctioned policies didn’t rub off on our troops on the ground in Iraq? I wish I could say that was the case. When WikiLeaks released some 400,000 documents about the ongoing war in Iraq, they contained some pretty grim disclosures, including this one about American forces decapitating an Iraqi on order of their higher-ups. You can only go by what the document says as to whether this really happened or not, but it’s definitely disturbing to read and think about.
61
EMBASSY CABLES
The State Department’s Take on Drug Money Leaving Afghanistan
The WikiLeaks cache of State Department cables contains quite a few about our war in Afghanistan, but none more revealing than what our diplomats really know about the country’s president, Hamid Karzai. One secret cable talks about how he’d released 150 of the 629 detainees that the coalition had transferred to Afghan custody since 2007—and pardoned five border police who were caught with 273 pounds of heroin in their vehicle and already been sentenced to prison. Karzai’s brother is portrayed as a corrupt drug baron.
It’s time we faced facts: fighting the Taliban over there is at the same time propping up the biggest drug-based regime in the world. The cable I’m reprinting here is all about how the money gets smuggled out of Afghanistan to countries like Dubai. And be sure to catch point number 6, about how our Drug Enforcement folks got a bit suspicious of the Afghan vice president entering the country with $52 million early in 2009.
62
“AFGHANISTAN’S OPIUM ECONOMY”
A World Bank Report on Drugs
The World Bank issued a report in 2006 on “Afghanistan’s Opium Economy.” I’m just including the chapter summaries, but you can read the whole thing on the World Bank website, including “Prices and Market Interactions in the Opium Economy.”
Isn’t it interesting that we’re fighting a “war on drugs,” yet over there we have no problem with this? Certainly those drugs are going to get here eventually, again just follow the money. But obviously the Afghans involved can buy protection and continue doing their business.
63
RETHINKING THE “WAR ON TERROR”
The Rand Report on Terrorism
The Rand Corporation has been around forever, it seems, doing policy analysis for the government on all kinds of things. I mean, the government is always basing policies on what the Rand people say. Well, in 2008, Rand came out with a major study titled “How Terrorist Groups End,” look-Rand came out with a major study titled “How Terrorist Groups End,” looking at data on all such between 1968 and 2006.
Their findings apparently weren’t too heartening to our policy-makers, if they bothered to read the study. The whole war on terror notion needs to be rethought, according to Rand, because in simple terms “countering al Qa’ida has focused far too much on the use of military force.”
If the government follows Rand on other matters, why not give them due consideration on this? Supposedly this is their job and they’re the experts. I mean, realistically, the “war on terror” is the equivalent of trying to exterminate the Hells Angels. You don’t need the military to do it!
Here’s the two-page summary of the study, including how you can order the whole thing.
I hope after digesting all this—if you can stomach it, pardon the pun you’ll agree wit
h me that it’s time to end these “phony wars on terror” and get down to the serious business of rebuilding our own democracy from the ground up. Let me close with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt, from his Progressive Party presidential platform in 1912:
“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul this unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of statesmanship.”
EPILOGUE
RESOURCES FOR CURIOUS READERS
If you’re interested in following the document trail in the future, there are plenty of places to look, including those listed below. I found these links especially useful in putting together this book. It’s time we used the “information age” to our advantage, in reclaiming our democracy from the secret-keepers.
*WIKILEAKS: By the time this book is published, who knows where you’ll find Julian Assange’s team? Right now, you can look at www.mirror.wikileaks.info. They have a list of the growing number of “mirror sites” that plan to publish the State Department cables and other documents. WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that launched their website in 2006 and, within their first year of existence, had a database of over 1.2 million documents. They publish submissions of private, secret, and classified documents obtained from anonymous sources and news leaks.
*CRYPTOME: Their website has been around since 1996, hosted in the U.S.A. “Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those.” They’ve hosted more than 54,000 files, including suppressed photos of American soldiers killed in Iraq, purported agents for Britain’s MI6, and much more. They have two DVDs loaded with hard-to-find documents leaked by whistleblowers both government and private, available for a $25 donation. Check out http://cryptome.org for some fascinating browsing.
*NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE: This is an independent research institute and library, located on the George Washington University campus. They are an amazing repository of government records listed by topic, historical and contemporary, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the war in Afghanistan and more. They get their documents by a variety of ways, including the Freedom of Information Act, Mandatory Declassification Review, collections of presidential papers, congressional records, and court testimony. The Archive was behind the groundbreaking legal effort to preserve millions of pages of White House email records from the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Check out www.nsarchive.org to find the vast amount of material that they’ve gathered.
*GOVERNMENT ATTIC: This website posts electronic copies of hundreds of interesting federal government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They recently revamped their document menu to consist of four distinct parts: Department of Defense; Department of Justice; Executive Branch Departments, the White House and Legislative Agencies; Independent Federal Agencies, Govt. Corporations and State/Misc. Records. Go to: www.governmentattic.org.
*PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE: Administrator Michael Haynes tells us: “This is an international collaborative research initiative working to facilitate equal access to information by enabling anyone to anonymously submit documents or information for online publication. In less than two years of operation, the site has published thousands of restricted documents related to issues of national security, the war in Afghanistan, banking and international finance, as well as government and corporate surveillance. The site maintains one of the largest collections of documents produced by U.S. fusion centers available to the public.” Go to: http://publicintelligence.net.
*THE MARY FERRELL FOUNDATION: This nonprofit is your best source for documents about the assassinations of the 1960s, the Watergate scandal, and the post-Watergate investigations into intelligence abuses. The digital archive contains over 1.2 million pages of documents, government reports, books, essays, and multimedia. Go to: www.maryferrell.org.
*OPEN THE GOVERNMENT: It’s a coalition composed of journalists, consumer and “good government” groups, library groups, environmentalists, labor and others coming together to make the federal government a more open place. They’re non-partisan and include progressives, libertarians and conservatives. Go to: www.OpenTheGovernment.org.
*OPENLEAKS: This is a new website scheduled to be up-and-running in 2011. Its founders have been closely linked to WikiLeaks in the past, but have since parted ways and are describing themselves as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks. Go to: www.openleaks.org.
*DOCUMENTCLOUD: Program Director Amanda Hickman tells us: “DocumentCloud (http://www.documentcloud.org) is a catalog of primary source documents and a free and open-source tool that reporters use to annotate, analyze, organize, and publish documents they’re reporting on. DocumentCloud’s catalog, assembled by reporters, archivists, and researchers, includes everything from FBI files to sample ballots, Coast Guard logs to legistation, and court filings. The project is designed to help reporters publish more of their primary source documents online, and to make those documents accessible to the general public in an indexed catalog.”
*CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency has a digital database called CREST that consists entirely of declassified documents. A finding aid is located at: www.foia.cia.gov/search_archive.asp.
*OPEN SECRETS: This is your prime resource for tracking money in American politics and how it affects elections and public policy. It’s part of the Center for Responsive Politics. Go to: www.opensecrets.org.
*THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS (www.fas.org) offers a rich archive of resources on national security policy. The Federation’s Secrecy News blog (www.fas.org/blog/secrecy) produces original reporting on U.S. government secret policy and provides direct access to valuable official records that have been withheld, withdrawn or are otherwise hard to find.
*THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES (www.archives.gov) is the repository for millions of government documents, and their Archive-It FOIA Collection lists sites that deal with FOIA requests at: www.archives.gov/ogis/foia-records.html.
Now get this—there are 407 million pages of classified documents waiting to be opened to the public at the National Archives. Mostly these consist of a backlog of historical records more than twenty-five years old and it’s a slow-moving process. But they do have a National Declassification Center that was created by President Obama’s Executive Order at the end of 2009. For example, the CIA still has around 50,000 pages of classified records related to the Kennedy assassination. What could the CIA still be protecting after almost fifty years?
Of course, you can always file Freedom of Information Act requests yourself, and this is an important tool of democracy. There’s a report called “Rummaging in the Government’s Attic: Lessons Learned from 1,000 FOIA Requests” from 2010, available at: www.governmentattic.org/3docs/Rummaging_2010.pdf.
And just in case you’re wondering what the feds might have on you, check out www.GetMyFBIfile.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION - WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK
PART ONE - OUR SCANDALOUS POSTWAR HISTORY
1 - ASSASSINATIONS
2 - EXECUTIVE ACTION
3 - SECRET EXPERIMENTS
4 & 5 & 6 - MIND CONTROL
7 - A FAKE TERRORIST ATTACK
8 & 9 - THE VIETNAM SHAM
10 - FLAWED INTELLIGENCE
11 - AGENT ORANGE?
PART TWO - GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, AND CORPORATE SECRETS
12 - NAZIS IN THE U.S.
13 & 14 & 15 - NAZI WAR CRIMES
16 - WARREN COMMISSION
17 - NORIEGA AND THE U.S.
18 & 19 - RWANDA ATROCITIE
S
20 - SOLDIERS AS GUINEA PIGS
21 & 22. - WAR’S REAL COST
23 - MILITARY TAKEOVER
24 & 25 - FREEDOMS FOR SAFETY?
26 - CONTINGENCY PLANNING
27 - EMBASSY CABLES
28 - THE FDA’S BLIND SIDLE
29 - THE EPA’S BLIND SIDE
30 - EMBASSY CABLES
31 - MILITARY STUDIES CLIMATE
32 - CORPORATE INFLUENCE
PART THREE - SHADY WHITE HOUSES
33 - NUKE THE RUSSIANS?
34 - THE CIA VS THE PRESIDENT
35 - RESTLESS YOUTH
36 & 37 - STOLEN 2000 ELECTION
38 & 39 - STOLEN 2004 ELECTION
40 - EMBASSY CABLES
41 - PROTECTING CYBERSPACE
42 - MORE CYBERSECURITY
PART FOUR - 9/11
43 - A NEW PEARL HARBOUR
44 - 9/11 WARNING I,
45 - 9/11 WARNING II
46 - A CHANGE OF POLICY
47 - CONTROLLED DEMOLITION
48 - FOLLOW THE MONEY
49 - TURNING A BLIND EYE
PART FIVE - THE “WAR ON TERROR”
50 - SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION
51 - NO MORE RULE OF LAW
52 - NO FREEDOM OF THE PRESS