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Witness testimony that was to be used in court by former Guantánamo detainee David Hicks suggests that prisoners were repeatedly drugged as part of the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation," Natalie O'Brien of the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Hicks, an Australian citizen, was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 by the Afghan Northern Alliance and sold to the U.S. military for a $1,000 bounty before becoming Detainee 002.
In April 2007 he was charged with "providing material support for terrorism" and transported from Gitmo to Australia to serve the remaining seven months of a suspended seven-year sentence.
The Australian government filed a lawsuit against Hicks to seize revenue from his autobiography, but dropped the case in July after the 37-year-old challenged evidence such as the certificate of his conviction from the Guantanamo military court.
Some documents provided by U.S. authorities at Guantánamo are to be kept secret, but defense affidavits confirmed that detainees were forced to take high dosages of the controversial anti-malaria drug mefloquine despite showing no signs of the disease, according to SMH.
Army doctor Remington Nevin told SMH that administering the drug in high doses to people who don't have malaria would be akin to "pharmacologic waterboarding," adding that high doses of the drug can cause brain injuries.
Josh Dratel, a Gitmo guard and New York lawyer who has top secret security clearance from the Justice Department, reportedly planned to provide evidence that several detainees were forced into ''non-therapeutic'' drugging and that U.S. prosecutors had admitted to forcibly drugging Hicks.
David Oten of the Office of the Secretary of Defense told Business Insider that they couldn't comment on specific cases without the court documents, but there are "decisions that [detainees] don't get to make" in regards to medications, including malaria medications.
In June Truthout revealed that antimalarial medications were used in experimental research under the CIA's covert human research program and that a key Defense Department expert on antimalarial drugs was a psychiatrist who trained personnel for Guantánamo interrogations.
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