They are to file briefs in a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday, arguing that the judge ordered too much released. The government is still fighting to keep portions secret. Government lawyers tried three more times to keep information contained in the report under wraps, but the ACLU received the bulk of the report in August. In September 2017, a federal judge in New York ordered the CIA to release it. The ACLU spent more than two years in court trying to get the report released. The document is not the CIA’s or the Office of Medical Service’s “final official history, or assessment, of the program,” the lawyers wrote. The CIA had no comment on the report’s release, but government lawyers emphasized in a court filing in the case early last year that the report, expressly marked “draft,” was just one agency officer’s impressions of the detention and interrogation program. “At the beginning of 2003, the Office of Medical Services’ review, informally termed ‘Project Medication’ was shelved, never to be reactivated,” the report said. Those questions became moot after the CIA decided against asking the Justice Department to give it a green light. “There were at least two legal obstacles: a prohibition against medical experimentation on prisoners and a ban on interrogational use of ‘mind-altering drugs’ or those which ‘profoundly altered the senses.’” “Versed was considered possibly worth a trial if unequivocal legal sanction first were obtained,” the report said. It’s in a class of anti-anxiety medications known as benzodiazepines that work by affecting a brain chemical that calms the activity of nerve cells. It also can temporarily impair memory, and often is used for minor surgery or medical procedures such as colonoscopies that require sedation but not full-blown anesthesia. It causes drowsiness and relieves anxiety and agitation. Versed is a brand name for the sedative midazolam, used since the late 1970s and today sold commonly as a generic. “But decades later, the agency was considering experimenting on humans again to test pseudo-scientific theories of learned helplessness on its prisoners,” Ladin said. These experiments were widely criticized and, even today, some experts doubt an effective substance exists. The CIA’s counterterrorism team “did not want to raise another issue with the Department of Justice,” the report said.īefore settling on Versed, the report said researchers studied records of old Soviet drug experiments as well as the CIA’s discredited MK-Ultra program from the 1950s and 1960s that involved human experimentation with LSD and other mind-altering drugs on unwitting individuals as part of a long search for some form of truth serum. It had taken months for the Justice Department to sign off on brutal interrogation tactics, including sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces and the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. The CIA ultimately decided against asking the Justice Department to approve drug-assisted interrogations, sparing CIA doctors “some significant ethical concerns,” the report said. They evaluated, monitored and cared for 97 detainees in 10 secret CIA facilities abroad and accompanied detainees on more than 100 flights. Between 20, CIA doctors, psychologists, physician assistants and nurses were directly involved in the interrogation program, the report said.
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