Commenting on the recent revelations about US Central Intelligence Agency mulling the use of truth serums for interrogations in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Philip Giraldi, a former CIA case officer and US Army intelligence officer who currently works as executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik that the use of drugs on a prisoner is “generally considered to be a war crime.”
As Giraldi remarked, “it is shameful that the United States government and CIA were considering administering so-called ‘truth drugs’ to detainees”, noting that “context is everything”.
"At the same time this was taking place, the CIA was also carrying out renditions, which consisted of seizing people without any due process and sending them to countries where they could be tortured, and also running its own torture prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe," he said.
Giraldi’s commentary comes as a newly-unveiled batch of documents, ordered to be unsealed by a judge in response to an ACLU lawsuit, revealed that CIA considered using a sedative used to treat anxiety as "possibly worth a try" as a truth serum, with the drug in question being described as a compound that "afforded some amnesia, a sometimes desirable effect".
READ MORE: CIA Wanted to Use Truth Serums in Post-9/11 Interrogations, New Docs Reveal
The reason the CIA never asked the Justice Department for approval to use drugs as an "enhancement" to their interrogations was that the CIA counterintelligence team "did not want to raise another issue," since they had already approved sleep deprivation, confinement in small cages and waterboarding as sanctioned tactics.
In wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City that killed some 3,000 people from 90 countries, the US government resorted to several controversial torture methods to interrogate suspects. Particularly, the CIA created several secret sites in foreign countries in order to incarcerate and detain terror suspects without due process.
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