The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has obtained 90 pages of documents on the CIA torture program.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency weighed using a sedative used to treat anxiety as “possibly worth a try” as a truth serum, records reveal.
The drug “afforded some amnesia, a sometimes desirable effect,” the documents say.
The CIA drug research program, fittingly called “Project Medication,” was just one of several revelations to come from documents ordered to be unsealed by a judge in response to an ACLU lawsuit.
The report focuses on CIA doctors, psychologists, physician assistants and nurses who were directly involved in the so-called enhanced interrogation program between 2002 and 2007, who oversaw 97 prisoners in 10 secret torture facilities.
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.
The CIA did not comment on the documents, but “government lawyers” cited by the Associated Press downplayed the significance of the documents, arguing that they detailed an officer's impressions of the program, not the CIA's final assessment.
The ACLU and the CIA have been battling…
