BBC report on "pharmacological torture" of former Guantanamo prisoner, Saad Iqbal Madni

BBC posted an article by Orla Geurin, out of Lahore, on the condition of former Guantanamo detainee, Saad Iqbal Madni. Among the other horrible instances of the torture of this man, the accusations of deliberate administration of addictive drugs stood out. The use of drugs on the Guantanamo prisoners has been noted by others, though a full documentation of it has yet to be accomplished. One recent accounting came from a Jason Leopold interview with Detainee 002, David Hicks.

In GTMO medical personnel were not in the same room as me during actual interrogations but from my understanding they were monitoring my interrogations from behind the one way glass in Camp Delta. For other detainees, such as those being shocked or water boarded, medical personnel were present, or if drugs were being administrated during interrogation as I describe in my book when they extracted false confessions from one of the UK detainees. They were present when I was injected in the spine, but that experience is one that I don't like to talk about.

From the BBC article:

Every other night Saad Iqbal Madni wakes up screaming. For more than five years the Pakistani Islamic scholar was one ghost among many - Prisoner Number 746 in Guantanamo Bay.

In terror-filled moments, in the dead of night, he still is.

"Since they arrest me, up to today, every second night I wake up screaming, yelling and crying," he said, breaking down in tears....

"They stripped me naked, just allowed was the underwear. They put me inside a six-feet by four-feet cage.

"They turned on the air conditioning to very high. During this period they took me to interrogation, and they said 'OK, now you are going to admit, or not?' I said no. I started a hunger strike because I was suffering too much, and they started giving me codeine and morphine as pain killers."

By the time of his release, Mr Madni says he was addicted to morphine.

His doctor, Lahore-based psychiatrist Muhammed Haris Burki, confirms his claim.

"He was a victim of pharmacological torture," said Dr Burki. "They made him an addict and it took five months to get him off it."

The American press and government branches have turned a deaf ear to the cries of prisoners held in the U.S. gulag. It will be up to independent journalists and dedicated human rights attorneys and activists to bring the story of drugging prisoners the exposure it desperately requires.