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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CCLE
October 25, 2001
530-750-7912
Drugging or Torture of
9-11 Suspects
Breaks Constitution, Law, and Treaties
Amidst
reports that the FBI is considering the use of forced drugging and even
torture to make suspects in the September 11 attacks divulge information,
the Center for Cognitive
Liberty & Ethics (CCLE) is calling on the FBI and other government agencies
involved in the investigation to respect US and International law, which
strictly forbids such invasive and brutal police tactics.
The
Washington Post reported on Sunday that in an effort to extract
information from the detainees, FBI and Justice Department investigators
are considering “using drugs or pressure tactics, such as those employed
occasionally by Israeli interrogators, to extract information. Another
idea is extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security
services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to
torture.” (Walter
Pincus, “Silence
of 4 Terror Probe Suspects Poses Dilemma,”
Washington Post,
Sunday, October 21, 2001)
“The
use of torture or physical intimidation to force a suspect to reveal
information is a clear violation of US and International law,” says
attorney Richard Glen Boire, Executive Director of the Center for
Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution
guarantees that no person “shall
be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” and
protects all people on US soil, whether citizens or not. Torturing a
person in order to extract a confession is inherently coercive and renders
any subsequent statements “compelled,” involuntary, unreliable, and
wholly unconstitutional.
Invoking
the Fifth Amendment, some of the 9-11 detainees have asserted their
constitutional right to remain silent, refusing to speak with
investigators. “It’s
deeply disturbing,” says Boire, “that the act of asserting the
constitutional right to remain silent is what is provoking the authorities
to consider resorting to torture and drugging.”
Numerous
international conventions prohibit the use of torture as an intelligence
gathering technique. Article
5 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and article 7 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both provide that no one shall
be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment.
Likewise
the International
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
or Punishment (Convention Against Torture), prohibits “any act by
which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is
intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from
him or a third person information or a confession….”
The
Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics is particularly disturbed by
reports that FBI agents may try and skirt US and international
prohibitions on physical torture by instead interrogating the suspects
after forcefully administering them mind-altering drugs. The Washington
Post article quoted a former senior FBI official with a background in
counter terrorism who distinguished the forced use of “truth serum”
from “beating a guy till he is senseless.”
When
the United
States ratified the Convention Against Torture on October 21, 1994, it
expressly acknowledged that “torture” includes “the administration
or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind
altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly
the senses or the personality.”
“The
bar on torture and forced drugging under the Convention Against Torture
does not have a ‘war time’ or ‘suspected terrorist’ exemption,”
comments Boire, adding that Article 2 of the Convention states “No
exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat
of war, internal political in stability or any other public emergency, may
be invoked as a justification of torture.”
“The
prospect of US law enforcement agents interrogating a person after
injecting that person with a mind-altering drug is terrifying and grossly
unconstitutional,” says Boire. Under the Fifth Amendment there is no
distinction between the use of physical force to obtain a statement and
the compelled administration of a mind-altering drug to obtain a
statement. “Both techniques,” notes Boire “violate the firmly
embedded constitutional guarantee against coerced confessions in which a
suspect’s ‘will is overborne’ or the confession was not ‘the
product of a rational intellect and a free will.’”
Condemning
the use of drug-induced confessions, the US Supreme Court has stated,
“It is difficult to imagine a situation in which a confession would be
less the product of a free intellect, less voluntary, than when brought about
by a drug having the effect of a "truth serum." (Townsend
v. Sain (1963) 372 U.S. 293.)
In another case, the Supreme Court cautioned, “the blood of the accused
is not the only hallmark of an unconstitutional inquisition." (Blackburn
v. Alabama (1960) 361 U.S. 199,
quoted in Miranda
v. Arizona (1966)
384 U.S. 436.)
The
Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics calls upon federal authorities
to respect the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the US
Constitution and in the international conventions protecting human rights
and prohibiting government-endorsed torture and mind manipulation. Under
no circumstances are US government agents permitted to coerce statements
through the use of physical intimidation or the forceful administration of
mind-altering drugs. “Use of such barbaric interrogation techniques is
unlawful,” says Boire “violates the basic human right to physical and
mental autonomy, vitiates the presumption of innocence, and runs counter
to the most fundamental and cherished of American freedoms and constitutional
guarantees.”
For
More Information:
Ms.
Zara Gelsey
CCLE, Director of Communications
Telephone & Fax: 530-750-7912
E-mail: zara@cognitiveliberty.org
About
the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE)
The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics is a nonpartisan, nonprofit,
law and policy center working in the public interest to protect
fundamental civil liberties. The Center seeks to foster cognitive liberty
– the basic human right to unrestrained independent thinking, including
the right to control one’s own mental processes and to experience the
full spectrum of possible thought. Web site: http://www.cognitiveliberty.org
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