Special Report: Detainee Experimentation Program Revealed
For the past seven months, Truthout reporter Jason Leopold and contributor Jeffrey Kaye investigated the origins of a little-known directive issued in March 2002 by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that severely weakened protections implemented decades ago against human subject research and experimentation conducted by the Department of Defense (DoD).
This directive, "Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research," was issued about a month after President George W. Bush stripped "war on terror" detainees of traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the Geneva Conventions. It limited safeguards against research and experimentation to "prisoners of war."
Drawing on interviews with more than 15 former military and intelligence officials and ethical scholars, Leopold's and Kaye's investigation found that the Wolfowitz directive became the legal document the DoD used to support a top-secret interrogation program at Guantanamo where psychologists and interrogators experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling detainees to measure levels of stress and to achieve "deception detection."
