March 29, 2006
Biscuits Anyone?
...BISCUITS - Behavioral Science Consultation Teams - consist of military psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and other health care professionals. Their role, it has been charged by former Guantánamo interrogators, is to advise the military on ways of increasing psychological duress on detainees, sometimes using their medical records to find ways of exploiting their fears and phobias, to make them more cooperative and willing to provide information.
The DOD has said that there is very limited access to prisoners' medical records. But many members of the health care community remain skeptical.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine said interviews with doctors who helped devise and supervise the interrogation regimen at Guantánamo showed that the BISCUIT program was explicitly designed to increase fear and distress among detainees as a means of obtaining intelligence."
article: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032806A.shtml
by William Fisher
[photo google not from truthout]
~How about a updated version of MASH? Instead of Korea the 4077 could be stationed in Guantanamo or a prison in Iraq or Afghanistan. Every week Hawkeye's grandson, now a shrink, in the midst of complaining about the boredom, playing practical jokes on his fellow BSCTs, and dealing with a military bureaucracy that doesn't have a clue, shows how nameless detainees are getting the best possible care?
"What's a shrink supposed to do with ten cases of tongue depressors? I requisitioned prayer-rugs." Cue laugh-track.