Stemming from a story in the Washington Post, questions are being raised about the role health professionals may have played in violating detainees’ human rights, domestic and international law, and codes of medical ethics established over 70-years-ago. The news report said forced medication may have been used for a variety of purposes, including as a chemical restraint, as a facilitator of interrogation, and other purposes.

Physicians for Human Rights points out that the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Statue states the use of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to profoundly disrupt the senses or personality in interrogation is illegal.

“There is no acceptable use for mind-altering drugs in interrogation, so any use of medication to aid in interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody would be experimental. As such, it would be a clear violation of international codes and domestic law in place since the doctors’ trials at Nuremberg,” said Dr. Scott A. Allen, a Physicians for Human Rights medical advisor.

According to the organization, there is a serious need for congressional and criminal investigations to determine whether medical expertise and personnel were used to drug detainees for purposes of interrogation, sedate them for transport and medicate them without consent for other non-therapeutic purposes.

“Additionally, use of medication as a restraint is unethical. Even therapeutic use of forced medication under U.S. military regulations is not ethically permissible in the absence of informed consent except for the rarest of cases, such as treatment for a highly infectious disease like tuberculosis,” added Dr. Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University.

The Department of Defense should probe the ranks of military physicians and other health professionals to find any hints of ethical violations as it relates to denying detainees information about what was done to them, said Physicians for Human Rights.

Historically, the Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg Code were established standards in U.S. law for the protection of individual rights in human experimentation. Both prohibit human experimentation without consent. These ethical guidelines were created in response to human experiments conducted by health professionals in Germany on WWII prisoners. Doctors involved in those abuses were later convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

“I’m not surprised by these allegations being made on a large landscape because this is going on every day in the prisons of America. This is the history of this country,” said Reginald Gordon to The Final Call. Mr. Gordon served 18 years in prison and said he witnessed experimentation on inmates first-hand. “They (prison officials) would give us certain drinks at lunch time that were mind-altering, like we were lab rats. People were drugged and beaten if they didn’t cooperate in court cases and were forced to give statements without consent. You have no power over yourself behind those barbered wire gates,” he said.

Since his release, Mr. Gordon has initiated Operation OG1 Prison Reform Program to help “deprogram young brothers from living lives of crime. We go into the prisons every week to make them cognizant of what these people have done to prisoners around the world and that it can happen to them.

According to its website, Physicians for Human Rights has documented the systematic use of psychological torture by the U.S. during interrogations of suspected terrorists internationally in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization has repeatedly called for an end to the use of unethical tactics by U.S. personnel, dismantling of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, and a full congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. government.

Phone calls by The Final Call to the U.S. House Committee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security for comments on if, or when congressional hearings would take place were not returned.