The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs, pronounced "biscuits") are groups of psychiatrists, other medical doctors and psychologists who study detainees in American

extrajudicial detention Administrative detention is arrest and detention of individuals by the state without trial. A number of jurisdictions claim that it is done for security reasons. Many countries claim to use administrative detention as a means to combat terrorism ...

.mirror
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History

The groups were being officially authorized by the

US Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

in mid-2002, following the advice of General Michael E. Dunlavey, later chief interrogator at

Guantanamo Bay detention camp The Guantanamo Bay detention camp ( es, Centro de detención de la bahía de Guantánamo) is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and Gitmo (), on the coast of Guant ...

. The BSCTs proposed a three-step pattern for harsh interrogations, including

sleep deprivation Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either chronic or acute and may vary ...

and psychological pressure:

Additional detention conditions they believed would further assist intelligence-gathering operations. These included using fans and generators to create white noise as a form of psychological pressure; restricting "resistant" detainees to no more than four hours of sleep a day; depriving them of "comfort items" such as sheets, blankets, mattresses, and washcloths; and controlling their access to the koran. "All aspects of the etentionenvironment," they argued, "should enhance capture shock, dislocate expectations, foster dependence, and support exploitation to the fullest extent possible."''Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror.''
Institute on Medicine as a Profession Founded in 2003, the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) is an American non-profit health care policy think tank housed at Columbia University in New York City. Its primary area of focus is the concept of medical professionalism. Other ar ...
(IMAP) and
Open Society Foundations Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a Grant (money), grantmaking network founded and chaired by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the wo ...
(OSF). Columbia University, 2013, p. 29

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The teams are controversial because some critics consider their participation in what is called enhanced interrogation of detainees in the

war on terror The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is an ongoing international Counterterrorism, counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks. The main targets of the campa ...

a breach of

medical ethics Medical ethics is an applied branch of ethics which analyzes the practice of clinical medicine and related scientific research. Medical ethics is based on a set of values that professionals can refer to in the case of any confusion or conflict. T ...

. When Darrel Vandeveld, one of the lawyers assigned to serve as one of

military commission Military justice (also military law) is the legal system (bodies of law and procedure) that governs the conduct of the active-duty personnel of the armed forces of a country. In some nation-states, civil law and military law are distinct bodie ...

prosecutors looked into the case against Mohammed Jawad, one of the individuals he was assigned to prosecute, he realized that the record showed that Jawad, then still a minor, had been subjected to long periods of sleep deprivation, a torture technique that had already been de-authorized, on the advice of Army psychologist Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer.

Medical ethics

Such was the consternation of the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

that in 2007 it adopted the resolution 'Reaffirmation of the American Psychological Association Position Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and Its Application to Individuals Defined in the United States Code as "Enemy Combatants"' to make clear that any

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts c ...

and other cruel, Inhuman, or degrading treatment was unethical, whatever the situation.

References

{{WoTPrisoners Guantanamo Bay detention camp Interrogations Prison healthcare