Republicans: Guantanamo prisoners eat well, are not tortured

U.S. Representative Hunter (R-California) shows himself to be a true believer in the "war on terror" in this YouTube video, in which he describes the menu served to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and claims that this shows how well they are being treated.



He emphasizes that this delicious food, as well as prayer rugs, Korans, and prayer calls over loudspeakers, are all provided to "these killers" courtesy of the American taxpayer. He declares that no "illegal touching" of prisoners takes place, and that claims that prisoners are tortured are ridiculous.

If these prisoners are being treated so well, what about all the discussion of waterboarding? Has this been flushed down the memory hole? This is not a subject that only liberals have talked about: Republicans have specifically defended this torture technique, and numerous articles, some of which I have reprinted on this very site, go into great detail about the torture techniques used by the CIA and American military, techniques such as painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, force feeding, waterboarding, exposure to extreme heat and cold, sexual and religious humiliation, hanging by the arms, and physical beatings. Representative Hunter prefers to emphasize the menu of chicken and fish served to "these killers", who have not been tried for or even charged with any crime. If these prisoners are being treated so well, why are they being held in Cuba, why has the Bush Administration declared them to be not subject to the Geneva Conventions, and why have those prisoners who have been released described the same types of torture in gruesome detail, while others apparently have gone mad from it?

To me, this is a prime example of the utter delusion affecting many Republicans and conservative true believers who cling to their ideology regardless of reality. As Eric Hoffer wrote,

It is the true believer's ability to 'shut his eyes and stop his ears' to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. Strength of faith, as Bergson pointed out, manifests itself not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move.

Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo

As Alternet summarizes, "In 2001, 19-year-old Murat Kurnaz was an innocent man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accused of being a terrorist, he spent five years in Guantanamo before being released -- now he's telling his story."

Disappeared: Five Years in Guantanamo
By Lou Dubose, The Washington Spectator
Posted on July 7, 2007, Printed on July 7, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/55993/

FIFTEEN AMERICAN SOLDIERS WATCHED over a man, shackled to a seat in the cargo bay of a C-17 Globemaster -- the Air Force workhorse that usually moves Abrams tanks, Chinook helicopters or infantry vehicles. Wearing goggles that shut out all light, a soundproof headset and a mask that covered his mouth so he could not speak, spit or bite, the prisoner arrived at Ramstein Air Force Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany, under the tightest security. The plane had burned through 36,000 gallons of jet fuel and had refueled in flight. During the seventeen-hour ride, the prisoner was provided with neither food nor water. Nor was he allowed to stretch his legs or relieve himself.

This was how what had been the world's greatest democracy when George W. Bush took the presidential oath in 2001 repatriated an innocent man who'd never represented a security threat to the United States. Murat Kurnaz was nineteen when he was taken off a bus in Peshawar, Pakistan. He had, as many first- or second-generation Muslims in Europe do, turned to a religion his family had abandoned when they emigrated from their native land. His religious awakening put him in proximity to Islamic fundamentalists: sufficient justification for detention by American forces, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as a supposed member of Al Qaeda.

Kurnaz was twenty-four and had been the last European held at the American prison camp in Cuba when the Globemaster touched down in Kaiserslautern in August 2006. He didn't know he'd been returned home to Germany until an American enlisted man removed his goggles and he saw three German policemen standing outside the airplane.

"He was dumped on German soil like some sort of alien," said Bernhard Docke, one of Kurnaz's attorneys, from the north German city of Bremen.

Murat’s Story

Murat Kurnaz, German born of Turkish parents, could be an expert witness and fact witness for any legislative or judicial procedure that would cast a cold eye on the transgressions of law, the Constitution or the fundamental precepts of human rights perpetrated by George Bush's terror warriors. Pick your amendment. Fifth: one is not compelled to be a witness against oneself, or deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. Eighth: protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Fourteenth: the state cannot deprive someone of life, liberty or property without due process.

The habeas corpus statute? For innocent detainees caught up in the sweeps that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there is no legitimate legal process that can be resorted to. No legal cause of action against the U.S. government. Not even an apology, if you're released.

"They threw my clothes over the fence," Kurnaz said in an interview in his lawyer's office in Bremen. "They told me, get ready to move. I thought to another prison; then I was back in Germany." That the U.S. soldiers continued to curse and humiliate him during the flight from Guantánamo gave him reason to believe he wasn't flying home to freedom. "They treated me the same as always," he said. "Like I was the number one terrorist."

Kurnaz represents a secondary problem related to the human rights violations occurring in the prison system Donald Rumsfeld situated ninety miles from Key West, beyond the reach of American law. After a prisoner has been subjected to "enhanced interrogation" (a phrase in U.S. military manuals and memos that is a direct translation of verschärfte Vernehmung, a euphemism for torture the Gestapo coined in 1937), you don't want him returning home to tell his story.

But that's precisely what Murat Kurnaz has done. His Fünf Jahre meines Lebens: Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo (Five Years of My Life: A Report from Guantánamo), is a straightforward account of his rendition, torture, detention and interrogation by American forces--torture that continued in Guantánamo. It even identifies a few of his tormentors, whose name tags were visible until Major General Geoffrey Miller took command and ordered all American personnel to remove anything that might identify them.

Kurnaz is beginning to appear in public to promote his book, described in the June 7 issue of The Economist as "a Swiftian tale" of a man who "survived by brawn and brains." On June 19 he was a guest on the TV show Beckamm, Germany's equivalent of PBS's Charlie Rose. On the same day in Washington, George Bush's nomination for the CIA's general counsel, John Rizzo, spent an hour equivocating before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding one subject with which Kurnaz has experience: torture.

For one man torture was abstract and theoretical. For the other, it was concrete and immediate.

CIA counsel nominee Rizzo said in response to a question asked by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI): "I'm trying to be responsive . . . without getting into a detailed explanation. We believed then and we have believed throughout this process that the CIA program, as it was conceived, when taken in toto, justifies the conclusion that the program was, from the outset, and remains conducted in a humane fashion."

Murat Kurnaz was more direct. "In Kandahar," he said, "they hanged me by my hands."

A massive, muscular man with a long reddish beard down to his chest and hair pulled back in a ponytail, Kurnaz speaks good, if basic English. He's a bit of a contradiction: a fundamentalist Muslim who drives a sports car and dresses as though he selects his clothes from GQ ads. His English improved considerably at Guantánamo. Kurnaz reluctantly agrees to interviews with reporters, though he earned a substantial amount of money for two exclusives with Der Stern magazine and a German television network. He tends to end interviews abruptly with the same line.

"I have to stop now."

From Jail to Justice

There are two Murat Kurnaz narratives. One is found in the paper trail and legal pleadings assembled by his two lawyers, Bernhard Docke in Bremen, Germany, and Baher Azmy from Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey. The other is his personal account of his five years in American custody.

The legal process by which Kurnaz was freed from Guantánamo was, in a sense, irrelevant. It's not precedent-setting, because there is no effective process that provides detainees access to justice. He is one of very few whose situation was eventually considered by an American court. His case is the best example of why the military tribunals conducting trials at Guantánamo are fundamentally flawed.

In January 2005, Washington, D.C., federal district Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled on Kurnaz's case, along with the cases of ten other detainees. During his Combat Review Status Hearing in Guantánamo, Kurnaz had appeared before a panel of three military officers. He had no legal representation and was not allowed to see the classified evidence used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda. Before his hearing in Washington, some of the classified evidence used against him was inadvertently declassified and obtained by the Washington Post> It included reports that established that two years earlier, the Command Intelligence Task Force that oversees Guantánamo had concluded there was "no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making specific threats against the U.S."

Judge Green reviewed the evidence and found nothing that justified holding Murat Kurnaz in prison. Among the hundreds of pages used to declare him a member of Al Qaeda, the smoking gun was a single document with vague allegations made by an unidentified officer. The judge was disturbed by the fact that Kurnaz, like other detainees, was never permitted to see or rebut the allegations that kept him in a cage in Guantánamo.

During the trial it was also revealed that a friend of Kurnaz's who was reported to have carried out a suicide bombing in Turkey--another bit of incriminating evidence--was alive and well in Bremen. And that German intelligence officers traveled to Guantánamo to interview Kurnaz and concluded he had not been involved in any terrorist activity in Germany. They even tried, at one point, to recruit him to return to Bremen and work undercover for them in the mosque he attended before going to Pakistan to study Islam. They later concluded he was so unconnected--and unsophisticated--he would be of no use to them as a snitch.

Yet nothing the judge did would result in his release. Judge Green ruled in his favor, devoting a number of pages in her 75-page opinion (some redacted) to the government's sloppy prosecution and lack of evidence against this man. But the heart of her ruling was that the process was basically illegal. The ruling was stayed, pending a decision at the appellate level. And after the trial, the then-Republican Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which included a controversial provision by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that denyed all detainees the right to file habeas corpus petitions. The habeas corpus right that Judge Green had provided as an avenue out of Guantánamo was stripped away by Congress.

Kurnaz was released only because Azmy and his colleague in Germany, Bernhard Docke, took his case to the court of public opinion in Germany. Their skillful use of the media persuaded German chancellor Angela Merkel to prevail on George Bush to release Kurnaz. Merkel raised the issue on her first visit to the White House in January 2006. The irony was evident: the Conservative chancellor who defeated Social Democrat Gerhard Schroeder, who had led a "red-green" coalition and was Europe's most strident critic of Bush's Iraq War, had delivered a German resident from Guantánamo, after Schroeder had allowed him to languish there for years.

"No one gets out of Guantánamo by any legal process," Azmy said. "Because there is none."

Counter-attack

It's now clear that the administration's attempt to maintain a detention center beyond the reach of U.S. law has failed. Eleven district judges have ruled against Guantánamo. There have been adverse rulings by the Supreme Court. And on June 4, two military judges in Guantánamo ruled that two detainees on trial were not properly designated "unlawful enemy combatants." A week later, a three-judge panel on the federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, ruled that the President cannot designate civilians who are in this country "enemy combatants" and order the military to hold them indefinitely. The ruling pertained to a citizen of Qatar arrested in 2001in Illinois, where he was a computer science student. A mid-June campaign by high-level White House staffers to begin planning to close Guantánamo was stopped by Dick Cheney. But there are enough stand-up judges to put Bush's squalid extra-judicial prison out of business. Or It will be done by the Congress in 2009, if no President Giuliani or Thompson is in office to veto it.

Kurnaz's five-year detention brings up another grave issue, one that the courts and the Congress have largely avoided. It was briefly addressed on June 19 at the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting, when committee chair John Rockefeller (D-WV) questioned John Rizzo. Rockefeller asked Rizzo about the memo Jay Bybee wrote at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002. (Bybee is now a Federal Appeals Court judge.) The memo, written in collaboration with John Yoo and widely known as the "Torture Memo," redefined torture as an act that inflicts pain equivalent in intensity "to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

Rizzo told Rockefeller he initially thought the expanded definition of torture was acceptable. The memo was later repudiated by the Office of Legal Counsel, but it was written both to expand the legal definition of torture and to provide cover for CIA agents pushing the envelope to the extreme limits described in the memo. Rockefeller pursued a second line of questioning, one that human-rights and personal-injury lawyers should be considering regarding cases like that of Murat Kurnaz. The senator asked Rizzo if he was aware of CIA agents' concerns that they could be exposed to criminal prosecution for their involvement in the interrogation program. Rizzo said yes.

Murat Kurnaz was picked up in Pakistan in December 2001, before then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales signed off on the torture memo. Kurnaz and hundreds of others were subjected to "illegal torture" (what a concept) before Bybee and Yoo drafted a memo that would protect the torturers from prosecution. The expanded legal definition of torture in their memo doesn't provide cover for those agents who tortured Kurnaz immediately after he was detained.

"The beatings began as soon as I was turned over to the Americans," Kurnaz said. Once in the Americans' hands, he was transferred to a camp at Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where suspected terrorists were held in tents. His account of his torture at the hands of the Americans--in his book and in interviews--is clear-eyed and consistent. He has repeated it in testimony before a committee of the German parliament, where he was described as a "very credible witness."

In the prison camp in Kandahar, Kurnaz said, he was hoisted on chains and was forced to hang by his hands while he was being interrogated. He was left hanging for "hours and days" after the interrogators left. An American physician in camouflage would come and check his vital signs to determine if he could withstand more enhanced interrogation.

The doctor's house call must have failed Kurnaz's neighbor in the next room. "They were hanging me and pulled me up higher than the other times. I could see the man in the other room. He was hanging, too. Maybe they lifted him higher that time, too, I don't know. I had heard him moaning and breathing; this is the first time I saw him. He was dead. The color of his body was changed and I could see he was dead."

Kurnaz said he was also subjected to waterboarding and electric shock. And that beatings were routine and constant. He theorizes that much of the torture was a result of the failure of the American soldiers and agents to capture any real terrorists in the initial sweeps. (He was told that he was sold to the Americans for $3,000 by Pakistani police, who identified him as a terrorist.) "They didn't have any big fish. And they thought that by torture they could get one of us to say something. 'I know Osama' or something like that. Then they could say they had a big fish."

The German government is still conducting a parliamentary inquiry into its complicity in the Kurnaz case. Ultimately Kurnaz may have a legal cause of action to seek some reparations from his government. As for the U.S. regime, the Bush administration's attempt to create a unitary presidency that uses war to justify executive powers never imagined by the men who negotiated our Constitution has been unmasked, and the Bush-Cheney presidency is in its last throes. When it is gone, or even before it packs up and moves on, some plaintiff will likely find legal counsel and a forum in which to litigate these issues.

In such a case, Kurnaz's book and testimony will be useful. He's written a primer on rendition, incarceration and torture. It's being translated by a U.S. publisher for a January release. It's not Solzhenitsyn, but it's a gripping account of life in an American gulag.

Movie rights have been sold in the U.S.

Lou Dubose is a former Observer editor and co-author of "The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money and the Rise of the Republican Congress."

Republicans are the party of torture. Audience applauds waterboarding, doubling of Guantanamo

America has officially lost any moral authority it had. Not just politicians and pundits, but audience members as well -- citizens, civilians, everyday Americans -- seem to have gone so insane with fear and revenge that they are willing to give up the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and just plain basic "everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten" morals. It seems that there is no longer any morality at all to them. And perversely, this comes from the party that declares itself to be the morality police for the rest of us, telling us that homosexual marriage will harm the institution of marriage (and is "morally wrong"). I'll tell you what's morally wrong, and it isn't homosexual marriage -- it's torturing people.

Think Progress has an excerpt from Tuesday's Republican presidential debates (see YouTube video above) in which candidate Rudy Giuliani endorses waterboarding and "every method they can think of":

HUME: Mayor Giuliani, the former Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, the current head of the CIA have both said that the most valuable intelligence tool they have had has been the information gained from what are called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to include, presumably, waterboarding. What is your view whether such techniques should be applied in a scenario like the one I described?

GIULIANI: In the hypothetical that you gave me, which assumes that we know there is going to be another attack and these people know about it, I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they can think of. Shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of.

HUME: Water boarding?

GIULIANI: I would say every method they could think of, and I would support them in doing that because I have seen — [applause] — I have seen what can happen when you make a mistake about this and I don’t want to see another 3,000 people dead in New York or any place else.

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) endorsed "Jack Bauer" techniques, saying "we are the last best hope of Western Civilization".

TANCREDO: I just say that it’s almost unbelievable to listen to this in a way. We are talking about it in such a theoretical fashion. You say that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we are wondering about whether waterboarding would a bad thing to do? I’m look for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you. [applause] There is nothing — if you are talking about — I mean, we are the last best hope of Western Civilization. So all of the theories that go behind our activities, subsequent to these nuclear attacks going off in the United States, they go out the window. When we go under, western civilization goes under. So you better take that into account and you better do every single thing you can as President of the United States to make sure, number one, it doesn’t happen, that’s right. But, number two, you better respond in a way that makes them fearful of you, because, otherwise, you guarantee something like this will happen.

As Think Progress notes,

During the debate last year over loosening the definition of torture, Gen. Colin Powell declared, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions]... would put our own troops at risk.” Earlier this year, the U.S. Army dispatched a general to tell producers of the television show 24 that its promotion of torture “was having a damaging effect on young troops.”

I simply don't understand people who endorse torture. How can they not realize that they give up any moral authority whatsoever as soon as they do so? How can they even criticize terrorism? How can they say "we are the last best hope of Western Civilization", when our country practices torture? A kindergartner would know it was wrong.

See this article from USA Today about the television show 24's glorification of torture.

Medical ethics and interrogation at Guantanamo Bay

The American Journal of Bioethics carries an analysis of recently de-classified logs of an interrogation at Guantanamo Bay:

The interrogation and the involvement of a psychologist, physician and medics violate international and medical norms for the treatment of prisoners.

...

For eleven days, beginning November 23, al-Qahtani was interrogated for twenty hours each day by interrogators working in shifts. He was kept awake with music, yelling, loud white noise or brief opportunities to stand. He then was subjected to eighty hours of nearly continuous interrogation until what was intended to be a 24-hour “recuperation.” This recuperation was entirely occupied by a hospitalization for hypothermia that had resulted from deliberately abusive use of an air conditioner. Army investigators reported that al-Qahtani’s body temperature had been cooled to 95 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit (35 to 36.1 degrees Celsius) and that his heart rate had slowed to thirty-five beats per minute. While hospitalized, his electrolytes were corrected and an ultrasound did not find venous thrombosis as a cause for the swelling of his leg. The prisoner slept through most of the 42-hour hospitalization after which he was hooded, shackled, put on a litter and taken by ambulance to an interrogation room for twelve more days of interrogation, punctuated by a few brief naps. He was then allowed to sleep for four hours before being interrogated for ten more days, except for naps of up to an hour. He was allowed 12 hours of sleep on January 1, but for the next eleven days, the exhausted and increasingly non-communicative prisoner was only allowed naps of one to four hours as he was interrogated. The log ends with a discharge for another “sleep period.”

...

In October 2002, before the time covered by the log, Army investigators found that dogs were brought to the interrogation room to growl, bark and bare their teeth at al-Qahtani. The investigators noted that a BSCT psychologist witnessed the use of the dog, Zeus, during at least one such instance, an incident deemed properly authorized to “exploit individual phobias.” FBI agents, however, objected to the use of dogs and withdrew from at least one session in which dogs were used.

...

Transgressions against Islamic and Arab mores for sexual modesty were employed. The prisoner was forced to wear photographs of “sexy females” and to study sets of such photographs to identify whether various pictures of bikini-clad women were of the same or a different person. He was told that his mother and sister were whores. He was forced to wear a bra, and a woman’s thong was put on his head. He was dressed as a woman and compelled to dance with a male interrogator. He was told that he had homosexual tendencies and that other prisoners knew this. Although continuously monitored, interrogators repeatedly strip-searched him as a “control measure.” On at least one occasion, he was forced to stand naked with women soldiers present. Female interrogators seductively touched the prisoner under the authorized use of approaches called “Invasion of Personal Space” and “Futility.” On one occasion, a female interrogator straddled the prisoner as he was held down on the floor.

...

He was leashed (a detail omitted in the log but recorded by investigators) and made to “stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to a dog.” He was told to bark like a happy dog at photographs of 9/11 victims and growl at pictures of terrorists.

...

Clinicians were integral to this abusive interrogation. Medics regularly assessed al-Qahtani’s vital signs, hydration, skin integrity and constipation. They attended to edema that appears to have resulted from a combination of prolonged restraint, recumbency and (perhaps) nutritional insufficiency. Physicians came to the interrogation cell to assess or treat dehydration, inanition, pain, edema and potential trauma from prolonged restraint to a metal chair. A physician told interrogators over the telephone that interrogation could continue despite bradycardia. Inpatient clinicians treated hypothermia-induced bradycardia and returned him to the interrogators. The Behavioral Science Consultation Team and its psychologist Chair oversaw the interrogation, including the use of a military dog to threaten the prisoner, and directly suggested responses to the prisoner’s requests and actions.

...

The Army investigation, instigated by an FBI complaint rather than by clinicians, focused on whether the interrogation techniques were authorized by Defense Department policy. The investigators found that the prolonged sleep deprivation was authorized. Cooling with an air conditioner was authorized “environmental manipulation.” Notwithstanding bradycardia requiring hospitalization, the investigators asserted, “There are no medical entries indicating the subject . . . ever experienced medical problems related to low body temperature” (Bashour, Gualberto and Ryan 1989). Investigators noted a second episode of bradycardia in February 2003 after the period covered by interrogation log. Army investigators found no evidence that al-Qahtani was ever physically assaulted and pointed out that medical records did not find evidence of physical assault or “medical conditions of note.” They concluded that there was “no evidence that [al-Qahtani] . . . was subjected to humiliation intentionally directed at his religion.” They found that the cumulative effect of this “creative, aggressive, and persistent” interrogation was “degrading and abusive” but did not constitute “torture” or “inhumane” treatment but did not define distinctions between these words. Not finding torture or inhumane treatment, the Army recommended closing the investigation.

...

International law squarely prohibits this kind of interrogation. The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War states,

"Persons . . . placed hors de combat by . . . detention shall in all circumstances be treated humanely ... To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever . . . (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; … No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind" (Geneva Convention 1949).

Similarly, the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture defines “torture” as “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, ... at the instigation of . . . a public official” (United Nations General Assembly 1984). Although the United States Supreme Court upheld the Geneva Convention in its Hamdan decision (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 124 S. Ct. 2633 [2004]), the recently enacted Military Commissions Act denies prisoners the right to invoke the Geneva provisions (Military Commissions Act of 2006).

...

Numerous ethics codes proscribe medical complicity with harsh interrogation. In response to public outcry against clinical participation in coercive interrogations at war on terror prisons, the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have endorsed more stringent codes for military clinicians who are asked to participate in interrogation (Table 1).

...

Table 1. Selected Excerpts from Medical Ethics Codes and Conventions Addressing Clinicians Roles in Interrogation.

United Nations General Assembly. Principles of Medical Ethics Relevant to the Protection of Prisoners Against Torture (1982).

"It is a gross contravention of medical ethics, . . . for health personnel, particularly physicians, to [1] engage, actively or passively, in acts which constitute participation in, complicity in, incitement to or attempts to commit torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, . . . [2] be involved in any professional relationship with prisoners or detainees the purpose of which is not solely to evaluate, protect or improve their physical and mental health, . . . [3] (a) apply their knowledge and skills in order to assist in the interrogation of prisoners . . . in a manner that may adversely affect the physical or mental health or condition of such prisoners . . . ; (b) certify, or to participate in the certification of, the fitness of prisoners . . . for any form of treatment or punishment that may adversely affect their physical or mental health . . . or to participate in any way in the infliction of any such treatment or punishment . . . , [4] participate in any procedure for restraining a prisoner . . . unless such a procedure is determined in accordance with purely medical criteria as being necessary for the protection of the physical or mental health or the safety of the prisoner or detainee himself . . . and presents no hazard to his physical or mental health."