Top US judge had delusions during detox, FBI files reveal

by Ed Pilkington, New York
Saturday January 6, 2007
The Guardian

William Rehnquist, the late head of the US supreme court, was so addicted to sedatives that when he stopped taking the drugs he had hallucinations that the CIA was plotting against him, newly released FBI records reveal.

The papers, running to 1,561 pages, are the product of an FBI investigation into Rehnquist’s drug dependency which is revealed to be much more serious than previously known. They show that he went into detox having been prescribed sedatives shortly before he was appointed by President Richard Nixon onto the supreme court 10 years previously.

The papers show that he withdrew from the drugs during a week at the George Washington University hospital in 1981, and suffered paranoid delusions.

One doctor said Rehnquist complained that the designs on the curtains were moving and that he heard voices outside his hospital room in which CIA operatives plotted against him. The judge was found in the lobby of the hospital in his pyjamas trying to escape.

It was already known that Rehnquist was dependant on Placidyl, a sedative he was prescribed for back pain and which is addictive. But the extent of his dependency is only now apparent, with the papers revealing that by the time of his detox he was on nightly doses of 1,500mg, three times the norm.

During the course of 33 years on the court Rehnquist came to represent the increasingly conservative face of US justice. When he took his seat in January 1972 the court was largely liberal in complexion, and remained so during the 1970s and 1980s until President Reagan managed to transform its composition. He nominated Rehnquist to the top judicial post of chief justice of the supreme court in 1986, a job which Rehnquist held until his death in September 2005.

The chief justice was controversial, having supported the segregation of southern schools in a legal memo written in 1952 and having been accused of attempting to prevent black and Hispanic people registering to vote while acting as a Republican election volunteer in Arizona in the 1960s. He also opposed abortion and was in favour of allowing religion to have a greater presence in public life.

The papers also show that Republican administrations asked the FBI to investigate witnesses they feared would be hostile to Rehnquist during his confirmation battles. In the run-up to his confirmation as chief justice in 1986 John Bolton, who recently stood down as US ambassador to the UN, delivered witnesses’ names to the FBI, telling the agency he “would accept responsibility should concerns be raised about the role of the FBI”.

Mr Bolton defended the action to the Washington Post yesterday, saying there was no political motive behind it as the request for FBI involvement originally came from the Democrats.

Newsweek weighs in…
By Peg Tyre
Newsweek

Jan. 6, 2007 – As more details about the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s battle with prescription medication have emerged, they have focused new attention on how doctors prescribe and monitor people who take potentially addictive drugs.

Declassified documents released by the FBI this week paint a picture of an esteemed and learned man who nonetheless fell prey to a long-term debilitating habit while he was a Supreme Court justice during the 1970s. In 1981, five years before he became chief justice, Rehnquist was admitted to George Washington University Hospital for a month in order to be weaned off prescription drugs. During his hospital stay, according to the documents, Rehnquist experienced paranoid delusions and tried, at one point, to escape from the hospital in his pajamas. Shortly before he underwent the treatment his family described him as having a longstanding problem with “slurred speech.”

And no wonder. The FBI reports that Rehnquist was already taking the powerful hypnotic ethchlorvynol—marketed as Placidyl—to treat insomnia when, in 1972, he came under the care of a Capitol Hill doctor (whose name was redacted from the report). Subsequently, Rehnquist’s dose of the powerful drug as much as tripled to 1,500 milligrams per day. He began taking a pill before retiring and a pill if he woke once or twice during the night. At the same time, the jurist was also taking Darvon, a narcotic, and Tylenol 3, prescribed by another physician to treat chronic back pain.

Back then, prescription drug abuse was nowhere near the problem it is today. There are simply more drugs available now, says Dr. Nora D. Volkow, executive director for the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and physicians often lack the training to properly administer them. “Doctors don’t know how to evaluate patients and they don’t know how to get honest responses from them about their drug use,” she says. Although increased public awareness has helped—former First Lady Betty Ford famously opened her clinic in 1982—for the most part, says Volkow, patients often mistakenly assume that if a doctor is prescribing a drug then “they can’t get addicted.” According to the U.S. government’s 2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the most recent study available, 6 million people—some 2.5 percent of the population over the age of 12—have abused prescription drugs.

Physical dependence is not always a sign of addiction. Dependence indicates that an individual has been exposed to a drug at high enough doses for long enough to develop a tolerance for it. Addiction is a neurobiological syndrome that can include physical dependence, but is characterized by craving, loss of control and compulsive use—even when the users knows it is causing them harm. Addiction is typically treated with behavioral intervention, drug treatment in the case of methadone, or a combination. Although it is not clear if Rehnquist’s drug problem affected his judgment, doctors who treated him told the FBI that toxicity from Placidyl might result in blurred vision, slurred speech and difficulty in moving.

In the FBI report, the doctor who helped Rehnquist get off drugs said the justice’s family blamed the prescribing physician and the pharmacist and suggested that they were intimidated by high-ranking government officials. Dr. Russell Portenoy, chairman of Pain Medicine and Palliative Care at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, says Mrs. Natalie C. Rehnquist may have been right. With an estimated 70 million Americans in chronic pain, Portenoy believes that every kind of doctor—including primary care physicians—should know how to identify patients who may have addictive tendencies and intervene if they think their patient has developed a problem. Warning signs? When patients up the dosage rates without medical supervision, experience cravings or get prescriptions from a variety of physicians (a practice known as doctor shopping.)

But Portenoy knows it’s not easy—especially with a VIP. “I have some sympathy for the doctor” who was treating him, he says. “The doctor realizes that an esteemed scholar, a person of high personal wealth or a head of a major corporation has been engaging in significantly problematic drug-related behavior,” such as Rehnquist exhibited. “The reality is, it can be difficult for a physician to handle.” Unfortunately, what was true 30 years ago is still true today.

From http://www.fantoma.com:

The new trailer for Fantoma’s upcoming January 23rd DVD release THE FILMS OF
KENNETH ANGER, VOL 1 is online. Follow links to view in QuickTime:

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At long last, THE FILMS OF KENNETH ANGER VOLUME 1 is finally available on
DVD this January.

Fantoma Films’ special edition DVD hits stores on January 23, 2007.

“It’s time that Kenneth Anger’s work became more available, because he is,
without a doubt, one of our greatest artists.” – Martin Scorsese

Cinematic magician, legendary provocateur, author of the infamous HOLLYWOOD
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(courtesy Sammy Harkham at FAMILY)

Analysis: Behind troop surge, a Neocon force – Los Angeles Times

By Peter Spiegel, Times Staff Writer
7:07 PM PST, January 3, 2007

WASHINGTON — Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war’s intellectual architects — the so-called neoconservatives — have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.

Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Defense Department’s most senior neocon, was shipped off to the World Bank. His Pentagon colleague Douglas Feith departed for academia. John Bolton left the State Department for the United Nations.

But other neocons have moved back into the mainstream of steering Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration’s blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago. In these neoconservatives’ view, not enough troops were being set aside to stabilize the country. They also worried that the Pentagon had formulated a plan that concentrated too heavily on killing insurgents rather than securing law and order for Iraqi citizens.

They have long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis.

Until now, it was an argument that had fallen on deaf ears.

“We have been pretty consistently in this direction from the outset,” said Kagan, whose December study detailing his strategy is influencing the administration’s current thinking. “I started making this argument even before the war began, because I watched in dismay as we messed up Afghanistan and then heard with dismay the rumors that we would apply some sort of Afghan model to Iraq.”

If Bush goes ahead with the surge idea, along with a concomitant shift to a more aggressive counterinsurgency, it would in many ways represent a wholesale repudiation of the outgoing Pentagon leadership.

These leaders — particularly former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. John Abizaid, the departing Middle East commander — strongly resisted more U.S. troops and a larger push into troubled neighborhoods out of fear it would prevent Iraqis from taking over the job themselves and exacerbate the image of the United States as an occupier.

The plan the administration appears to be moving toward envisions an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 troops, the majority of whom would be sent to Baghdad. The increase would be achieved by delaying the departure of Marine units already in Iraq and speeding the deployment of Army brigades due this spring.

The neoconservative group as a whole had been the driving force in Washington behind a move against Iraq, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They saw Saddam as a lingering threat to world security — a view bolstered within the administration after the attacks. They argued that transforming Iraq into a democracy could serve as a model with potential to remake the Middle East’s political dynamics.

The war effort’s unraveling gradually undermined the clout they had wielded. But perhaps the more important hurdle — especially on military matters — was the White House’s refusal to see its Iraq policy as a failure.

That changed this summer, when the spike in sectarian violence and the failure of an offensive to secure Baghdad created what one Pentagon adviser called a “psychological break” within the administration. Until then, neoconservatives argue, the administration saw little proof that Abizaid’s plan, backed by Army Gen. George Casey, the military commander in Iraq, was failing.

The main reason for the new ascendancy of the neocon recommendations, said Kristol, is that “the Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey theory was tried and was found wanting. … Some of us challenged it very early on, but, of course, then we were just challenging it as a competing theory.”

Although Kristol, Kagan and their intellectual allies have pushed for their policy for more than three years, they bristle at the notion that the idea of a larger troop presence in Iraq and a different approach to securing the country is wholly a neoconservative idea.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a leading presidential contender, has been pushing for more troops and a different security strategy for nearly as long as Kristol and Kagan. Recently, support for a revised counterinsurgency plan has gained support among military officers, active and retired. Perhaps most notable is retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army chief of staff who signed onto Kagan’s plan last month.

The case for change has been bolstered by actions the military itself has taken, including a successful 2005 Army offensive in the northern Iraqi city of Tall Afar, where midlevel officers used counterinsurgency tactics to suppress sectarian violence. The Pentagon released a new counterinsurgency field manual last month that largely echoed the neocons’ thinking.

The troop-surge proposal is not embraced by all neoconservatives. Wolfowitz, for instance, had ridiculed the notion that more troops would be needed to secure Iraq. Richard Perle, a former top adviser to the Pentagon who advocated for smaller troop numbers at the time of the invasion, is known to be skeptical of a surge.

The plan’s advocates acknowledge the split within the neocon movement.

“Before the war, I was arguing for a quarter of a million troops in expectations we’d be there five or 10 years,” said Gary Schmitt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked closely with Kristol and Kagan. “Richard Perle, obviously somebody else who’s thought of as a neocon, thought we should go in” with far fewer U.S. forces.

The neocons calling for more troops in Iraq and different tactics have pressed their proposals in public writings and speeches and in private conversations within the administration.

Kenneth Adelman, a leading neoconservative thinker, recalled a meeting a year ago of the Defense Policy Board, a group of outside advisers to the Pentagon, during which he pressed Rumsfeld to implement more traditional counterinsurgency ideas, such as keeping soldiers longer in their deployed areas to get to know the local population better.

“What you need for counterinsurgency has been pretty clear for some time: You need to protect the population and get the population to fight the insurgents with you, or at least inform on them,” Adelman said. “The fight is over the population, it’s not over getting the enemy.”

Much like they did when advocating for the invasion, these neocons have promoted their military strategy even at times when it was seen as politically unpalatable.

“What you can say about Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol … is they’ve been constant in sounding this theme,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military analyst at Johns Hopkins University’s international studies school in Washington who has advised the administration on Iraq policy. “You’ve had other people who have dropped in and out of this.”

Courtesy R. Pleuger

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