The Packbats' Weblog

Joshua Kors tells the story.

Luther insisted to doctors at Camp Taji that he did not have personality disorder, that the idea of developing a childhood mental illness at the age of 36, after passing eight psychological screenings, was ridiculous. The sergeant used a vivid expression to convey how much pain he was in. "I told them that some days, the pain was so bad, I felt like dying." Doctors declared him a suicide risk. They collected his shoelaces, his belt and his rifle and ordered him confined to an isolation chamber.

Extensive medical records written by Luther's doctors document his confinement in the aid station for more than a month. The sergeant was kept under twenty-four-hour guard. Most nights, he says, guards enforced sleep deprivation, keeping the lights on and blasting heavy metal music. When Luther rebelled, he was pinned down and injected with sleeping medication.

Eventually Luther was brought to his commander, who told him he had a choice: he could sign papers saying his medical problems stemmed from personality disorder or face more time in isolation.

I can't even joke about this. It's horrible, pure horror.

Edit: Link via ceruleanst, here.

Bearing in mind that the blogosphere is inherently vulnerable to amplification effects, this does seem worrisome.

Google cache seems to confirm the decision was temporarily pulled (the URL is a 404), and the revised opinion has oddities in the formatting of the first seven pages which match the (not at all odd) formatting of the first seven pages of the purported original. (Note particularly p. 3, which in the revised version loses a line, and p. 7, where the redaction notice appears.)

I don't have time to research this properly. But there's certainly something wrong here.