Jose … symbol of our decline

December 7th, 2006

I’m posting a second piece today — and that will do it ’til next week when I’ll be back in the [cold, snowy] Pea Patch. Meanwhile, Mel is still with us, bless her.

This is a collection on Jose Padilla — we have driven him insane; there will never be, in my estimation, a rationale for this conduct on the behalf of our government. It’s a low point among many … but Jose is, no matter what else, a United States citizen … and that makes him OUR BUSINESS, in spades!

Reprehensible stuff, below … this is shame that, once corrected … and I keep hope … must NEVER be forgotten in this nation.

Jude

Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation
DEBORAH SONTAG, NYT
December 4, 2006

One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.

That day, Mr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Muslim convert whom the Bush administration had accused of plotting a dirty bomb attack and had detained without charges, got to go to the dentist.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Todd Vician, said Sunday that the military disputes Mr. Padilla’s accusations of mistreatment. And, in court papers, prosecutors deny “in the strongest terms” the accusations of torture and say that “Padilla’s conditions of confinement were humane and designed to ensure his safety and security.”

“His basic needs were met in a conscientious manner, including Halal (Muslim acceptable) food, clothing, sleep and daily medical assessment and treatment when necessary,” the government stated. “While in the brig, Padilla never reported any abusive treatment to the staff or medical personnel.”

In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations. In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”

Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.

Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”

Ali al-Marri, a Qatari and Saudi dual citizen and the only enemy combatant currently detained in the United States, has made similar claims of isolation and deprivation at the brig in South Carolina. The Pentagon spokesman, Lieutenant Vician, said Sunday that he could not comment on the methods used to escort Mr. Padilla to the dentist. Blackened goggles and earphones are rarely employed in internal prison transports in the United States, but riot gear is sometimes used for violent prisoners.

One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

Federal prosecutors and defense lawyers are locked in a tug of war over the relevancy of Mr. Padilla’s military detention to the present criminal case. Federal prosecutors have asked the judge to forbid Mr. Padilla’s lawyers from mentioning the circumstances of his military detention during the trial, maintaining that their accusations could “distract and inflame the jury.”

But defense lawyers say it is unconscionable to ignore Mr. Padilla’s military detention because, among other reasons, it altered him in a way that will impinge on his trial.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.

Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.

Mr. Padilla is portrayed in the indictment as the recruit of a “North American terror support cell” that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist “global jihad” in general, with a special interest in Bosnia and Chechnya. Mr. Padilla, the indictment asserts, traveled overseas “to participate in violent jihad” and filled out an application for a mujahedin training camp in Afghanistan.

Michael Caruso, a public defender for Mr. Padilla, pleaded “absolutely not guilty” for him to charges of conspiracy and of providing material support to terrorists. Mr. Padilla faces two charges that each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years.

Over the summer, Judge Marcia G. Cooke of United States District Court in Miami threw out the most serious charge, of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country, saying that it replicated accusations in the other counts and could lead to multiple punishments for a single crime. This was a setback for the government, which has appealed the dismissal.

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.

From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.

But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.

Mr. do Campo said that Mr. Padilla was not incommunicative, and that he expressed curiosity about what was going on in the world, liked to talk about sports and demonstrated particularly keen interest in the Chicago Bears.

But the defense lawyers’ questions often echo the questions interrogators have asked Mr. Padilla, and when that happens, he gets jumpy and shuts down, the lawyers said.

Dr. Hegarty said Mr. Padilla refuses to review the video recordings of his interrogations, which have been released to his lawyers but remain classified.

He is especially reluctant to discuss what happened in the brig, fearful that he will be returned there some day, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit.

“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.” ++

Padilla photos shocks military expert
UPI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 (UPI) — Newly released photographs of U.S. terror suspect Jose Padilla wearing sensory deprivation devices have outraged a Washington military expert.

The photos came from a Defense Department video of Padilla, 36, being escorted from his cell at a South Carolina brig where he was held for 3 1/2 years without being charged. He is shown wearing noise-blocking headphones and blacked-out goggles, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told the newspaper he found the images “extremely disturbing” and called it “outrageous government conduct.”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a torture expert at Notre Dame Law School, agreed.

“It looked extraordinarily excessive,” O’Connell said. “He’s only a suspect — he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

The New York-born Padilla, a convert to Islam, was declared an “enemy combatant” after he was arrested in 2002 and prosecutors alleged he was conspiring to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. When he was eventually charged in 2005 with conspiring in a minor terrorism case but there was no mention of a dirty bomb in the indictment, the newspaper said. ++

Breaking The Furniture
by digby
Sunday, December 03, 2006

This [the NYTimes piece] is going to keep me up tonight:

[... posted above]

When I was a kid I read “The Count Of Monte Cristo” and it had a profound affect on me. It is a book about horrible injustice, terrible solitary confinement and the natural human response to suffering it. Every time I read about these prisoners being thrown into these high tech dungeons, isolated and dehumanized I think of that book and the descriptions of madness to which Edmund Dantes nearly succumbs until his mind is saved by the presence of another person to talk to. I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.

I get the sense that a lot of this stuff was rank experimentation. We have known for years that Guantanamo became a guinea pig farm very early on in which they trained green interrogators in “new” techniques. This was probably part of a similar program.

From a January 2004 article in Vanity Fair by David Rose:

Reporters are not allowed to speak with interrogators or anyone else who deals with intelligence at Gitmo. The only testimony I hear is from General Geoffrey Miller, the task-force commander. “We are developing information of enormous value to the nation,” says Miller, a slight, pugnacious man said to be a strict disciplinarian. “We have an enormously thorough process that has very high resolution and clarity. We think we’re fighting not only to save and protect our families, but your families also. I think of Gitmo as the counterterrorism-interrogation battle lab.”

But Miller’s background is in artillery, not intelligence, and senior intelligence officials with long experience in counterterrorism, who spoke to Vanity Fair on condition of anonymity, question his assessment

[...]

General Miller, however, sees no cause for concern. “I believe we understand what the truth is. We are very, very good at interrogation… As many of our detainees have realized that what they did was wrong, they have begun to give us information that helps us win the global war on terror.”

Spies and psychiatrists may have their doubts, but Donald Rumsfeld is convinced that even the mere foot soldiers imprisoned at Gitmo are “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” All, he has said, “were involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans.”

You read some of this stuff now and it’s like these guys were all running lines from some cheap 1950’s era B-Movie script. Yet the press corps called this nutcase Rummy a “rock star.” It was some sort of mass delusion.

Somewhere they came up with the idea that every single person detained by the military as an enemy combatant was not just guilty, he was not even a human being. And so they did this stuff almost as if to make sure the person was not treated as a human being in any way. Perhaps it tested their own assumptions too much if they were seen as people instead of pure personifications of evil.

And it worked:

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

This “piece of furniture” had to have blackout goggles and earphones, manacles and a force of men in riot gear in order to go to the prison dentist. I do not know if they made him wear the goggles and earphones when he had his root canal. But I’d be willing to bet they did. It would be so much more punishing not to be able to see and hear, but be able to feel. Why waste an opportunity to further dehumanize the furniture?

Oh, and be sure to read the whole article to remind yourself of just what a pathetic, absurd case the government is bringing against this guy. ++

Becoming What We Despise
Robert Scheer
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 by truthdig

Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, has been tortured by his own government for the better part of three-and-one-half years, suffering years of systematic sensory deprivation documented in his attorneys’ filings and supported by photos of the prisoner published this week by the New York Times.

In that time, Padilla, who has been judged by professionals as mentally ill as a consequence of his brutal treatment, has been denied his Constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial and was permitted no legal representation for 21 months. The Bush administration’s excuse for this betrayal of our legal system was that Padilla was a dangerous al Qaeda agent, a big fish caught in the administration’s successful pursuit of its much ballyhooed war on terror. In the words of then-U.S. Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft, Padilla was “a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States.” Those lurid claims were abandoned when the government, faced with a belated U.S. Supreme Court censure, finally charged Padilla with vague and lesser crimes carrying a maximum 15-year sentence.

Were this some isolated case of officially condoned sadism, say in a rural county jail, it could be minimized as an aberration. Instead, it is an all-too-accurate reflection of a presidential policy of dehumanizing anyone even suspected of being an enemy. The Times photos, taken from a government video, give evidence of a heavily manacled prisoner with masked eyes and muffled ears being walked down a corridor within a Navy brig, lending physical evidence to Padilla’s lawyer’s claims of a pattern of disorienting isolation. “There is nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement,” Philip D. Cave, a former Navy judge advocate general, told the Times.

Obviously, a prisoner who has been deliberately disorientated for so long is no longer in a position to exercise his right to confront his accusers. An examining psychiatrist wrote that “as the result of his experience during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness … complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”

The excuse for this heinous treatment of a U.S. citizen is the same as that given for an entire orgy of despicable treatment of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and a gulag archipelago of secret military facilities around the world: Our enemies, all linked through sophistry to the 9/11 terror attacks, are so vile and dangerous that the limitations on government power enshrined in our guiding documents and political culture no longer apply. Once the Twin Towers were knocked down, supposedly, we could no longer afford to be “nice guys”—as if the rule of law is an indulgence of only the most secure nations.

By that standard, any tyrant can justify the cruelest of actions by citing enemies, real or imagined, be it King George III blockading Boston Harbor to teach the rebellious colonists a lesson or Saddam Hussein killing Kurdish villagers after an assassination attempt on his life. The very uniqueness of our national experiment was the checks and balances put upon the government to prevent such convenient rationalizations for abuse of the individual. The Founding Fathers won a war, but their true contribution to human history was to tackle head-on the reality that humans and their institutions can so easily become that which they despise.

Even when an American is suspected of a “capital or infamous crime,” as was Padilla, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically says he still cannot “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” That is why the Supreme Court finally forced the Bush administration to give Padilla his day in court.

In the end, the administration has retreated from its hoary claims; Padilla’s trial, set to begin on Jan. 22, does not include any reference to dirty bombs, al Qaeda, or any specific plans to attack America. Instead, he faces lesser charges claiming he was the recruit of a “North American support cell,” whose interest was in jihad in Bosnia and Chechnya. As if it had no bearing on the disoriented state of mind of the defendant, the Bush administration’s lawyers have argued in motions that his treatment as a prisoner should not be presented before the jury.

The more important question now, however, is when will those who, like Ashcroft, used this case to shamelessly exploit our fears for political purposes face their own day of accountability in a court of law? ++

Was Jose Padilla Tortured?
A video of the accused terrorist shows he was subjected to unduly harsh treatment, his lawyers claim, leaving him psychologically damaged and unfit to stand trial
ADAM ZAGORIN/WASHINGTON — TIME
Monday, Dec. 04, 2006

Jose Padilla was the first and only American citizen to be held without charge after being labeled an “enemy combatant” by President Bush. A 36-year-old former Chicago gang member, he was arrested in June 2002, following his arrival at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. The U.S. claimed he had been sent by al-Qaeda to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city.

Now, after more than three years in custody, Padilla’s lawyers are claiming that new images taken from a government video show that he received unduly harsh treatment while being held at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The pictures, still shots from an unclassified Department of Defense video, show his hands and feet shackled as he wears headphones and blacked-out goggles while being escorted by three guards dressed in helmets and riot gear to a dental appointment.

The new material was filed in federal court in Miami late last week, and was first reported by the New York Times . The filing comes as part of an attempt by Padilla’s lawyers to win dismissal of criminal charges against him for supporting terrorism. The lawyers argue that Padilla was subjected to the equivalent of torture while in U.S. military custody, and that the experience has left him psychologically damaged and unable to participate in his own defense.

After his lawyers contested the government’s right to hold him without trial, Padilla last January was transferred from military to civilian custody. He is set to go on trial Jan. 22 in Miami, along with two codefendants, on charges of supporting terrorism . The charges do not include the “dirty bomb” allegations, which the government appear to have dropped.

“The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” said one court filing by Orlando do Campo, one of Padilla’s lawyers. Padilla’s filing also says that he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extremes of heat and cold, forced to stand in “stress positions” that can be painful, and given “truth serum” to make him talk.

The filing includes an affidavit from a psychiatrist who said that he apparently is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, and cannot adequately assist his own lawyers in preparing his legal defense. According to the psychiatrist’s affadavit in the court filing: “When approached by his attorneys, he begs them, ‘please, please, please’ not to have to discuss his case. ” The psychiatrist also reported that Padilla “refuses to watch the videos of his interrogation and he refuses to answer questions pertaining to aspects of the evidence in his case.”

U.S. officials and spokespersons for the Department of Defense have long insisted that Padilla never faced torture, arguing in their own legal filings that he never experienced anything but “humane” treatment consistent with his safety and security. ++

Padilla Padilla Padilla
Jane Smiley
12.06.2006

I haven’t been posting much lately, because every time the Bush administration puts me in a rage, other posters beat me to it. This is a good thing. I want there to be an avalanche of rage pouring down on the Bush criminals. I want my own now-six-year-old rage to be just the palest
imitation of all the rage there is.

Nevertheless, when I read Robert Scheer’s eloquent post about Jose Padilla this morning (”Becoming What We Despise”), I thought, “He is too kind.” In fact, as shocking as the treatment of Padilla has been, and as horrifying as Padilla’s condition now is, and as terrifying as the fact that Padilla, a US citizen, was stripped of all of his constitutional rights and tortured without recourse just exactly as if he lived in South Africa during apartheit, or in Russia in the Stalinist period, or in any South American dictatorship you could name is, the most vile, stinking, contemptible, debased, and humiliating fact about the whole episode is that yesterday, when Padilla’s condition was reported on AOL, 75% of AOL’s poll responders voted FOR the government’s treatment of Padilla. Apparently they did not know that he is no longer being accused of the dirty bomb crime, and apparently they didn’t care ANYTHING about their constitutional rights as Americans. Gosh. I thought the Democrats won the election and that the Bush administration’s policies had been repudiated.

I have to say that I can’t find the poll today, so perhaps those folks who voted yesterday were a small, skewed sample, and perhaps it was Mary Cheney, whom I now discover works for AOL, who kept voting repeatedly (personally, I voted twice against the government) (and now that I know that AOL gave Mary Cheney a job, I will have to rethink having anything to do with AOL) (but on the other hand, AOL is in big trouble, so maybe Mary will lose her job before her pregnancy leave kicks in), but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Anyone at all who does not find Padilla’s treatment repugnant in every way, and perfect grounds for impeachment, imprisonment, and solitary confinement of everyone in charge of our government for the last five years and ten months, has devolved from a human being to a reptile.

Those votes on AOL are the best argument for global-warming-as-the-fitting-end-to-the-failed-human-experiment that I’ve seen lately. Jose Padilla, whatever it turns out that he has done (and I bet it won’t be much) is a martyr to our Constitution, and that picture of his face in black goggles should be on the wall in every classroom and in every government building and in every church in the nation. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves