Daily Dish - Andrew Sullivan
"Jose Padilla is a U.S. citizen. He was detained without formal charges for almost four years and turned into a mental patient. The original charges against him appear nowhere in his current criminal prosecution. They were fabrications or delusions or fantasies...
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...
Neither you nor I know what Padilla was up to, and it will now be up to a court to decide. But the effect of the brutal incarceration of Padilla may now make it impossible to convict him on any grounds. Like al-Qahtani, the torture and abuse to which he has been subject seem to have broken his mind:
"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, by all accounts, was a completely non-violent and docile prisoner every day of his incarceration. And yet they put him in body-manacles for four years, complete isolation and darkness, and even fitted him with night-goggles for a dental operation. They dehumanized him into a piece of furniture. The level of pure sadism and paranoia in his treatment is worthy of a military dictatorship, not a democracy.
Remember also the description of another detainee, al-Qahtani, after detention by the Bush administration:
At the end of months of sleep deprivation and other forms of torture, Qahtani, according to an FBI letter, "was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end)."
Now remember the definition of torture: "severe mental or physical pain or suffering." Four years of blindness and isolation? Post-traumatic stress disorder? Involuntary twitching and body contortion? You think that doesn't amount to prolonged and severe mental suffering?
This, remember, is an American citizen, who was charged with grievous crimes even the government has now dropped for lack of any evidence. Locked away for four years in solitary confinement, and not even allowed to walk down a hallway without night-goggles, in order to keep him disoriented. Padilla may not be successfully prosecuted because his treatment means evidence from his own testimony is too tainted by torture to be admitted in court. (Qahtani has also retracted everything he was tortured to say.)
This is the America Bush has created: lawless, brutal, inhumane, and incompetent. We have no evidence that any of this has made you safer. But it has struck at the very heart of the liberty this country was founded to protect and defend.
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How can you people tolerate this? Your president is taking a dump on every American ideal that people around the world used to admire. So much for civil rights. Your civil rights are utterly worthless when a President can subject you for 4 years of sensory deprivation to the point of torture with no charges laid. Where is the outrage? What I don't understand is how people are so blase about this. Does anyone even care?
