Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation”>
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.
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.”
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.’ ”
Sounds like he’s achieved the neocon version of a model American voter.
Look at the helmets that these guys are wearing.
The man’s hands and feet are shackled, he has no-vision goggles on and ear muffs. What purpose is the darth vadar helmet, but to scare US the viewer..
-Erik
O well, this ahole wouldn’t think twice about killing any American. All in the name of his backwards ass religion. I wouldn’t care if he ever saw the light of day again. It also sends a message to all other would be jerk off terrorist, no civil rights, no slick, free attorney to get you off on a technicality, no hope of freedom. He deserves everything he gets.
Ah, don’t you just love truth, justice and the American way!
To Hell with Mr. Padilla and his ilk.
#3,4 and 6. Your showing your true compassionate conservatism in action boys. Where is this guys due process? Constitutional rights? From what I’ve read on this case the guy was mentally unstable and had no access to dirty weapons nor capable of carrying it out if he had.
You guys read what the administration says and immediately believe he’s a terrorist. Good going you bunch of sheep.
7. IF what you’ve said is true, and I have read the same things, then I am ashamed of this country.
The fact is that we have here a US citizen denied his constitutional rights, with no evidence beyond accusation. Support of such cavalier treatment of the tenets of our society is a sad joke.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about his mental state you blithering idiot.
If someone comes to my house with a gun trying to kill me I have
no compassion for him.
#10 sh
Why do you hate America so much?
Jose can you see….
Let’s see, They’re taking him for medical treatment. Unless they are doing the root canal as a form of torture it sure sounds like he is being treated pretty well most counties would let him and his teeth rot.
This country has really only had one conflict that had enemy combatants that were “home grown.” And guess what, Habeas Corpus was suspended in that case as well by none other than Lincoln.
Civil rights has been suspended several times in US history, all under the threat of war. The full freedoms of our Constitution are only as good as the people’s willingness to stand, and perish for those rights if necessary. Hiding in the dark from the boogeyman is the best way to forfeit those rights.
gquaglia you seem to be rather violent in your postings here. They’re almost a call to arms to others. You seem to be trying to incite violence against others and the country. I think you should be taken away and not given any access to a lawyer or be able to talk to your family. Stick you in a cell with no human contact and when you need to be transfered anywhere you are made blind and deaf. You deserve that gquaglia so maybe you’ll think twice in posting the wrong thing. We’ll call Homeland Security now…please stay calmly at home while they come pick you up and please, don’t resist: they’re carrying tazers.
Funny and here I thought WE were supposed (and I use the term loosely, see School of the Americas, Operation Phoenix and all the other bullshit we’ve been doing around the world for years) to be the good guys precisely because we DIDN’T do this kind of thing.
the terrorist have already won.
And hey, you want revenge, you want payback and whatever more power to ya, but DO NOT claim any moral superiority ’cause we don’t have any.
Jose can you see….
Comment by Juan Tiamo —
LMAO!!!!
I like Lewis Black’s thoughts on fighting terrorism. You just have to be crazier than they are and they will leave you alone. Time to re-elect a dead president. Set him up in his coffin for press conferences, have a reporter ask a question, dead silence, then everyone start scribbling things down. Hell the parades that the president partakes in could be a coffin in a hearse rolling down the street with everyone cheering. I would think that would throw any enemy of the state off quite a bit.
Scott Grant, the terrorist’s new best friend.
Actually gquaglia you seem to be the one they’d love. Certainly you are doing your best to promote and create them.
>Good going you bunch of sheep.
Hmm, it’s been the posters here that reflexively defend lynn Stewart, Padilla, the people arrested in London, etc.
He has to be kept in sensory deprivation even on a trip to the dentist, so he can get a root canal, so that he won’t die too soon of an infection, so he can be deprived of sensation some more. You speak of cruelty, but it would be less cruel to just shoot him in the head then to systematically destroy him as a human being. Keep in mind, that it seems that all of the bull we have been told about his past behavior were basically fairies and unicorns (the charges against him mention none of it), and consider that they only charged him to pre-empt the Supreme Court from having any say in his confinement. They continue to profess their belief that they can do this to any American citizen; grab us, slander us, and hold us in a bare cell with no window, no mattress, and no blankets, indefinitely, with no charges, no trial, no offering of proof, then beat us and drug us and anything else they so wish. And you are glad of this? Do you think this defends our freedom? Even if the people wielding such a power started off as perfect saints, ringed in halos and followed by angelic choirs every where they went, do you think they could take that ring of power and not be warped into something very dark indeed? Or do you believe your Leader to be greater than a saint, a God King whose word is absolute and whose action is infallible? If that is so, then profess your faith, and we can debate it, but don’t just tell me “I’ll be sorry when. . .” or “He gets what he deserves. . .” without thinking about how absolute the power these men profess to have is, and what a dark temptation such a power over the citizenry would be to even the best of men.
Padilla never threatened anyone, at any time. His crimes were:
1. Being Muslim.
2. Reading about “dirty bombs” on the internet. If you’ve ever read Heinlein’s “Solution Unsatisfactory”, you too are a terrorist.
That’s it. BTW, the CIA long ago decided that dirty bombs couldn’t do much damage. The major damage would be caused *by the uninformed fear and panic* engendered by the *idea* of the bomb.
This man, this AMERICAN CITIZEN, has had his mind destroyed by torture, and he did, and threatened to do, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. All the evil you blame him for is based on your own ignorance, hate, and bigotry. And the fact you get your news from American sources. Under what damned law was this man kidnapped and tortured until his mind died? What did he DO? And if he did nothing, why is he still being tortured? Is he literally being held as a proxy for all muslims, a gimp for the KKK members of the armed forces?
The neocons are closet sadist pervs, supressed leather boys who want to see men scream in masks. I want to see the men who did this, ordered this, laughed at this, buried in a hole with a hood over their face until the day they die.
17:
We are the terrorists, now.
23. Well said. I’d like to add that the defenders of the Constitiution, are the people here, some veterans like myself, who feel betrayed that what we stood up for, is being perverted. The sheep are the blind followers of government gone awry.
We don’t want terrorists set free. On the other hand, we don’t want an innocent or deranged person tortured. If they don’t have enough after three and a half years of torture, maybe he isn’t a terrorist. When President Lincoln suspended normal civil rights, was anybody held (and tortured) for 3 and a half years? Looks to me like the law should have a limit. If 6 weeks of torture and investigation is not enough to make a case, then maybe the hierarchy should work like in “The Prisoner” (TV series with Patrick McGoohan). If the head-torturer doesn’t make a case in one episode (6 days?), he’s demoted to bottle washer. Even if they prove the prisoner guilty of terrorism, there’s nothing sadder than a sadist out of a job; a terrorist would be sent to a normal prison. So they simply don’t want this to finish. Paycheck and sado-rush for life. Right now there doesn’t seem to be an incentive for justice, just torture, world without end, amen.
And oh, yes, he wasn’t a terrorist when he was imprisoned without cause and tortured. But if they had done that to me, I’d sure as hell be one when I got out.
They can’t ever let these poor bastards leave. They’ve made thousands of random muslims into torture victims who will hate our bloody guts for not caring about them. They’re a PR nightmare at best, and at worst will be the men who blow up a major American city with a nuke. Wouldn’t YOU?
If you had been yanked off the streets of your town by China, flown to some black gulag, put in a whole and tortured by Chinese agents for six years, what they hell would YOU think about China, Mr. Innocence? If China had done this, we’d declare war. Russia apparently is killing Brit asylum holders on UK soil; there’s gonna be a problem for Mr. Putin there.
But if Americans do it, it’s okay, because as Mr. Bush says, they are in the gulag because they are guilty. QED. The fact that we’ve let hundreds go from Gitmo after years of torture, because they were demontrably innocent, even under our standards, seems to have evaporated from the American consciousness.
If Americans think this is okay, then we need to be embargoed and our planes grounded in every airport on earth to stop the Black Train to our torture cells.
On The Prisoner (TV series with Patrick McGoohan), the interrogator in chief (Number 2) was demoted or liquidated if he didn’t get Number 6 to squeal within one episode (a week?). So in three and a half years, they would have gone through 182 Number Twos.
If Zinc Bushing Inc, had a system like that, the prisoner would have been convicted or released long ago. As things stand, it looks like the goal of the authorities is torture world without end, amen. Paychecks and sado-rushes for life is sweet. He’s probably already confessed to spying for the Carthaginians, plotting to assassinate Hitler, and killing Papa Doc with Voodoo. But shhhhhhh! He’s our candidate rice bowl.
So let me get this straight gquaglia, you’re for American Citizens being swept away forever just because they “may” be terrorists without a trial? Forget evidence, proof, a trial etc etc. We don’t know any of this about him, it’s all here say about him so far as he hasn’t been put on trial nor has evidence officially been rendered. You really want that gquaglia? That’s your way of beating the terrorists? You really stand by that?
So then, it wouldn’t be any big deal to accuse you then with no evidence, right? I mean, that’s the way it should be right? I think I can make quite a case against you as an enemy of the people of the US from your various posts here…especially with a Democratic congress coming to power. I mean, you “may” be a terrorist. Who knows. Best we lock you away “just in case”. Right?
This goofball here, Padilla, is “probably” guilty of a ton of stuff. But who the hell knows? He didn’t have a trial. Even Saddam had at least a fake trial.
How many people taken prisoner by the miltary in Iraq have gotten trials? Do you think they should all get trials, as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan?
#31 If we are to practice what we preach, yes; we can start with all of the photographers and journalists we are holding without charge. And before you say “They were terrorist sympathizers etc.” remember that we did not imprison German Italian, or Japanese journalists in WWII when they wrote from the front to their papers, so why do it now? It’s not like we didn’t know that was going to be grist for the propaganda mill.
And no, Tokyo Rose is not a counter example, she was a avowed traitor, and she was tried. Period.