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Monsters and Cowards
Posted by Kevin

This is what solitary confinement can do to a person:

Some of these symptoms are: perceptual distortions, illusions, vivid fantasies (sometimes along with vivid hallucinations) and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. Along with these, some people developed observable syndromes which include cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies (sometimes along with fearful hallucinations) and in some cases, delirium like conditions. EEG’s confirmed the same abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium. It was also seen that there were organic changes in the brain similar to stupor and delirium.

… * hearing voices - even whispers,
* panic attacks,
* difficulty in concentration and with memory (example: inmates stated they could not concentrate to read) which can lead to disorientation,
* mind wanders,
* aggressive fantasies of revenge, torture and/or mutilation of the guards,
* paranoia and other fears,
* authorities trying to “break them down,”
* doubt oneself and troubles in determining what is real, and
* problems with controlling impulses - sometimes with random violence.

Those symptoms occur under these kinds of conditions:

The phrase solitary confinement is the confinement of a person/prisoner alone in a cell nearly all day and with very little chance for social interaction or stimulation. It is also an environment that does not stimulate the any of the human senses (sight, taste, touch, sound, smell) restricted environment stimulation (RES) and one in which the person is in near isolation. Individuals tolerate these conditions in variable ways and in variable degrees which run form the mild to the severe.

This is what the US government did to Joseph Padilla for two and one half years:

“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.

… 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.”

The government deliberately set out to break his mind. They did everything they could think of to disconnect him from the real, physical world that human beings depend upon. Stimulus is the anchor that keeps human beings tied to the real world, tied to their sanity. And the Bush Administration deliberately severed the anchor of Joseph Padilla. Padilla had not been charged with a crime, he had not been convicted of a crime, he had not been so much as seen by a judge. One day, the government decided that they could take a man form the street and deliberately set out to destroy his mind and that no court, no legislature, no officer of the law or the armed services could do anything to stop them.

Oh, and the government leaks about dirty bombs and blowing up apartment buildings? When fear of a ruling by the Supreme Court finally forced the Bush Administration to charge Padilla with something, well, let’s just say that the indictment was missing a few things:

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.

That is Bush’s America — totalitarianism married to Kafka. Anyone who would defend this is either a coward or a monster. Either they think governments should have the right to treat people in this barbaric way, or they are so afraid of Al Qaeda that they would throw away everything good and just and decent about America for the illusion of safety. Either way, they deserve nothing but contempt.

Link via Digby., who, as usual, has the heart of the matter.

December 4th, 2006 Politics, Legal Issues, Iraq, Terrorism, Torture | 5 comments