At Least We Aren't Nazis! - Democratic Underground

Pamela Troy

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Tue Dec-05-06 03:42 PM
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At Least We Aren't Nazis!

Edited on Tue Dec-05-06 03:57 PM by Pamela Troy

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/us/04detain.html?ex=1165899600&en=d1a72bbb2b02b8bb&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

The late British naturalist Gerald Durrell was a passionate and an articulate advocate for the humane treatment of captive animals. He considered it important that zoos care, not only for the physical state of their charges, but for their emotional and mental well-being and he was very good at illustrating -- with profound anger -- the brutality of confining sentient beings in spaces that literally drove them mad with boredom and loneliness. One of the most heartbreaking images from his writing, and one that has remained with me since I read it many years ago, was of an orangutan he saw once in a zoo.

Orangutans are valuable items for a zoo, so I have no doubt it was fed regularly on a healthy diet and cared for and monitored by a qualified vet. But this intelligent and beautiful animal had been kept for years in a simple cage with a concrete floor. It had only one plaything -- a piece of paper. It sat for hours on the floor of its cage, putting the piece of paper on its head, taking it off, putting it back, taking it off, putting it back...

I suppose there are people who would find this image funny. Back in my college days, the word for human beings that empty of empathy was “sociopaths.”

Which brings us to our country’s indefensible treatment of Jose Padilla.

Some online readers may recall past comments I’ve made about this case and on the stunningly casual attitude I’ve encountered towards the government holding an American citizen in highly secretive conditions, without formal charges and without meaningful access to a lawyer. "Because the conditions of his imprisonment are secret, we don’t know whether Padilla has been tortured or not,” I observed once. Another time I asked, "Given that the administration does not rule out the use of torture, and has used it on prisoners who are NOT being held in secret, why in the world would I assume ‘enemy combatants’ held in secret would not be tortured?"

Well, we have at least part of the answer now, via a video released to THE NEW YORK TIMES. It’s given us a telling glimpse, not only of the manner in which Mr. Padilla has been tortured, but of our all-American approach to rationalizing torture. We aren’t EXACTLY like the Third Reich in that we don’t just cram prisoners into camps, and allow starvation, exposure, over-work, and disease to take its course, (with occasional help from the “cleansing” properties of bullets or a powerful insecticide.) We aren’t EXACTLY like the Soviets either. OUR staggeringly enormous system of prisons is a bit more open and apparently puts more of an emphasis on the sexual humiliation of inmates than the puritanical USSR did. And in any event, back then he was an “Enemy Combatant” rather than a criminal suspect, so the torture of Padilla indicated in that video doesn’t involve him being gang-banged front and back by his fellow inmates after having his teeth knocked out. We aren’t EXACTLY like our Latin American friends in Chile or Guatemala or El Salvador. As far as we know, electric shocks were not applied to Padilla’s genitals and he was not water-boarded. He was not forced to watch his wife being raped, and did not end up in a mass grave on the countryside.

No, all that happened to Padilla was, he was kept for almost two years in a bare cell, with almost no human contact other than his interrogators, under constant electronic surveillance, with blackened windows, no clock or calendar, nothing to read, and nothing to sleep on other than a steel frame. When he was taken out for a root canal, he was outfitted with dark goggles and earphones so that he could neither see nor hear.

And THAT’S just what they’re willing to admit to, what they’ve declassified. According to this article, “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.’”

It’s little wonder that Padilla was described by his keepers as being as docile as “a piece of furniture,” that his lawyers complain he is now too mentally destroyed to assist in his own defense. The effects of that kind of isolation and sensory deprivation, even among less intelligent creatures than human beings, are well documented by science. If I kept a dog or a cat under such conditions, confining it by itself in a small locked room, its only contact with hostile keepers, the fact that I also fed it regularly and occasionally sedated it so it could be taken to the vet would not greatly impress anyone who gave a damn about the decent treatment of animals. I would justifiably be denounced as either too sadistic or too stupid to be entrusted with the care of any living thing more sophisticated than a beetle.

But you can bet your bottom dollar that many Americans here and elsewhere will react to what that video reveals by feigning wide-eyed incomprehension about what has been done to this man. They’ll snigger. They’ll “comically” mime horror, dabbing at their eyes and mocking both his suffering and the outrage it has inspired. They’ll pretend to believe that being fed regularly and having one’s teeth cared for makes up for being driven insane. They’ll emote and beat their chest and declare themselves relieved that this dangerous man is being confined, even though so far no solid evidence has been presented for this presumed “danger” beyond the government’s bare assertions.

To read about how Padilla has been treated, and blandly attempt to justify it on the grounds that we are afraid, that Jose Padilla is a scary, scary man that this is an example of our government “protecting us” from him is beneath contempt.

Only the basest coward would truly believe that giving the government the power to destroy a human being’s mind in this manner is the best way to protect Americans.

And God help us, we seem to have far, far, too many of those cowards among us these days.