This is a part of the larger pattern of torture and memory erasure that is at the heart of the mistreatment of prisoners in George W. Bush's Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). Indeed, torture is not so much about extracting information from terrorists, the actual result is to reduce the mental capacity of prisoners so that the false history created by the Administration and its stenographers in the corporate media can never be corrected.
PADILLA: SENSORY DEPRIVATION AND PERSONALITY DECOMPENSATION
Jose Padilla's torture has been well-documented. He was subjected to prolonged psyschological torture by sensory deprivation and isolation leaving him in a near vegetative state, unable to recall important events or assist in his own defense. The British press has described what was actually was done to him, and its effects. See,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1970084,00.html :
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "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, ie, post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation". José Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism. He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant", Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.
ABU ZUBAYDAH: WATERBOARDING AND MEMORY ERASURE
Abu Zubaydah was the first "high value" figure captured in March 2002. He had been at bin Laden's side going back at least to the early 1990s. He ran several major militant training camps on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he trained thousands of jihadists, including six of the 9/11 hijackers. Zubydah is identified by U.S. intelligence as the author of the plan to attack the USS Cole, and was a key organizer present at an al-Qaeda planning summit held in Kuala Lumpur in early January 2000 at which the Cole and 9/11 attacks were mapped out in detail.
Despite his categorization by US and allied intelligence as a very important al Qaeda leader, and long period in positions of responsibility within al Qaeda, it is now claimed -- rather implausibly -- that he had long been insane. Zubaydah's story, however, has not been adequately documented, as he's had no access to the courts. The primary source for information about his psychological state has come from a book by Richard Suskind, whose sources appear to have spun the story to make it seem that Zubaydah was insane before his capture, in an apparent effort to cast doubt on the details that have emerged about his role as the trainer of six of the 9/11 hijackers. See,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/12/10/133754/60/799/420257What has been acknowledged is that Zubaydah was the first GWOT prisoner held by the U.S. to be waterboarded, a form of torture involving partial drowning and the cutting off of oxygen to the brain. The neuropsychiatric effects of partial drowning and oxygen deprivation are well-documented in medical literature. The common results of partial or short periods of oxygen deprivation are dizzyness, disorientation, and memory loss. When blood oxygen levels fall below a certain level, the result is loss of consciousness, death of brain cells, permanent neurological damage, and if prolonged for more than a couple minutes, death. The logical conclusion is that Zubaydah, described as insane by U.S. intelligence sources, suffered lasting psychological and neurological damage as the result of waterboarding and perhaps other forms of torture while in custody. See, tp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x245566
ALTERING MEMORIES AND THE RECORD
Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM) and Ramzi bin al Sheibh, high value al Qaeda detainees who planned or attended the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting, have also been waterboarded.
Torture, particularly sensory deprivation and water boaring, have spoiled any chance of developing a complete and accurate public record documenting exactly what al-Qaeda was doing, who was directing them, and for what reasons. The effects of torture on Jose Padilla to falsify and obscure the facts, in an effort by the Administration to develop a false history, make this much clear: See,
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/worthington.php?articleid=11548 Quite what rubbish was spouted by Padilla during these years of "dependency and terror" – before he lost his mind to such an extent that his warders described him as "so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for 'a piece of furniture'" – is unknown. His own desperate confessions – and where they led – have yet to be revealed. What is clear, however, is that other confessions, themselves produced under duress by "high-value" detainees held in secret CIA prisons, formed the basis of the "dirty bomb" allegation. According to the government, Padilla approached training camp facilitator Abu Zubaydah (captured in Pakistan five weeks before him) and 9/11 kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (captured in 2003) with plans for the bomb and was apprehended after Zubaydah identified him to the FBI. Less vigorously reported were admissions by the government itself that both Zubaydah and KSM were "skeptical" about the plot. Other insider comments indicated that Zubaydah actually dismissed Padilla as "a maladroit extremist," telling his interrogators that he was so "ignorant" that he believed he could "separate plutonium" from other nuclear materials by "rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material."
It's also clear that another man who was picked out by Zubaydah in relation to the same dubious plot – Binyam Mohammed al-Habashi, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was captured in Pakistan a week after Zubaydah – suffered even more severely than Padilla. Rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months and had his penis repeatedly cut by razors, and then transferred to Guantánamo via the CIA's own "Dark Prison" near Kabul – a medieval torture prison with the addition of 24-hour amplified music and noise – Mohammed admitted to being a part of the whole Zubaydah-KSM-Padilla "dirty bomb" plot, but later explained that he had confessed to whatever his U.S.-directed Moroccan torturers told him to, and had never even met Padilla.
While Binyam Mohammed remains in Guantánamo – unsure if the authorities will release him (as requested by the British government) or will attempt to reinstate the charges against him in a military commission (following their collapse in June 2006, when the Supreme Court judged them illegal, and their reintroduction via last fall's Military Commissions Act) – the "dirty bomb" allegation against Padilla was dropped in November 2005, just days before the Supreme Court was due to look at the legality of his detention. Apparently the administration was unwilling to allow Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to testify, lest they reveal that they had been tortured.
Unlike in Guantánamo's "enemy combatant" tribunals – and in the military commissions, which the administration is still trying to revive after further setbacks in June – evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible in U.S. courts, because it is illegal, immoral, and unreliable. And however much the administration may try to deny it, the "dirty bomb" allegation is a perfect demonstration of the hole into which the administration has dug itself: a "plot" whose existence was only ever announced through torture – whether of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, José Padilla, or Binyam Mohammed – that lives only in this world of tortured confessions and cannot be verified in the real world.
Once Padilla's "enemy combatant" status was dropped, along with the "dirty bomb" story ( in marked contrast to Binyam Mohammed, whose alleged involvement in the plot limped on until the Supreme Court struck down the military commissions eight months later), he was charged with the vague, motive-based crimes for which he was eventually convicted. Padilla was then moved to a legally recognized detention facility, where he was located when the photos of the world's most high-security dental visit were revealed in the New York Times.
As a result of the revelations about Padilla's mental state in the Times article, it looked, for a while, as though the trial might not even go ahead. In February 2007, Naomi Klein, in an optimistic report for the Nation, suggested, "Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods U.S. interrogators have used since September 11 to 'break' prisoners are finally being put on trial." In the end, however, as noted above, District Judge Marcia G. Cooke pulled the plug on the dissenters, and six months later, as Padilla's trial came to an end, it was as if most of the country had succumbed to collective memory loss.
In the week before the verdict was announced, one journalist at least avoided having his mind wiped clean. Warren Richey's three-part series on Padilla, which I quoted from above, revisited, in horrific detail, the systematic mental destruction of Padilla that took place during the 43 months that he was illegally imprisoned without trial and tortured by his own government. As also noted above, however, Richey's was a rare voice in the mainstream media.
Most of the dissenting voices – the ones who realized, with an appalling clarity, that the U.S. government was getting away with torturing its own citizens, and that, in theory, no U.S. citizen whatsoever was protected from similar treatment – peppered the blogosphere. In a shining example of a concerned citizen jolted into a state of near-insomnia by the ramifications, the author of the Talking Dog blog, who has long maintained that the Padilla case is "the most important case of our lifetimes," fulminated that the sweeping aside of an issue that involved "not just our entire Bill of Rights, but the Magna Carta" was effected by a "complicit commercial media won't even tell us what happened."
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