U.S. Torture System to Go on Trial

[Time for change]

“If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world.”


I believe that the coming trial described in this article could be one of the most important ever to be held in this country. It involves nothing less than the systematic torture by the U.S. government of possibly thousands of people.


A Trial for Thousands Denied Trial
By Naomi Klein
The Nation – March 12, 2007

Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to "break" prisoners are finally being put on trial.

This was not supposed to happen. The Bush Administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government…

According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defense… In order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged," his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent," that his treatment is irrelevant.

US District Judge Marcia Cooke disagrees… It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of CIA "extraordinary rendition" as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla… There is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. All of Delta Block was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the "prison of darkness" – tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. "Plenty lost their minds," one former inmate recalled. "I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors."

These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in a US court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus – a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different: He is a US citizen… He is the only victim of the post-9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary US trial.

Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem.... The US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army's field manual, reissued just last year, states, "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior," as well as "significant psychological distress."

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.

[terip64]

1. kick and recommend

[nashville_brook]

2. how many more Padillas are there?

:kick: for truth

[EFerrari]

4. I hope someday we can know.

:kick:

[Time for change]

12. I'm hoping that this trial will give us a lot of answers

I don't see why it shouldn't.

And then maybe Congress will be forced to do something about this.

[Time for change]

9. There are probably over a thousand

Witnesses abound.

I read a book written by the first Muslim chaplain to provide religious services to the prisoners at Gitmo. All sorts of abuse and torture were routine there. It was encouraged by the base commander, General Geoffrey Miller -- who did such a great job at Gitmo that they sent him to Iraq to preside over the Abu Ghraib scandal. Chaplain Yee himself was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement and tortured because he showed too much concern for his flock:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=304686&mesg_id=304686

[bonito]

3. Outrageous, inhumane, illegal, sinful. n/t

[Time for change]

21. "Articles of Impeachment against George W. Bush" -- written by the Center for Constitutional Rights

One of their articles of impeachment concerns prisoner abuse and torture, and they document a great many things in that chapter. Here is a partial list:

 Isolated in constantly lit cells about 5 x 10 feet, let out for 10-20 minutes per week to exercise, with virtually no contact with family or outside world
 Often held in solitary confinement, some for more than a year
 Punched and kneed, shackled and repeatedly picked up and dropped, resulting in serious injuries.
 Strangled and had lit cigarettes put in their ears.
 Beaten, deprived of sleep, exposed to temperature extremes, and subject to sexual and religious humiliation.
 Threatened with rape and other torture, execution, and harm to their families.
 Suffered debilitating psychological effects.
 Prisoners were regularly beaten; one was beaten with a chair until it broke, and was kicked and choked until he lost consciousness.
 Beaten with a broom, had liquid chemical poured all over him, and sodomized with a police stick while female MPs threw a ball at his genitals.
 One detainee witnessed the rape of a teenage prisoner.
 Detainees were left naked, hooded, and chained to the doors of their cells.
 Boys were stripped and cuffed together facing each other.
 Detainees being placed in a pile and told to masturbate, then being ridden like animals.
 Prisoners were placed in solitary confinement with poor air quality and extreme temperatures.
 Electrical wires placed on his fingers, toes and penis and being threatened with electrocution.
 Being urinated on.
 Dogs were placed in the cell of juvenile prisoners and permitted to “go nuts.”
 Continuously shackled, held naked, and intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time.
 Being forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods.
 Doused with freezing water in the winter.
 Interrogators can also play on their prisoners’ phobias, such as fear of rats or dogs…

[Jcrowley]

5. K&R n/t

[MasterDarkNinja]

6. Outrageous, it's about time this kind of torture has to go to court

Hopefully Padilla's lawyers get a speedy trial that has the end result of declaring this kind of torture illegal.

[Time for change]

17. Yes, it certainly is outrageous. Look at this littany of torture by this administration:

Includes findings witnessed or documented by our FBI, a U.S. Army chaplain who worked at Gitmo for several months, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, Seymour Hersh, Jimmy Carter, Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights. There is a great deal of physical torture going on, in addition to the psychological torture described in this post.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1890766

[Vidar]

7. Cheering Padilla & his lawyers.

[porphyrian]

8. Can we impeach now? - n/t

[Time for change]

10. If this was the only crime this administration had ever committed

it would still be more deserving of impeachment than any other Presidential administration we've ever had. And it should be a slam dunk. I just wish they would get started.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x277375

[porphyrian]

15. You said it. And good link/post. - n/t

[donkeyotay]

19. Agreed, this one crime alone merits impeachment. They hate us for our freedom?

So we let the most loathsome and illegitimate administration ever destroy our Constitution, the rule of law, the principle of an individual's inalienable rights, and the perception that we stood against tyranny. And we have folks saying impeachment is too much trouble.

Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla… There is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. All of Delta Block was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

[Time for change]

20. The Chaplain at Gitmo provided this description of how prisoners were routinely treated at Gitmo

I was immediately struck by the harsh conditions in which the detainees were held. They were allowed out of their cages for fifteen minutes every three days, and only if they cooperated….

General Miller had a saying…. “The fight is on!” This was a subtle way of saying that rules regarding the treatment of detainees were relaxed…. The soldiers would get pumped up, and many came to work looking for trouble. Guards retaliated in whatever way was most convenient at the moment…. Punishment often meant physical force…. The troopers called it IRFing…. Carried out by a group of six to eight guards called the Initial Response Force…. put on riot protection gear…. Then they rushed the block, one behind the other, where the offending detainee was…. It sounded like a stampede…. drenched the prisoner with pepper spray and then opened the cell door. The others charged in and rushed the detainee…. tied the detainee’s wrists behind his back and then his ankles…. then dragged the detainee from his cell and down the corridor…. to solitary confinement. When it was over…. The guards were pumped…. They high-fived each other and slammed their chests together…. I found it an odd victory celebration for eight men who took down one prisoner.

From "For God and Country" by James Yee:

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=9781586483692

[wildbilln864]

11. An absolute K&R!

Impeach, indict, and imprison the Bush/PNAC cabal! It's the American thing to do!

[many a good man]

13. Fruits of CIA's "Manhattan Project of the Mind"

AMY GOODMAN: A new expose gives an account of the C.I.A.’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture, spanning half a century. It reveals how the C.I.A. perfected its methods, distributing them across the world, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and we're joined by its author, Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

snip

AMY GOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it's very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGill University, a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It didn't take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones, earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours, denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then ultimately breakdown.

And if you look at many of those photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr. Hebb’s original cubicle.

Now, then the second major breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand -- okay, you're not beating them, they have no resentment -- you tell them, “You're doing this to yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down.” And so, as they stand, what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form, they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they're short-shackled -- okay? -- that they're long-shackled, that they're made -- several of those photos you just showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that's self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques -- sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain -- is the basis of the C.I.A.'s technique.

more...

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/17/1522228

http://www.news.wisc.edu/11995.html

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MCC409A.html

[Time for change]

16. It's all so terrible

Certainly this kind of stuff is much more prevalent under the Bush administration than it's ever been.

I sure hope this trial blows the lid off of this.

[WinkyDink]

14. Jose Padilla, U.S. Citizen~~~When Bushco went that one step too far.

But of course, "no-one could have anticipated...."

[Time for change]

18. Yeah, that's one thing they really did fail to anticipate

But it really upsets me that when it comes to the most basic sacred issue of fairness -- the right to a fair trial -- they feel that they have the right to have a totally different set of rules for non-citizens. That certainly isn't what our Declaration of Independence says. Nor does it comply with international laws to which we are a signatory. These people are totally rotten.

[Uncle Joe]

22. Kicked and recommended

Thanks for the thread Time for change

[Time for change]

24. Thank you Uncle Joe

Of the many crimes that the Bush administration has committed, in my opinion there is none more heinous than this one. Our international reputation is deservedly plummeting, and it seems to me that one good way to make ammends would be to remove Bush and Cheney from office, starting with impeachment. Hopefully this trial will pave the way for that.

[Uncle Joe]

25. I agree and when you say many crimes,

that covers a lot of territory and then someone like Gergen comes out and says there haven't been any major scandals until the Libby Conviction!

[Senator]

23. This is What the DC Dems "Own" By Not Impeaching

All the Euphemedia buzzword blather about the Dems "trying not to own" the Iraq War is ignoring this stinky elephant carcass in the National Living Room.

Willful failure by a gov't official to report and/or try to stop ongoing war criminal activity is a war crime in itself.

Only Impeachment... is a substantive act of stopping/reporting.

It IS our positive agenda.

It is our ONLY moral, patriotic option.

--

[Time for change]

30. "Only Impeachment can get the American People off the hook for that which they never gave consent."

Yes, I agree. I would love to see it.

[FatDave]

26. The judge already found him competent.

A week ago.

MIAMI (AP) - A federal judge ruled Wednesday that suspected al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla is competent to stand trial on terrorism support charges, rejecting arguments that he was severely damaged by 3 years of interrogation and isolation in a military brig. Padilla was in court when U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke announced her decision, but he showed no reaction.

``This defendant clearly has the capacity to assist his attorneys,'' Cooke said just hours after she finished four days of competency hearings.

<snip>

Cooke said testimony in the competency hearing showed that Padilla understands ``legal nuances'' of pretrial motions and noted that he had signed a document verifying the truth of allegations made by the defense that he was tortured and mistreated during his years in a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6447499,00.html

[Time for change]

28. I didn't know that -- HOWEVER it appears that all is not lost

The Ruling on Jose Padilla's Competence to Stand Trial:
The Judge May Have Been Right, But Legal and Moral Questions Persist
By ELAINE CASSEL
3-5-07

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/cassel/20070305.html

Still pending, before Judge Cooke, is Padilla's motion to dismiss the charges based on the government's egregiously inhumane treatment.

Affidavits from Padilla and his attorneys detail outrageous conditions of confinement, particularly while he was held as an "enemy combatant," and not yet charged with a crime. Allegations not disputed by the government include long periods of sensory deprivation, interspersed with periods of extreme noise and constant bright lights to deprive Padilla of sleep; solitary confinement for now more than five years; and denial of access to an attorney for two years. The government disputes Padilla's sworn allegations of physical torture that include beatings, injection with mind-altering drugs, and denial of medical treatment.

If Padilla's motion to dismiss on these grounds were granted, it could benefit the hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who have been held in similar conditions for more than five years, too. But there is little chance, in my view, that the motion will be granted.

In the 1973 case of U.S. v. Russell, the Court's opinion -- written by then-Justice Rehnquist -- conceded that there could, in theory, be an instance where government mistreatment of a criminal defendant is such an outrageous deprivation of due process that the charges against him should be dismissed. Yet besides this, there is little precedent to support Padilla's request.

Moreover, even if Judge Cooke were to dismiss the charges -- for she has indicated she is appalled by the conditions of Padilla's confinement -- the government would doubtless appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, and Judge Cooke likely would be reversed again.

I predict that some day the Supreme Court will hear the merits of Jose Padilla's case. It will not be able to stand on technicalities forever. Whatever it does decide about the constitutionality of the way Padilla has been treated by his own government for years, the decision will have profound importance to every American who presumes, perhaps wrongly, that rights of due process, the rule of law, and fair play--long held to be hallmarks of our justice system--still mean something today.

[yellerpup]

27. If torture is good policy, then Dick should spend some time in the box

and Scooter, and dub and definitely, definitely, definitely Alberto and rummy. Hook them all up until the truth comes out. After that, they can all go on trial. I don't know what Padilla did or didn't do, but the current administration of the United States has been busted for unAmerican activities. We can't allow torture in our names.:kick:
Edited to add the kick. Already recommended.

[Time for change]

29. Yes, they're doing this is our names, and our country has been way too passive about this

Our corporate media is the worst of all. This should be a major scandal, but they cover as little of it as they can get away with.

Though I don't know the details of Padilla's case, my guess is that they don't have a case against him. Why else would they hold him so long without charges before finally charging him when they were forced to do so?

A good portion of the prisoners that they torture are handed over by mercenaries to the US military for money! They'll (BushCo) take whatever they can get. It's good for their "War on Terror" to have lots of prisoners.

[yellerpup]

32. Your handle says it all--Time for change eom

[rndmprsn]

31. kicked

[mod mom]

33. torture and deceit-bu$h's legacy.

Thanks TFC-for another informative post.