Ethan Heitner / Tompaine.com
December 04, 2006
The New York Times takes a bit of a break from the furious rush of Iraq analysis and meta-analysis (summary: Iraq is in a bad way and there aren't any great options ) to bring you a day in the life of "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla.
The graphic detail and, importantly, still images of a video tape taken by the U.S. Army of Padilla, will send chills down your spine. A man, a U.S. citizen, named Jose Padilla, was kept shackled and in sensory deprivation, without any contact with the outside world other than his interrogators or any sense of time or space.
He alleges he was given mind-altering drugs and tortured. And now he is, according to one of his lawyers, "so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”
From a description of video taken when Mr. Padilla was being taken to visit a dentist one day:
|
The New York Times |
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.
Readers of TomPaine.com should be familiar, by now, of the incredibly disturbing case of Jose Padilla, who has been convicted of no crime and was thrown into indefinite detention on the say-so of those in power. Glenn Greenwald also sums up the history concisely.
What the Times is showing us is what wardens and prison psychiatrists have long known: You don't need to touch someone to torture them. And you can permanently damage someone simply by keeping them locked in a box, forever.
He's been called our Josef K., our Count of Monte Cristo. I would offer another literary analogy: Doctor Manette, the prisoner of the Bastille, from Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. At the start of that book, Manette, imprisoned on the whim of the French king, has been released, an old man, finally, from many years of solitary confined in the notorious Parisian political prison. His mind has been wrecked. Even freed from the physical prison, he cannot comprehend what has happened. He can only sit and make shoes, the activity taught to him as a prisoner. I'll let Dickens describe it:
"You are still hard at work, I see?"
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, "Yes -- I am working." This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die."
|
The New York Times |
Allen L Roland is a practicing psychotherapist, author and lecturer who also shares a daily political and social commentary on his weblog and website allenroland.com He also guest hosts a monthly national radio show TRUTHTALK on Conscious talk radio www.conscioustalk.net
