Padilla conviction. Monbiot on Padilla's treatment.

There is no mention at all of the torture that Padilla underwent or the state of his mind. He refuses to defend himself and believes his defence is conspiring against himm. He thinks the government and captors are his saviours! The article by Monbiot below gives a little bit of the background but there is much more available all over the place. Even USA today notes that the big charges originally levelled against Padilla were changed to the lesser present ones.


Court finds Padilla guilty in terror case
Updated 12h 59m ago

Jose Padilla
AP







By Kevin Johnson and Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY
Jose Padilla's five-year journey through the federal government's murky war-time justice system ended Thursday in conviction on three terrorism support charges in a verdict that offered a boost to the administration's checkered record in terror-related prosecutions.
In an investigation that ultimately tested the Bush administration's political will to bring terror suspects to civilian court, a federal jury in Miami deliberated just more than a day following three months of testimony before delivering its guilty verdicts against Padilla and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi.


CASE: Padilla's indictment and case history

All three were accused as part of a North American terror cell that was offering support to Muslim extremists to conduct attacks outside the United States. They face maximum punishments of life in prison at a Dec. 5 sentencing hearing.

Padilla, 36, was only added as a defendant to the conspiracy case against Hassoun and Jayyousi in 2005, after being held for 3½ years as a so-called "enemy combatant" in the custody of the U.S. military under a special designation by President Bush.


For the government, the verdicts salvage a case that was stripped of its most flammable accusations: that Padilla was part of a chilling al-Qaeda-directed plot to detonate a radioactive bomb in an undisclosed American city.

The prosecution's case made no mention of the dirty bomb allegations nor Padilla's previously alleged contacts with high-level al-Qaeda operatives. As a result, legal analysts say the conviction may forever be overshadowed by what the government did not prove.

"The fact that the most serious charges were not brought here is the elephant in the room," says Notre Dame University law professor Jimmy Gurule. "It's a victory, but it's not a complete victory."

Gurule, a former Justice Department official, said it's possible that the government declined to proceed on the more serious charges because it would have required disclosing classified information.

"It's an open question," he said. "We just don't know."

"They (the government) had made him out to be 'Public Enemy No. 1," says Loyola University law professor Laurie Levenson. "They had to go forward. But like a lot of these terrorism cases, there seems to be more smoke than fire when it was presented."

Shortly after his arrest in 2002, with the nation still reeeling from the Sept. 11 attacks, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft first identified Padilla as a suspect in a dirty bomb plot in a televised statement while the attorney general was traveling in Moscow.

The daunting allegations against Padilla were immediately called into question when the White House challenged Ashcroft's characterization of the threat posed by the former Chicago gang member.

And he was never charged in connection with a plan to detonate radioactive material before or after he was designated as an enemy combatant.

Still, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other government officials lauded the conviction as a "significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters."

"This case demonstrates that we will make full use of our intelligence and law enforcement authorities to prevent individuals – and particularly our own countrymen – from supporting and joining the ranks of our terrorist enemies," said Kenneth Wainstein, Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

Former federal prosecutor Ruth Wedgwood, now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says the guilty verdict inspires confidence "that the American criminal justice system can be applied effectively in a case like this."

"By the same token, success in this case should not lead anyone to believe that it's simple or even always possible to muster this quality of proof. But American juries are renowned for their common sense."

Wedgwood noted one piece of evidence that may have been particularly compelling to the jury: an application form for entry to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Padilla's fingerprints were lifted from the document that was recovered by the CIA in 2001.

Defense lawyers have argued that Padilla's travels overseas had nothing to do with terrorism but were linked to his desire to become a Muslim cleric.

"The common sense of juries is something people should not discount," she says. "It's nice that even with a highly stringent demand of proof...the system can work."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at Duke University, said the government should have moved to try him sooner rather than subject an American citizen to indefinite detention as an enemy combatant.

"There's no excuse why the government didn't try him five years ago," he says. "I think it's clear the government had the evidence to bring the conviction."

Here is Monbiot's earlier article:

he Darkest Corner of the Mind
Posted December 12, 2006
US interrogators have devised a new form of torture. It debases the democracy they claim to be defending.


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th December 2006.

After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

Last week, defence lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant”, released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor(1).

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 over 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 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, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”(2) Jose 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(3). God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA’s foreign oubliettes.

That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its “war on terror” can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay(4). This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain “stress positions”, and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.

The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep(5). The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were “commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep” while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, “in black hoods or spray-painted goggles”(6).

Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: “stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation”(7). The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.

Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates(8). US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.

But Padilla’s treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end(9). They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for twenty-two and a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation”. The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone(10).

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list(11). Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.”(12) People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners(13). If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Deborah Sontag, 4th December 2006. Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation. New York Times.

2. Dr. Angela Hegarty, cited by Deborah Sontag, ibid.

3. Deborah Sontag, ibid.

4. Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, 26th April 2006. By the Numbers. http://hrw.org/reports/2006/ct0406/index.htm

5. Carlotta Gall, 4th March 2003. U.S. Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody. New York Times,.
6. Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, 26th December 2002. U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations. Washington Post.

7. Alfred W. McCoy, 19th September 2004. The hidden history of CIA torture
Abu Ghraib is only the newest U.S. atrocity. San Francisco Chronicle.

8. Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project, ibid.

9. Eg Carol Costello, 4th May 2006. American Morning – CNN. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0605/04/ltm.01.html

10. Laura Sullivan, 26th July 2006. At Pelican Bay Prison, a Life in Solitary. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5584254

11. ibid.

12. Peg Tyre, 9th January 1998. Trend toward solitary confinement worries experts. CNN. http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/

13. Laura Sullivan, 28th July 2006. Making It on the Outside, After Decades in Solitary. National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5589778