Jose Padilla was convicted of federal terrorism support charges Thursday after being held for 3 1/2 years as an enemy combatant.
Okay Naomi, tell it like it is sister-
He was kept in a cell 9ft by 7ft, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.
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 defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors.
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 “extraordinary rendition” carried out by the CIA, as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to James Yee, a former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. “They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over.” All the inmates of Delta Block were on 24-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.”
And it all it took for the jurors was Fox news and ‘24′. Good little Germans.
16 August, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Bastardos! Son of Bitches…the trial should not have even happened, considering that it illegal to have a trial in which the defendant can not defend himself (at least it was illegal, not so much these days…)
16 August, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Jury had it in their power to make a stand, they didn’t. Sheeple.
16 August, 2007 at 10:46 pm
i heard about this guy from monbiot about six months back, i’m amazed he can still speak. four years, trapped, in the dark, it’s a whole new kind of terrifying.
17 August, 2007 at 12:27 pm
This is the brave new world of psychologist enabled torture, a culmination of centuries, Nazi tech and all subsequent CIA research. They made him dependent on his oppressor and afraid of his defence counsel. A more extreme version of what the corrupted culture does.
18 August, 2007 at 6:07 pm
those zombies are up to something:
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/7/3/225654/0947
18 August, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Thanks Dave, quick cull of that link-
“In the Jose Padilla trial, jurors showed up today all dressed up. Row one in red. Row two in white. And row three in blue. I’m not kidding.”
a comment-”This jury can’t render an unbiased verdict based on the law. Put it this way: what’s the point of wearing those colors except to say that you’re going to hang ‘im high for attacking America?”
Exactly, meet the new lynch mob, zombie patriots attack. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ anyone?
18 August, 2007 at 8:10 pm
You don’t have to take a short trip inside a police box to remember…
“And in other news an all white jury in Mississippi found three members of the Ku Klux Klan innocent of violating the civil rights of….”
Echo anyone?
18 August, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Not to mention the Jena six, rotten juries all over. And prosecutors chasing voes with political ambitions willing to do anything, justice ain’t just blind, she’s tied up and gagged in the basement.
“I’m out of order? This whole court is out of order!”
19 August, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[...] lobotomised through four years alone in the dark until little more than a vegetable (Padilla was recently convicted of terrorism support by a bizarrely colour-coordinated [...]