JOSE PADILLA CASE REVEALS DETAILS OF HOW DAVID HICKS HAS SPENT THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF HIS LIFE IN GUANTANAMO BAY
The Guantanamo Bay cell where Australian David Hicks spends some 23 hours every day, and the local 'library', devoid of books
A detailed report from the New York Times follows on how the United States has dealt with one of their own : an American citizen named Jose Padilla.
This shocking story of how years of incarceration and brutal interrogation in military prisons can destroy the mind of a man has disturbing echos of what little facts Australians have learned about the life of their fellow citizen, David Hicks, in Guantanamo Bay.
This weekend, David Hicks will have been locked away in Gitmo for five long years.
Five years. A married man with two young children.
Five years, where he has spent up to eight months at a time without being exposed to sunlight, and on average spends 23 hours a day in a tiny, featureless room, where the lights are never turned off.
David Hicks, like Jose Padilla, has not been convicted of commiting any crimes at all, let alone being a member of the Taliban or plotting acts of terrorism.
Like David Hicks, J0se Padilla was originally accused of being an enemy of America, a "killer who kills" (to quote President Bush). Padilla was branded a dirty bomber by the preisdent and Defence Secretary, Donald Rusmfeld. He was, the worst of the worst".
As with so many other cases of suspected American terrorism, no military, government or justice department prosecutor could make the charges of planning, aiding or abetting a 'dirty' bomb attack stick to Jose Padilla. So they came up with lesser charges, that have nothing to do with suspected acts of terrorism.
They haven't even charged Padilla with thinking about trying to destroy targets inside the United States, even though President Bush has now granted himself the freedom to impose such charges, if he sees fit, on any American. Philip K Dick's science fiction concept of 'Pre-Crime' has become another startling reality in the land that protrays itself as a beacon of freedom and liberty for the world.
Padilla may get out soon, or he may spend a decade suffering through the inhumanity detailed below. Either way, it may no longer matter. They've broken his mind, long after they broke is spirit. A sorrowful, shuddering shell of a man remains.
That all of this happened to an American, inside the borders of the United States, only makes it all the more nightmarish, and unbelievable.
From the New York Times (excerpts) :
This is what the Bush Administration is prepared to do to one of their own citizens, all in the name of fighting the increasingly vague and cloudy 'War On Terror'.One spring day during his three and a half years as an enemy combatant, Jose Padilla experienced a break from the monotony of his solitary confinement in a bare cell in the brig at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C.
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.
...lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”
In the brig, Mr. Padilla was denied access to counsel for 21 months. Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers, said his isolation was not only severe but compounded by material and sensory deprivations.
In an affidavit filed Friday, he alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan.”
Mr. Padilla’s situation, as an American declared an enemy combatant and held without charges by his own government, was extraordinary and the conditions of his detention appear to have been unprecedented in the military justice system.
Philip D. Cave, a former judge advocate general for the Navy and now a lawyer specializing in military law, said, “There’s nothing comparable in terms of severity of confinement, in terms of how Padilla was held, especially considering that this was pretrial confinement.”
One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.
In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”
Mr. Padilla’s status was abruptly changed to criminal defendant from enemy combatant last fall. At the time, the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention — and thus the issue of the president’s authority to seize an American citizen on American soil and hold him indefinitely without charges — when the Bush administration pre-empted its decision by filing criminal charges against Mr. Padilla.
Mr. Padilla was added as a defendant in a terrorism conspiracy case already under way in Miami. The strong public accusations made during his military detention — about the dirty bomb, Al Qaeda connections and supposed plans to set off natural gas explosions in apartment buildings — appear nowhere in the indictment against him. The indictment does not allege any specific violent plot against America.
Mr. Padilla’s lawyers say they have had a difficult time persuading him that they are on his side.From the time Mr. Padilla was allowed access to counsel, Mr. Patel visited him repeatedly in the brig and in the Miami detention center, and Mr. Padilla has observed Mr. Patel arguing on his behalf in Miami federal court.
But, Mr. Patel said in his affidavit, his client is nonetheless mistrustful. “Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.
“During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body,” Mr. Patel said. “The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”
There have been few geniune convictions of terrorists inside the United States since September 11, 2001. Most Americans couldn't even name one bad guy busted for trying to destroy an American city or attacking a vulnerable target like a school or subway.
And for all the surveillance, all the airport screenings and harrassment of travellers, the thousands abducted from the streets of American cities and held, without charge, and then released weeks or months or years later, without charge, and for all the absurd lists of so-called suspected terrorists (including four year old children, and dead people), Bush keeps telling Americans that they are winning the 'War On Terror', as though it were a Superbowl game.
The list of American civilian casualties from illegal imprisonment, from profiling, from harrassment and later-dismissed charges has grown larger by the year. But where are all the terrorists? If the threat is real, so looming, why have so few been charged with anything even approaching an actual attempted terrorist attack? And even fewer convicted?
Russia, China, Burma, these countries where freedoms, we are told, are so restricted, where human rights are supposed to count for next to nothing, they now look to the United States and shake their heads in disbelief as they rattle off the questions :
What are they doing over there in the United States?
Why has America gone to war against its own people?
Why are they building prison camps to hold tens of thousands of Americans?
Why does their President need to have the right to name any person he feels like as a suspected terrorist and then lock them away for years?
Why does he have all the powers of a dictator in a police state and yet he can still claim to be fighting for freedom, truth and liberty in the world?
Who are Americans now to tell us that we are bad or inhuman or that we hate freedom?
The very same questions more and more Ameicans are now asking themselves, each other, their congressmen and women, and their president.
He's not listening, of course. Why should he? He doesn't have to. Bush got his dream.
It'd be so much easier if this were a dictatorship, Bush once joked, so long as I'm the dictator.
That comment was deemed to be a 'Bushism' a few years ago, and it was a big laugh. Ho, ho, ho. Few are laughing now.
The Torture Of Jose Padilla
Federal Court Dismisses Terror Charge Against Jose Padilla, Incarceration Continues
The Case Against David Hicks - US Government Presents Weak Case
The Jurist : Justice At Guantanamo Bay - The Paradox Of David Hicks
The Torture Of David Hicks : Handcuffed, Blindfolded, Then Beaten; Sleep Deprivation; Forced To Take Drugs
