A 'dirty-bomber's' Catch-22

Posted by Joshua Holland at 6:50 AM on January 23, 2007.

Reuters, via the Boston Globe …

Jose Padilla rocked back and forth during the meetings with a psychologist, his chained hands sweating and facial muscles twitching, and insisted repeatedly in a voice devoid of emotion that he was not crazy.

He is a bit paranoid and believes the government is persecuting him, "but this does not appear to be delusional," wrote one of doctors who examined the alleged al Qaeda operative in a Miami prison cell at his lawyers' request.

If he's insane, he can't be tried. He believes the government's "persecuting" him, which of course, by any reasonable standard, it is. So I guess that awareness proves he's sane enough to stand trial.

Yossarian: Is Orr crazy?

Doc: Of course he is. He has to be, if he keeps flying after all those close calls.

Yossarian: Then why not ground him?

Doc: He has to ask me.

Yossarian: That's all he's gotta do?

Doc: Yes.

Yossarian: And then you can ground him?

Doc: No. Then I cannot ground him. There's a catch.

Yossarian: A catch?

Doc: Sure, Catch- Anyone who wants to get out of combat isn't really crazy, so I can't ground him.

Yossarian: Let me see if I got this straight. In order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.

Doc: You've got it! That's Catch- .

Yossarian: That's some catch, that Catch- .

Doc: It's the best there is!

Padilla's case, now set for trial in April, has tested the limits of presidential authority and raised questions about whether the fight against terrorism trumps the basic rights of U.S. citizens.

"Tested the limits of presidential authority," huh? That's putting it mildly. I'd say he was an American citizen, arrested on U.S. soil under the authority of a president claiming war powers in the absence of … you know, a war, accused of being a "dirty bomber" and given a perp-walk by a fascist wannabe lounge-singer and then held incommunicado for three and a half years until the administration dropped the whole "dirty bomb" business and reluctantly hanged some vague charge of "supporting terrorism" on his ass and stuck him into the judicial system in an attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court rule on the case.

But that's just me.

His lawyers said in court papers that 1,307 days of extreme isolation, abuse and interrogation in a U.S. military prison had left the 36-year-old American too mentally impaired to stand trial for aiding Islamist terrorists in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Africa. They want the charges dropped.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke gave prison doctors until February 9 to conduct their own mental exam of Padilla. The prosecution rejects claims that Padilla was mistreated.

Yet court documents paint a harrowing picture of his detention at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Padilla was held without charge as an "enemy combatant" by order of President George W. Bush.

Padilla was kept in a 9-by-7-foot (3-by-2-metre) cell, the lone occupant in a two-story, 10-unit block, defense lawyer Andrew Patel wrote in an affidavit. The windows were blocked so no light could enter and meals, often cold, were delivered through a slot in the door, Patel said. […]

Padilla was kept without a clock, calendar or reading material, sometimes for long periods in darkness, and other times for long periods under bright light. He was subjected to extreme cold, deprived of sleep, chained in painful positions and drugged with what he believed to be "truth serum," the documents alleged. […]

For the first two years, he was not allowed to speak with a lawyer nor send or receive mail, except for a brief note sent to his mother in Florida through the International Committee of the Red Cross.

When Patel was first allowed to visit his client in March 2004, the brig staff told him that Padilla "was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of a piece of furniture," Patel wrote.

Nonetheless photos introduced in the court case showed that when Padilla was taken to see a dentist, he was shackled at the hands and feet, wearing blackout goggles and earmuffs, and escorted by guards whose faces were hidden by riot helmets.

Here's something you already understood perfectly well …

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said yesterday that Washington's once-powerful role as a prime defender of human rights had effectively ended because of arbitrary detentions and reports of torture since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and the group urged the European Union to step up as a leader of the cause.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, released the group's World Report 2007, an assessment of last year's global human rights practices, by saying that the counterterrorism record of the United States over the past five years has tarnished its credibility as an influential moral voice.

He listed several practices he said were being used by the Bush administration in its fight against terrorism, including torture, arbitrary detentions, allowing CIA interrogators to use coercive techniques and the unsupervised handling of so-called enemy combatants held in other countries.

"This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable of defending some of the most basic rights," Roth said in the report, released on the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The greatest mass-delusion in America today is the belief that after Bush, with new leadership, America will regain its standing in the world. Dems believe in the premise like some believe in the Holy Grail. But it's never going to happen, regardless of whether and to what degree we renounce the current administration.

For a century, we clothed American power in the flowery rhetoric of democracy and human rights. It was an iron fist in a velvet glove and now that the glove's come off you can choose your metaphor -- genies and bottles, toothpaste and tubes or Pandora's box -- U.S. foreign policy will never again be the same again.

Tagged as: war on terror, detentions, padilla

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.