So I Remember Ev'ry Face - Of Ev'ry Man Who Put Me Here

Yesterday, February 28, 2007, Federal Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami ruled that Jose Padilla, an American Citizen who after being labelled a terrorist by the Bush Administration and held for years without charges and tortured and inhumanely mistreated in a Navy Brig, is competent to stand trial and assist in his own defence.

The original court filings, psychiatric evaluations, affidavits, and photos of Jose Padilla documenting some of his treatment in the Navy brig, are here.

The treatment that Jose Padilla has been subjected to at the hands of his own countrymen and his own government flies in the face of every standard of human decency and every ethical and moral standard ever conceived.

Naomi Klein writing for The Nation brought the case into sharp focus the other day with:

It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago.
...
Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, 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 of Delta Block was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.
...
These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in a US court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus--a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different: He is a US citizen... He is the only victim of the post-9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary US trial.

Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration--that's the whole point. "The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure." That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a 1963 declassified CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources."

The problem the government has is that the defence has argued vociferously that Padilla's treatment and torture have driven him insane and reduced him to a "piece of furniture" unable to assist in his own defence, a diagnosis that psychiatric evaluations have concurred with.

Now Marcia Cooke rules that Padilla, in spite of his years of torture and maltreatment, is competent even though during yesterdays hearing:

One of Padilla's lawyers, Andrew Patel, testified earlier in the day that he has been involved with Padilla since 2002 and has never been able to get meaningful information out of him. Patel also said that Padilla seems to think his lawyers are part of a government plot against him.

"He has expounded the belief that we are part of the continuing interrogation," Patel said.

In my opinion Judge Cooke has in some and perhaps more than one sense made a "ruling on those claims" since the claims are made to support defense contentions that he is incapable.

Is she not by rejecting them "ruling" on them?

And what kind of definition of "capacity to assist" is being used here? If one of his lawyers drops a pencil and Padilla is capable of picking it up and handing it back to his lawyer that would demonstrate some "capacity to assist" of course, but would be no indication that he understands what is happening to him in the course of the trial or how the trial has become one of the things "happening" to him, or what the ramifications of his actions or statements during the trial would be.

It seems to me that Cooke is covering her own ass here. By avoiding putting herself in a position of having ruled in favor of the defense she has ruled in favor of the prosecution yet is trying to confuse that point and deny having done so.

This is a case of everyone running for cover at not only Padilla's expense, but at the expense of anyone who ever expects and has the right to fair and honest treatment with integrity by the justice system.

This is not justice. This is sickness. A sickness that has spread throughout the entire society for that past six years since George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and the rest of the Neocon criminal cabal that has hijacked America began their WOT in earnest to further their own hegemonic ambitions. The legal manouverings and contortions have become part of Padilla's ongoing torture and mistreatment.

This is not a trial of Jose Padilla.

It is the continuing trial of the government and the Bush Administration, and more specifically it is a trial of George W. Bush, who leads that government, and of Bush's supporters.

It is also a trial of the American system of justice, itself.

Only from the far side of the looking glass can it be considered a trial of Jose Padilla.

If we cannot and will not give this man the justice guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States of America, how can we ever expect it for anyone else?

Jose Padilla could have been your neighbor, or your brother...... or you.

The case of Jose Padilla is one of the most despicable and outright un-American travesties the U.S. Government has perpetrated for a long time. It is impossible to defend that behavior, let alone engage in it, and claim with any legitimacy that one believes in the principles that have defined and guided this country since its founding. But there has been no retreat from this behavior. Quite the contrary. The atrocity known as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a huge leap forward to elevating the Padilla treatment from the lawless shadows into full-fledged, officially sanctioned and legally authorized policy of the U.S. Government. The case of Jose Padilla is no longer a sick aberration, but is instead a symbol of the kind of Government we have chosen to have.

Have we as a society, out of fear, this time thrown away something that can never be replaced? Our integrity and simple human decency and sense of justice? I fear that we have. I can only hope that we never forget the faces and the names of the men who put us here. George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Et Al.

They say ev'rything can be replaced,
Yet ev'ry distance is not near.
So I remember ev'ry face
Of ev'ry man who put me here
-- I Shall Be Released, Bob Dylan