Thursday, December 07, 2006

I can't get it out of my head!

Last week, this image of Joseph Padilla being taken to the dentist by a high security force, in blinders was the first image published of him since 2002, when he was taken into custody. He was charged then with complicity in a terrorist plot to bomb apartment buildings and another plot to create a "dirty" atomic bomb which would be detonated in an American City. He was shown to have had contact with Al-Quaeda and pages of documentation were produced which supposedly traced his movements and contacts. He has been held in high security, subjected to constant interrogation torture techniques involving sensory deprivation. He has not been allowed reading material. He is a Moslem and he is denied possession of a Koran.
He sleeps on a bare metal platform and is constantly monitored. According to his legal representatives, he has been driven mad.
After almost 4 years of trying to build a case against him, everything has been thrown out of court, but under the special powers of this government, that just means that they haven't tried hard enough to get the information out of him they want. This is beyond Kafkaesque. In the picture, he is blindfolded. Why? Is it as Michele Malkin suggested apologetically that he might be capable of blinking communication to his cohorts?
I think about all the prisoners in Guantanamo living for years in a beyond kafka nightmare. Incarceration without end. Subject to the experimentation behind closed doors of new interrogation methods. Experimentaion with drugs. It has been documented and shown that quite a few of these men are prisoners because they were turned in by corrupt war lords in Afghanistan getting rid of enemies and eager to collect the bounty that the US was handing out.
I believe that Joseph Padilla, if the present administration has its way, along with a large portion of the detainees in Guantanamo will never see freedom.
I think that many of them have been so damaged and destroyed by this inhuman process that they could never be allowed to be seen with out becoming damning evidence of the mindless brutal abuse they have endured. They have been made into scapegoats for men with out a soul, howling for blood.
I cannot get this out of my head!

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