Jose Padilla Trial Adds Another Urgent Reason for Impeachment

Today Jose Padilla was convicted on charges he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism.

Who is Padilla? A U.S. citizen who

was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to the protection of United States law.

Bush's designation of Padilla as "an illegal enemy combatant... not entitled to the protection of United States law" was an entirely dictatorial act.

Padilla was kept in complete isolation as a form of psychological torture to "soften him up" for interrogation without a lawyer.

For a month, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been questioning Padilla in New York City under the rules of the criminal justice system. [Note: without an attorney.] They wanted to know about his alleged involvement in a plot to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” in the US. Padilla had nothing to say. Now, military interrogators were about to turn up the heat.

Padilla was delivered to the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., where he was held not only in solitary confinement but as the sole detainee in a high security wing of the prison. Fifteen other cells sat empty around him.

The purpose of the extraordinary privacy, according to experts familiar with the technique, was to eliminate the possibility of human contact. No voices in the hallway. No conversations with other prisoners. No tapping out messages on the walls. No ability to maintain a sense of human connection, a sense of place or time.

In essence, experts say, the US government was trying to break Padilla’s silence by plunging him into a mental twilight zone. Padilla was not the only Al Qaeda suspect locked away in isolation. Although harsh interrogation methods such as water boarding, forced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and stress positions draw more media attention, use of isolation to “soften up” detainees for questioning is much more common.

“It is clear that the intent of this isolation was to break Padilla for the purpose of the interrogations that were to follow,” says Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and nationally recognized expert on the debilitating effects of solitary confinement. Dr. Grassian conducted a detailed examination of Padilla for his lawyers.

It took 3 1/2 years for his lawyers to get him transferred to a Miami jail to face actual criminal charges. By then he had basically lost his mind.

The trial was a travesty, as meticulously blogged by Lewis Z. Koch. Yet Bush's Justice Department won a conviction anyway.

If this could happen to Jose Padilla, it could happen to any United States citizen. Any one of us could be designated an "enemy combatant" without any court review and locked away in isolation until we too went insane.

Is that how you understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? If this scares you, it should.

It's time for every American to demand Bush's impeachment - before we all become Jose Padillas.

Read Pastor Martin Niemöller and substitute "terrorists" for communists:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Update 1: Here's Scarecrow:

The jurors who convicted Padilla did their duty, presumably basing their verdict on the evidence presented at trial. But that evidence did not include any information on the government’s egregious and lawless misconduct during his long incarceration. The jurors were not told he had been tortured, or held in isolation, or denied counsel, because the judge ruled that none of the pre-trial misconduct was relevant to the charges against him. The jury was left in the dark about the Justice Department’s duplicity or any of the backgound that might have revealed this was little more than a show trial, a trial forced by misconduct and staged for propaganda purposes by a regime that had no regard for truth, or justice or the rule of law. They did not hear from Dr. Hegarty and so did not know that Padilla’s mind had been broken by his jailors...

This may be just the beginning. Our government is declaring that Muslim charitable groups who may have provided direct or indirect financial assistance to any group connected to or deemed to be a “terrorist” organization — e.g., Hamas or Hezbollah, not just al Qaeda — can be designated an unindicted co-conspirator in trials of suspected terrorists. So if you think that Israel and the US are wrong in trying to economically strangle the people in Gaza and seek to help them through a Palestinian relief organization, you may find yourself listed as a “co-conspirator” in some trial you knew nothing about. And we are being conditioned to think that any Muslim person anywhere, citizen or not, can be suspected of scheming to form a “terrorist cell.” CNN’s Glen Beck and other right wing nuts reinforce this night after night.

It is the 1950s and “red scare” all over again, except the “enemy” are Muslims/terrorists instead of communists. And it’s not just here. It will bring out the worst in many, if we let it. Fight back.