Jose Padilla: More Sinned Against Than Sinning

4.9.07

Jose PadillaNews that Jose Padilla’s lawyers are seeking to hold former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and 59 other US officials responsible for “abusive and unconstitutional tactics used against Mr. Padilla while he was held in military custody as an enemy combatant from 2002 to 2006” has temporarily revived the story of the Chicago-born former gang member and Islamic convert. Padilla’s conviction on August 16, in a court room in Miami, for “conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people in a foreign country, conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, and providing material support for terrorists,” was announced to whoops of joy from an administration ravenous for all crumbs of comfort, but to a generally muted response in the US media.

An American citizen once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil, Padilla –- whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a “known terrorist,” who was “exploring a plan” to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city –- is due to be sentenced in December (if the verdict does not unravel on appeal). He faces the prospect of spending between 15 years and the rest of his life in jail, even though his profile has shrunk so considerably, that, after once being regarded as a potential mass murderer on a unprecedented scale, he was, in the end, not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

The trial

Many of the media outlets that bothered to report the verdict stuck to a narrowly defined script, neglecting to mention Padilla’s long detention without charge or trial, and hailing it, as ABC News did, as a triumphant example of a legal victory in the “War on Terror.” This in itself was doubtful. Since the prosecution was allowed to show, on a huge screen, a seven-minute video of a speech by Osama bin Laden that was completely unrelated to the case, and lead prosecutor Brian Frazier mentioned al-Qaeda around a hundred times in his opening comments, and another hundred times in his closing remarks, the few outspoken critics of the trial were justified in concluding that this was an arrant display of propaganda masquerading as evidence.

They were also justified in highlighting the weakness of the actual evidence against Padilla: his fingerprints and personal details on an application form for an “al-Qaeda” training camp in Afghanistan, which he apparently filled out in July 2000, and just seven intercepted phone messages, out of the thousands recorded between 1993 and 2001 featuring Padilla’s co-defendants, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, in which he purportedly demonstrated his commitment to “violent jihad.” It’s also noticeable that, whereas his co-defendants were accused of repeatedly speaking in code, this allegation was not applied to the seven calls featuring Padilla.

Even overlooking the fact that this was, at best, just one notch up from a “thought crime” –- and that there may be something wrong with a system in which, as Brian Frazier told the jury, “you can find that the defendants are guilty even if they never killed or harmed anyone –- under the law it is the illegal agreement that is the crime” –- the brandishing of the application form was enough to convince the jurors of Padilla’s guilt. After a three-month trial, they took only eleven hours to reach a verdict.

Noting that this meant that the jurors spent less than one hour of deliberations for each week of trial testimony, whereas “the rule of thumb, [as] any trial attorney will tell you, is that one week of trial testimony usually tracks one day of deliberations,” CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen wrote that both lawyers and reporters were “shocked by the speed of the verdict.” According to the New York Times’ account, one juror said that she “had ‘all but made up her mind’ about the defendants’ guilt before deliberations began.”

The torture

What makes the verdict particularly distressing for those concerned with justice in the United States, however, is not just the manipulation of the trial by the prosecution and the slimness of the evidence against the once-alleged “dirty bomber.” The elephant in the room in Padilla’s case –- his detention, in brutal isolation, as an “enemy combatant” for 43 months in a military brig, and its effect on his mental health –- was swept aside as though it had never existed, not only during the trial itself, in which the judge, Marcia G. Cooke, explicitly barred both the prosecution and the defense from speaking about it, but also in much of the mainstream media coverage of the verdict.

This is shocking beyond belief. In a country in which far too many people have expressed their utter indifference to the fate of non-Americans detained by their government in the “War on Terror,” the treatment of Padilla should at least have set alarm bells ringing. Unlike foreigners, who, according to the President, can be picked up anywhere in the world, imprisoned, tortured and held forever without charge or trial, American citizens are supposed to be protected against this kind of treatment. Padilla’s case emphatically proves that this is no longer true.

There was, I must admit, a certain amount of uproar and hand-wringing in the US in December 2006, when photos of Padilla, shackled and restrained, and kitted out in black-out goggles and sound-muffling headphones for nothing more dangerous than a walk from his cell to a dental appointment, were published in the New York Times. Momentarily electrified, the media responded with a rush of indignation (perhaps proving, as with the Abu Ghraib scandal, that photos speak louder than words), and articles poured forth describing what had happened to Padilla during the four years and eight months he had then spent in US custody.

Jose Padilla's shocking trip to the dentist

The image of Jose Padilla’s trip to the dentist that shocked Americans in December 2006.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, who had moved to Florida and converted to Islam in 1994, was arrested on May 8, 2002, at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, after several years abroad in Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was held for a month as a material witness and interrogated by the FBI, and was then designated as an “enemy combatant” and transferred to a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where, for 43 months, as described by Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor, 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.” Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and “an expert on the debilitating effects of solitary confinement,” who conducted a detailed examination of Padilla for his lawyers, said that it was “clear that the intent of this isolation was to break Padilla for the purpose of the interrogations that were to follow.”

Richey continued: “Padilla’s cell measured nine feet by seven feet. The windows were covered over. There was a toilet and sink. The steel bunk was missing its mattress. He had no pillow. No sheet. No clock. No calendar. No radio. No television. No telephone calls. No visitors. Even Padilla’s lawyer was prevented from seeing him for nearly two years. For significant periods of time the Muslim convert was denied any reading material, including the Koran. The mirror on the wall was confiscated. Meals were slid through a slot in the door. The light in his cell was always on.” In addition, as Naomi Klein noted, it was reported that his interrogators –- the only people with whom he was allowed any contact –- “punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds,” and Padilla also stated that he was “injected with a ‘truth serum,’ a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.”

As Richey went on to note, “Those who haven’t experienced solitary confinement can imagine that life locked in a small space would be inconvenient and boring. But according to a broad range of experts who have studied the issue, isolation can be psychologically devastating. Extreme isolation, in concert with other coercive techniques, can literally drive a person insane, [which] makes it a potential instrument of torture.” When approved by Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, Defense Department lawyers warned that isolation was “not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days,” echoing the CIA’s findings, in its declassified 1963 handbook, when the agency warned of the “profound moral objection” of applying “duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage.”

According to Stuart Grassian, however, it was “clear from examining Mr. Padilla that that limit was surpassed.” After studying the daily activity logs relating to his incarceration, particularly during the period from November 2002 to April 2003, which Padilla himself described as the “terrible time,” Grassian discovered that it was “not unusual for Mr. Padilla to go four, five, or six days without even brief [visual checks] by the brig staff, who were, in any event, under instruction not to converse with him.” Richey added, “Other than the brief checks by brig guards, Padilla went through stretches of 34 days, 17 days and 15 days without any human contact,” and Grassian concluded that “when he did have such contact, it was inevitably with an interrogator.”

As a result, Grassian declared, “Given the extensive research on this issue, much of it funded by the United States government, it follows necessarily that the United States government was well aware of the likely consequences of its conduct in regard to Mr. Padilla.” Grassian explicitly condemned a statement made by Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in which he revealed a portion of the government’s interrogation strategy in an affidavit in 2003. Refuting Jacoby’s claim that “The Defense Intelligence Agency’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator,” in which “Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence-gathering tool,” Grassian stated, bluntly, “What the government is attempting to do is create an atmosphere of dependency and terror.”

Quite what rubbish was spouted by Padilla during these years of “dependency and terror” –- prior to losing his mind to such an extent that his warders described him as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture’” –- is unknown. His own desperate confessions –- and where they led –- have yet to be revealed. What is clear, however, is that other confessions, themselves produced under duress by “high-value” detainees held in secret CIA prisons, formed the basis of the “dirty bomb” allegation.

The “dirty bomb” plot — and Binyam Mohamed

According to the government, Padilla approached training camp facilitator Abu Zubaydah (captured in Pakistan five weeks before him) and 9/11 kingpin Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (captured in 2003) with plans for the bomb, and was apprehended after Zubaydah identified him to the FBI. Less vigorously reported were admissions by the government itself that both Zubaydah and KSM were “skeptical” about the plot. Other insider comments indicated that Zubaydah actually dismissed Padilla as “a maladroit extremist,” telling his interrogators that he was so “ignorant” that he believed he could “separate plutonium” from other nuclear materials by “rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.”

Jose Padilla arriving in Miami

Jose Padilla arriving in Miami (Photo: Alan Diaz/AP).

It’s also clear that another man who was picked out by Zubaydah in relation to the same dubious plot –- Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was captured in Pakistan a week after Zubaydah –- suffered even more severely than Padilla. Rendered by the CIA to Morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months and had his penis repeatedly cut by razors, and then transferred to Guantánamo via the CIA’s own “Dark Prison” near Kabul –- a medieval torture prison with the addition of 24-hour amplified music and noise –- Mohamed admitted to being a part of the whole Zubaydah-KSM-Padilla “dirty bomb” plot, but later explained that he had confessed to whatever his US-directed Moroccan torturers told him to, and had never even met Padilla.

While Binyam Mohamed remains in Guantánamo –- unsure if the authorities will release him (as requested by the British government) or will attempt to reinstate the charges against him in a Military Commission (following their collapse in June 2006, when the Supreme Court judged them illegal, and their reintroduction via last fall’s Military Commissions Act) –- the “dirty bomb” allegation against Padilla was dropped in November 2005, just days before the Supreme Court was due to look at the legality of his detention. Apparently, the administration was unwilling to allow Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to testify, in case they revealed that they had been tortured.

Unlike in Guantánamo’s “enemy combatant” tribunals –- and in the Military Commissions, which the administration is still trying to revive, after further setbacks in June –- evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible in US courts, because it is illegal, immoral and unreliable. And however much the administration may try to deny it, the “dirty bomb” allegation is a perfect demonstration of the hole into which the administration has dug itself: a “plot,” whose existence was only ever announced through torture –- whether of Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Jose Padilla or Binyam Mohamed –- that lives only in this world of tortured confessions, and has no independent existence that can be verified in the real world.

Once Padilla’s “enemy combatant” status was dropped, along with the “dirty bomb” story (and in marked contrast to Binyam Mohamed, whose alleged involvement in the plot limped on until the Supreme Court struck down the Military Commissions eight months later), he was charged with the vague, motive-based crimes for which he was eventually convicted, and moved to a legally-recognized detention facility, which is where he was located when the photos of the world’s most high-security dental visit were revealed in the New York Times.

“The most important case of our lifetimes”

As a result of the revelations about Padilla’s mental state in the Times article, it looked, for a while, as though the trial might not even go ahead. In February 2007, Naomi Klein, in an optimistic report for the Nation, suggested, “Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to ‘break’ prisoners are finally being put on trial.” In the end, however, as noted above, District Judge Marcia G. Cooke pulled the plug on the dissenters, and six months later, as Padilla’s trial came to an end, it was as if most of the country had succumbed to a collective memory loss.

In the week before the verdict was announced, one journalist at least avoided having his mind wiped clean. Warren Richey’s three-part series on Padilla (see here, here and here), which I quoted from above, revisited, in horrific detail, the systematic mental destruction of Padilla that took place during the 43 months that he was illegally imprisoned without trial and tortured by his own government. As also noted above, however, Richey’s was a rare voice in the mainstream media.

Most of the dissenting voices –- the ones who realized, with an appalling clarity, that the US government was getting away with torturing its own citizens, and that, in theory, no US citizen whatsoever was protected from similar treatment –- peppered the blogosphere. In a shining example of a concerned citizen jolted into a state of near-insomnia by the ramifications, the author of the Talking Dog blog, who has long maintained that the Padilla case is “the most important case of our lifetimes,” fulminated that the sweeping aside of an issue that involved “not just our entire Bill of Rights, but the Magna Carta” was effected by a “complicit commercial media [that] won’t even tell us what happened.”

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, and the majority of the American people are happy to know that, like the worthless foreigners who can be seized, tortured and imprisoned without charge or trial at the whim of their President, they too can be seized, tortured and held in a military brig for 43 months, but I strongly suspect that this is not the case. The corollary –- as a non-US citizen like myself is all too aware –- is that, unless the issue of Padilla’s treatment is resuscitated and thrust at the administration whenever Bush or his dwindling coterie of cronies declares that America “does not torture,” then a viciously dismissive set of double standards is at work.

What the case of Jose Padilla should demonstrate most of all, to any American who recalls the barriers to tyranny erected in the Constitution and recognizes that the current administration has swept them away, is that not only should American citizens be protected from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, but those safeguards should also apply to foreigners, including the 359 men still detained in Guantánamo, the tens of thousands imprisoned in Iraq, and the hundreds of others held in secret CIA-run prisons or transferred to torture prisons in third countries.

The Talking Dog is right; it really is that important, and it is for this reason that Padilla’s lawyers are to be commended for filing their lawsuit challenging the President’s power as commander-in-chief to dismiss the constitutional rights of US citizens designated as “enemy combatants” by asking US District Judge Henry Floyd to declare that Padilla’s treatment in the brig was “unlawful and in violation of the Constitution.” As Jonathan Freiman, one of Padilla’s lawyers, said when the lawsuit was announced, “This is the American people’s last chance to know what happened behind the closed doors in Charleston, and the last chance for a court to determine if what happened is consistent with our Constitution and values.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

As published on Antiwar.com and American Torture.

See here for updates on Padilla: Why Jose Padilla’s 17-year prison sentence should shock and disgust all Americans (January 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (April 2009).

Also see the following for articles about Ali al-Marri, the last US “enemy combatant”: Court Confirms President’s Dictatorial Powers in Case of US “Enemy Combatant” Ali al-Marri (July 2008), The Last US Enemy Combatant: The Shocking Story of Ali al-Marri (December 2008), Ending The Cruel Isolation Of Ali al-Marri, The Last US “Enemy Combatant” and Why The US Under Obama Is Still A Dictatorship (both March 2009), Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged As US “Enemy Combatant” Pleads Guilty (May 2009).

21 Responses

  1. DhafirTrial » The Guantánamo Files: Additional Chapters Online – The Qala-i-Janghi Massacre says...

    […] whistleblowers, the significance of the illegal detention of the US “enemy combatants” Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, the stumbling progress of the Stalinesque show trials known as Military […]

  2. The Two Malcontents » Leftists disgusted-outraged over Jose Padilla’s sentence says...

    […] news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United […]

  3. qwstnevrythg.com » Why Jose Padilla’s 17-Year Sentence Should Disgust all Americans says...

    […] news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United […]

  4. Why Jose Padilla’s 17-year prison sentence should shock and disgust all Americans - Juxtaposeur says...

    […] news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United […]

  5. Dictatorial Powers Upheld « American Armageddon says...

    […] the government to transfer him to a federal prison to face a trial in a US court, as happened with Jose Padilla, a US citizen and one of two other “enemy combatants” imprisoned without charge or trial […]

  6. Silence on War Crimes « Dr Nasir Khan says...

    […] and can imprison them indefinitely on the U.S. mainland without charge or trial, as the cases of Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri reveal in horrific […]

  7. The Last US Enemy Combatant - The Shocking Story of Ali al-Marri « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] to face sketchy charges of providing material support for terrorism, which, nonetheless, led to a conviction in August 2007, and a 17-year sentence in January […]

  8. Why the U.S. Under Obama Is Still a Dictatorship says...

    […] got cold feet, and moved Padilla into the federal court system, where, in August 2007, he was convicted of providing material support for terrorism in a lopsided trial — in which all mention of his […]

  9. Why the U.S. Under Obama Is Still a Dictatorship « DC: Freedom & Linux says...

    […] got cold feet, and moved Padilla into the federal court system, where, in August 2007, he was convicted of providing material support for terrorism in a lopsided trial — in which all mention of his […]

  10. Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] only useful lead cited — that of Jose Padilla, who had reportedly planned to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York — is itself […]

  11. Why the U.S. Under Obama Is Still a Dictatorship | Congress Check says...

    […] got cold feet, and moved Padilla into the federal court system, where, in August 2007, he was convicted of providing material support for terrorism in a lopsided trial — in which all mention of his […]

  12. Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged As US “Enemy Combatant” Pleads Guilty by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] in CIA custody, was shared only by the other two US “enemy combatants,” Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, and a handful of prisoners in Guantánamo. His isolation was such that, according to a psychiatric […]

  13. UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] petition, by dropping the central allegation against him — that he was involved, with US citizen Jose Padilla, in a plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York — and, in November, the Defense […]

  14. Ali al-Marri, The Last US “Enemy Combatant,” Receives Eight-Year Sentence + Ali al-Marri’s Statement In Court by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] extra-legal detention and torture — like those endured by two other Americans, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla — are a black mark on America’s recent history, and it has always amazed me that even Americans […]

  15. Fahad Hashmi And Terrorist Hysteria In US Courts says...

    […] held in conditions that are only marginally less severe those under which US “enemy combatants” Jose Padilla, Ali al-Marri and Yaser Hamdi were held during the Bush administration, when each was imprisoned […]

  16. On Bush’s Waterboarding Claims, UK Media Loses Its Moral Compass by Andy Worthington « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] bomb plot” to attack New York — in which British resident Binyam Mohamed and US citizen Jose Padilla were implicated (by Abu Zubaydah), and which had involved nothing more than some casual browsing on […]

  17. Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”? « Dandelion Salad says...

    […] In the case of Jose Padilla, who was held in strict solitary confinement for 21 months, the effects of his isolation were so intense that it has been reported that he literally lost his mind (his warders described him as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture’”) [Further details of Padilla's harrowing mental collapse can be found here]. […]

  18. Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”? | Amauta says...

    […] In the case of Jose Padilla, who was held in strict solitary confinement for 21 months, the effects of his isolation were so intense that it has been reported that he literally lost his mind (his warders described him as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture’”) [Further details of Padilla's harrowing mental collapse can be found here]. […]

  19. NDAA Martial Law - The Red Pill Network says...

    […] combatant” in the war on terror. Padilla was held for 3 1/2 years in isolation, tortured and given, according to his lawyer , some kind of hallucinogenic drug such as LSD. His attorney, Andrew Patel, said that after a time, […]

  20. Guilty By Torture says...

    […] took another three and a half years for the allegations to be dropped against Padilla, who was held as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland, in isolation so severe that it amounted to torture, before being put tried and […]

  21. Dictatorial Powers Upheld says...

    […] the government to transfer him to a federal prison to face a trial in a US court, as happened with Jose Padilla, a US citizen and one of two other “enemy combatants” imprisoned without charge or trial […]

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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