(Via Jeralyn at TalkLeft)
US Gov't broke Padilla through intense isolation, say experts
Despite warnings, officials used 43 months of severe isolation to force Jose Padilla to tell all he knew about Al Qaeda.
By Warren Richey Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 14, 2007 edition
Miami - When suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla was whisked from the criminal justice system to military custody in June 2002, it was done for a key purpose – to break his will to remain silent.
As a US citizen, Mr. Padilla enjoyed a right against forced self-incrimination. But this constitutional guarantee vanished the instant President Bush declared him an enemy combatant.
By April 2003, Padilla had already spent 10 months in isolation at the brig. Ultimately, he was housed in the same cell, alone in his wing, for three years and seven months, according to court documents.
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, these experts say. And that makes it a potential instrument of torture, they add.
Fear of "brainwashing" prompted the CIA and Defense Department to underwrite research in the 1950s and '60s into the impact of isolation and sensory deprivation. The findings were included in a 1963 CIA handbook, later declassified. The book discusses the possible use of such techniques, including isolation. But it warns of the "profound moral objection" of applying "duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage."
That's what happened in Padilla's case, says Grassian. "It is clear from examining Mr. Padilla that that limit was surpassed."
"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.
Monday, August 13, 2007
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Padilla was raised in Chicago, where he became involved in the gang scene at an early age. He was arrested at age 14 in a brutal murder and robbery committed by several gang members. Padilla moved with his family to South Florida after being released from juvenile detention in 1988.
In 1991, he was arrested in Florida after a road rage incident in which he pointed a loaded gun at a police officer. He served 10 months in prison.
Although several published reports have suggested that Padilla converted to Islam in prison, this does not appear to be the case. (All the reports have been attributed to anonymous government sources.) What seems more likely is that Padilla formed a favorable impression of Islam as a result of his prison experience, but several well-sourced news reports indicated that he first expressed interest in actually converting in 1993, while working at a Taco Bell in Davie, Fl., near Fort Lauderdale.
The New York Times in 2002 quoted Padilla's manager at the restaurant as saying that Padilla inquired about Islam while working at the store in early 1993.
According to government sources quoted in South Florida newspapers, Padilla may have been introduced to Islam by Adham Hassoun, a local Palestinian activist who in early 1993 opened an office of the Benevolence International Foundation in Plantation, Fla., about five minutes from Padilla's workplace.
The Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) has been designated as a terrorist organization by the federal government, which charges that the Islamic charity is a front for al Qaeda money laundering operations. Hassoun was arrested shortly after Padilla on an immigration charge and is currently fighting deportation in South Florida. He has not been charged with a terrorism-related crime, and he has denied any ties to al Qaeda and any wrongdoing in general.
Adham Hassoun has been charged with illegally possessing a firearm, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which also reported that, in a separate proceeding "Immigration Judge Neale Foster found Hassoun participated in an assassination plot, recruited a "jihad fighter," donated money to charities under investigation for possible links to terrorism and belonged to an international terrorist organization called Al-Gama Al-Islamiyya, according to Hassoun's petition for release to a federal district judge. That petition was denied."
Al-Gama Al-Islamiyya, also known as the Islamic Group, was led by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual leader of a New York City-based al Qaeda cell. One member of that cell, Clement Rodney Hampton-El, recruited U.S. military veterans for al Qaeda, as reported in an investigative report exclusive to Intelwire.
Padilla's formal conversion appears to have taken place in 1994, when he took the Muslim name Ibrahim. When he was arrested, he had taken the Muslim name Abdullah Al-Muhajir. His subsequent court filings have been under the name Jose Padilla, which is by far the most common name used in news accounts.
Padilla left the U.S. in 1998. According to most accounts, he traveled to Egypt first, where he was to study Arabic, but found his way to Saudi Arabia and to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions and al Qaeda soon thereafter, according to an affidavit by Michael Mobbs, a Defense Department adviser.
After connecting with al Qaeda in Pakistan, Padilla appears to have answered directly to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
CBS News reported in 2002 that Hassoun and Padilla had been in telephone contact shortly before Padilla returned to the U.S, and BIF was based in Chicago, where Padilla flew into the U.S.
Padilla is of Puerto Rican descent. His race has been identified in various government filings and criminal proceedings as white, Latino or black.
His Florida police record also gives insight into this man and his perpensity of being a danger to others.
Murder before he is 18, gun charges with one of the pointing a gun at an officer and connections with al-Qaeda....yeah, I feel REAL bad for this guy.
Padilla was "broke" way before he was declared, rightly so, an enemy combatant.
If you cared about more about tre victims than the criminals, our country wouldn't BE so screwed up.
Then another NYT article:
yet ANOTHER New York Times article while fact checking:
But in 1985, Mr. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in connection with an armed robbery turned homicide. He told the police that he and a friend had decided to rob a pair of Mexican gang members because they were drunk; court documents show they took a watch, $107 and some Mexican currency. The victims chased the robbers, leading to the stabbing. Mr. Padilla was prosecuted as a juvenile.
Mr. Padilla's records are sealed because of his age at the time, but he is believed to have spent three years in juvenile detention. The prosecutor at the trial where his partner was convicted of murder said in a closing statement that Mr. Padilla "punched, kicked and clubbed" a victim with a baseball bat.
Court records show that Mr. Padilla, using aliases, was arrested twice in 1989, for assault and battery and for trespassing, and failed to report to his probation officer two months in a row, prompting an arrest warrant. Two years later, he faced weapons charges after being caught on Chicago's West Side with an unregistered .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson, police records show. At one point, he identified himself as a member of the Latin Disciples gang.
Mr. Padilla apparently jumped bail and, soon after, got in trouble 1,355 miles away, in Sunrise, Fla., near his mother's home. He was sentenced to 364 days in jail after a traffic accident in which he fired a revolver toward a car 20 to 25 feet away, according to police reports.
Excuse me if I don't join you in feeling sorry for him.
AMEN Spree!!
This is the typical M.O.A.S.T. of the brain dead Leftinistra moron moonbat fruit loop brigades.
M.O.A.S.T. = Mother Of All Sob Stories
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