AN AMERICAN DISGRACE

I posted before that Jose Padilla's mind was seriously harmed by his draconian detention and the AP reports that in addition to Padilla, 2 other "illegal enemy combatants" were also grievously harmed.

Officer wrote of harsh treatment of U.S. detainee
By Pamela Hess, Associated Press
October 8, 2008
LA Times

WASHINGTON -- A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.


Yale Law School's Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by attorneys Jonathan Freiman and Tahlia Townsend, who represent another detainee, Jose Padilla. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment's protections against cruel treatment.

The 91 pages of e-mails and documents produced by U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which runs the military brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., detail daily decisions made about the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, then both American citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal resident. All were designated as by the White House as "illegal enemy combatants."

The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home, and allowed no contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months. For years, they were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.

"I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we're working with borrowed time," an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of prisoner Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. "I would like to have some form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me."

An officer was still raising alarms about Hamdi's mental state after 14 months behind bars with no contact with lawyers, family or other prisoners.

"I told him the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere from here as a 'basket case,' of use to no one, to include himself," the officer wrote in an e-mail to undisclosed government officials in June 2003. "I fear the rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can keep his head in the game much longer."