That’s what his lawyers are trying to prove, anyway: Jose Padilla was so mentally traumatized by his treatment in Navy brigs that he is not competent to assist in his own defense.
The Navy jailers who had charge of him will be called to testify, despite bitter protests by the government’s lawyers.
Is there anything to this?
What’s the question you’re asking? Can tortured people go mad? Become paranoid? Sure.
Would his jailers know something about his treatment and condition? Of course.
The question is, is Padilla shamming, or is he really mentally ill? If the latter, does that result from his treatment while detained, or from something else? And in either case, is he competent to be tried?
The Kubark manual repeatedly warns against the dangers of driving subjects over the edge.
Apparently, balmy folks don’t provide the good intel.
Has Padilla gone round the bend? Dunno. I haven’t seen him. Has anyone seen him?
This is truly sickening.
Damn. This is an interesting story. I’d like to have more to add to your thread, but I have no idea what really happened to Padilla.
But I wanted to assure you that despite the paltry replies to this topic, people are interested in the story.
IIRC, the CIA, back in the '50s or '60s, experimented with LSD as a “truth serum.” The results were disappointing. It does break down the subject’s resistance, as expected, but . . .
INTERROGATOR: How many Soviet troops are in place in Cuba?
SUBJECT: Hey, man, have you ever really looked at your hands?
A “must read” for anyone interested in torture, interrogation and intel acquisition
Especially relevant is this section:
[INDENT]Colonel Steven M. Kleinman, USAFR, serves as the Reserve Senior
Intelligence Officer and Mobilization Augmentee to the Director, Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, HQ Air Force Special Operations Command.
Col Kleinman formerly served as Director, Air Force Combat Interrogation
Course and as DOD Senior Intelligence Offi cer for Special Survival Training.
A graduate of the Joint Military Intelligence College, he received a Master of
Science of Strategic Intelligence in August 2002. He is an independent contractor
for the MITRE Corporation, where he has worked in support of the Intelligence
Science Board’s Study on Educing Information.[/INDENT]
**
KUBARK Manual
Well, the judge has ruled Padilla competent to stand trial and assist his own counsel. The story doesn’t say whether his lawyers plan to appeal that ruling.
I forget where I read this (probably the NYT) but apparently he believes that his lawyers are part of a larger government conspiracy out to get him and he has sided with his former captors. Clearly something’s wrong there.
I remember a time not long ago when the whiff of a suggestion that the US military methodically and regularly engages in torture would provoke howls of outrage and angered demands for the names of those who had called the honor of its members into question.
Now, it’s run of the mill.
Yeah, it’s called Stockholm Syndrome. But it won’t fly as an insanity defense, just ask Patty Hearst.
Well, well, looks like a key video involving Padilla’s “interrogation” has gone…missing:
Don’t know whether he’s “guilty” or not, but the entire way this has been handles strikes me as profoundly evil and un-American, and I hope that the one bright side to his horrible ordeal is that continued investigation results in additional illumination into how our government handles “enemies of the state”. To many of us, this is old news, but I think there’s still a lot of America who don’t want to believe or admit our government’s capable of such things, and the more incontrivertible exposure this gets, the more people will slowly understand what this administration truly stands for.