WHY DID THEY TORTURE JOSE PADILLA?

By JOHN GRANT

THERE'S A RANCID odor escaping from the cracks in the Jose Padilla
case. Padilla is the American citizen arrested in Chicago and declared
by President Bush to be an "enemy combatant." He was then kept for
nearly two years in a South Carolina brig without access to a lawyer,
family or friends.

The courts finally forced the Bush administration to release Padilla
into the justice system, and he is now imprisoned in Miami awaiting
trial on charges that have nothing to do with what he was arrested for,
an alleged plot to use a dirty bomb in the United States. It is claimed
he had al Qaeda connections.

What makes this case so insidious is that, according to a
psychiatrist who examined him over a 22-hour period, the treatment
Padilla received in the South Carolina brig was such that he now "lacks
the capacity to assist in his own defense." In other words, a U.S.
citizen was secretly worked over for 21 months to the point he is
unable to think well enough to engage with his lawyer.

What needs to be pointed out is that the procedures that broke down
Padilla's mental equilibrium weren't dreamed up by his jailers in South
Carolina. According to Alfred McCoy in a new book called "A Question of
Torture," they are the result of decades and billions of dollars of
taxpayer-funded research.

"From 1950 to 1962," McCoy writes, "the CIA became involved in
torture through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological
warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reached a
cost of a billion dollars annually - a veritable Manhattan Project of
the mind." This research amounted to "the first real revolution in the
cruel science of pain in more than three centuries." This "black
budget" research has never stopped and elements of it were rushed into
practice after 9/11.

No need for thumbscrews, racks, phone-crank generators to the
genitals or Black & Decker drills. This was "no-touch torture,"
using extreme isolation and sensory deprivation to create confusion
while establishing in the subject's mind the sense that any pain is
self-inflicted, that he had chosen the course that led to the pain he
was suffering. All it required was extended periods of time and the
total elimination of all stimulation and human contact other than that
of the jailer and the interrogator.....Read More