"...nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"


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Ugh. It reminds me of the interrogations from Brazil:

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It was farcical in 1985. Now it seems prescient.

Hasn't it been pretty clearly demonstrated that Padilla has done nothing of what he's not done what's he accused of?

He is a scary example of what can be done to any of us in the name of fighting terror. But what if the terrorists are our leaders? Doesn't that make any voice of dissent a voice of terror?

The whole Padilla affair is just sickening. From the moment of Ashcroft's creepy announcement from Russia, with that strange red-washed video and his horrible apocalyptic rhetoric to this institutionalized torture of an American through sensory deprivation.

I think these techniques have been a long time developing in the American prison system. Peoples' moral sensibilities have been systematically degraded to the point where, just by putting somebody in that orange jumpsuit, they take for granted the idea that a different set of ethical rules applies.

I had a strange experience this summer. When I was riding my bike through Colorado, I passed a series of prisons around Pueblo. Like 6 or 7 in a row. I had some mechanical trouble and needed to hitchhike 90 miles back to Pueblo for a part and got a lift there from a truckful of migrant Mexican workers. When we passed one of the prisons, the driver honked his horn and all the guys looked out across the barbed wire and guard towers with pained looks on their faces.

On my way back, I caught a lift from a guard at the prison. He was telling me about a riot the previous year at a neighboring jail and how his team had been first on the scene to suppress the uprising. He was telling me about the fear and exhilaration of dressing up in riot gear and kicking ass, and about how, after they had locked down one of the cellblocks, they were in the courtyard of the prison. How he looked up into the night sky and saw the helicopters overhead and heard the announcement go over the radio that they had gotten the block under control. And how he heard all the hundreds of assembled police and guards outside let out a cheer.

"Man, it was just like being in a movie," he said.

I thought about those Mexicans who were living out a different kind of movie...a sort of 21st century Grapes of Wrath, I guess. It made me very sad.

Don't know why seeing Jose Padilla in the Times made me think of that, but it did.

*looks for button to favorite Felix's comment*

“Mr. Padilla remains unsure if I and the other attorneys working on his case are actually his attorneys or another component of the government’s interrogation scheme,” Mr. Patel said.

This story makes me physically sick to my stomach. There is no righteousness in breaking a man, whether physically or mentally.

My heart bleeds for this man. How many others like him are there?

well, as a foreigner who used be in awe for America exactly for the fact that, for all her contradictions, it was the place where you just _couldn't_ be arrested & not charged & tortured and kept without access to a lawyer in a dark windowless cage to sleep on steel like it happens in dictatorships way too often, well, to me the Padilla thing is huge. To me and frankly to quite a lot of other non-Americans.

It is in a way even more shocking than Abu Ghraib -- mind you, I'm not saying worse, I said more shocking.

as pointed out above, this is a movie, an Orwellian satire like Brazil -- it can't be Jefferson's invention. it just cannot be.

.

This is sad in so many ways.

In praise of Godwin at Slate.