Travis Kavulla, of the Salient and Crimson, responds to my Jose Padilla post:

I was a bit surprised by this response, because it seems extraordinarily callous. Kavulla admits several behaviors while claiming they aren't torture: solitary confinement, sensory deprivation, cold (as long as it's not cold enough to leave a mark), and an environment that was purposefully kept inconsistent (it's not just, "So he didn't have a mattress"; the material deprivations were part of a strategy to break the man down.)

And this is all being visited on a man that is presumed innocent under US law, and was deprived of his right to a lawyer and really all of his civil rights for three years. (CORRECTION: Padilla was deprived of a lawyer for "only" 21 months)

If Kavulla really thinks that all this is acceptable behavior on the part of a government, then surely he wouldn't object to the same being visited on him.

Kavulla also scoffs at Padilla's claim that he was drugged, but he failed to mention that Dr. Hagerty pointed out that what Padilla thought were the effects of drugs may well have been the effect of extended sleep and sensory deprivation.

And no, I'm not arguing that imprisonment under humane conditions amounts to torture. But I would say that solitary confinement, and the accompanying sensory deprivation, does:

 

At Pelican Bay in California, where 1200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for twenty-two and a half hours a day, then released into an “exercise yard” for “recreation”. The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone(10).

The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there’s a waiting list(11). Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from “memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions … under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy.”(12) People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners(13). If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

And what Padilla experienced was, of course, worse than what was inflicted on prisoners at Pelican Bay. Padilla was reportedly kept in a totally darkened room, with no human contact except for being slapped around once in a while. He was kept in an empty wing of the prison, and guards opened and closed the metal doors at random intervals to disturb any attempt he might make at sound sleep. The picture that accompanied my first article, along with this New York Times report, make a powerful case that the US pursued a strategy of destroying Mr. Padilla mentally. The interview with Ms. Hegarty which I cited shows that they were extremely successful.

I haven't seen anyone question Ms. Hegarty's credibility: she's a professor of psychiatry at Columbia. Or perhaps Padilla was lying, cleverly faking symptoms of mental distress, and doing it so consistently and well that over the course of 22 hours of interviews, Hegarty was fooled. But I don't find that likely either.

IF Kavulla wants to assert that anything that doesn't leave a physical mark doesn't qualify as torture, then I say go ahead, but I don't know how far he'll get.

But perhaps if he considered Padilla as a human, with basic human rights, instead of a faceless other, he wouldn't be so snarky and dismissive. By all means, try to prove that these accounts aren't true; I sure hope that they aren't. But to admit that we are treating our prisoners this way and then to dismiss it is unconscionable.