José Padilla's trial is bringing mind-breaking techniques under scrutiny.
MIAMI (AP) -- A videotape showing Pentagon officials' final interrogation of al-Qaida suspect Jose Padilla is missing, raising questions about whether federal prosecutors have lost other recordings and evidence in the case.
The tape is classified, but Padilla's attorneys said they believe something happened during that interrogation that could explain why Padilla does not trust them and suspects they are government agents.
Padilla attorney Anthony Natale said in court papers that the March 2, 2004, interrogation at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., could contain information the government conveyed to Padilla that ''directly impacts upon his relationship with his attorneys.''
Prosecutors and the Pentagon have said they cannot find the tape despite an intensive search.
Authorities made 88 video recordings of Padilla being interrogated during the 3 1/2 years he was held at the brig as an ''enemy combatant,'' officials said. Eighty-seven tapes have been given to the defense, leaving only the last session unaccounted for.
''I don't know what happened to it,'' Pentagon attorney James Schmidli said during a recent court hearing.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke was incredulous that anything connected to such a high-profile defendant could be lost.
''Do you understand how it might be difficult for me to understand that a tape related to this particular individual just got mislaid?'' Cooke told prosecutors at a hearing last month.
Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen, is scheduled to stand trial April 16 along with two co-defendants on charges of being part of a North American terror support cell.
When he was arrested in 2002, Padilla was initially accused of mounting an al-Qaida plot to detonate a radioactive ''dirty bomb'' in the United States, but the criminal case does not include those allegations.
Padilla's lawyers sought the brig tapes, medical records and other details about his incarceration to back up claims that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his long isolation and repeated interrogations.
The judge ruled Feb. 28 that Padilla is competent to stand trial.
Miami criminal defense lawyer David O. Markus said the missing tape makes the government agents look like ''Keystone cops.''
''You can't help but be suspicious,'' Markus said. ''It's the government's burden to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. When it 'loses' evidence, defense lawyers are right to cry foul.''
Padilla's attorneys have also accused the Bush administration of mistreating and even torturing Padilla at the brig, before he was transferred to civilian custody. Justice Department and Pentagon officials have repeatedly denied those claims.
While in the brig, Padilla was represented by New York attorneys Andrew Patel and Donna Newman. Patel remains on the defense team, and neither he nor Natale responded to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment about the lost tape. Pentagon officials also declined to comment Friday.
Stephanie Pell, one of the Padilla prosecutors, said more than 150 hours of interrogation tapes have been given to defense lawyers. She said the lost tape was actually on a DVD that did not get transferred onto a format used by the Padilla defense team.
''It's somehow buried in the massive amount of information that we have turned over to defense,'' Pell said.
The judge ordered prosecutors to give defense lawyers a written summary of notes taken by agents during the interrogation session. But Natale said there may be more tapes missing and other interrogations that were not recorded.
Defense lawyers say brig logs indicate that there were 72 hours of Padilla interviews that either were not taped or for which tapes may be missing. Natale said it seems unlikely that any interrogation session with Padilla was not videotaped ''when he was videoed taking showers.''
Pell said that figure may be a miscalculation due to a misreading of the logs or mistakes in the handwritten entries. And not every Padilla interview was taped, she said. ''We do not believe there is 72 missing hours,'' Pell said. ''We can't provide what we don't have.''
This was not supposed to happen. The Bush administration's plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla's lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.
Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a 2.75-by-2.1-metre cell with no natural light, no clock, and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum”, a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.
According to his lawyers and two mental-health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that “the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla is competent” and that his treatment is irrelevant.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. “It's not like Mr. Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place.” The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify on Padilla's mental state at the hearings, which began February 22. They will be asked how a man alleged to have engaged in elaborate antigovernment plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, “like a piece of furniture”.
It's difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy-metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of CIA “extraordinary rendition” as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, former army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. “They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over.” All of Delta Block was on 24-hour suicide watch.
Human Rights Watch has exposed a U.S.–run detention facility near Kabul known as the “prison of darkness”: tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. “Plenty lost their minds,” one former inmate recalled. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors.”
These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in a U.S. court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus—a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different: he is a U.S. citizen. The administration did not originally intend to bring Padilla to trial, but when his status as an enemy combatant faced a Supreme Court challenge, the administration abruptly changed course, charging Padilla and transferring him to civilian custody. That makes Padilla's case unique: he is the only victim of the post–9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary U.S. trial.
Now that Padilla's mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration—that's the whole point. “The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure.” That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a 1963 declassified CIA manual for interrogating “resistant sources”.
The manual was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK Ultra program, which in the 1950s funnelled about $25 million to scientists to research “unusual techniques of interrogation”. One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal's McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation “produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia”.
There is no need to go so far back to prove that the U.S. military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The army's field manual, reissued just last year, states: “Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior” as well as “significant psychological distress”.
If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the U.S. government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of U.S. psychological torture.
This column was first published in the Nation (www.thenation.com/).