Torture is now part of the American soul

By George Monbiot

"After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.

"In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an 'enemy combatant,' released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk -- taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.

"Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for 'a piece of furniture.' The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there ..."
AlterNet

Tagged: usa, torture, war+on+terror, human+rights