Amy Goodman interviewed Dr. Angela Hegarty, the forensic psychiatrist hired by Jose Padilla's defense team yesterday. Dr. Hegarty is an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.
What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being's mind," said Dr. Hegarty. "[Padilla's] personality was deconstructed and reformed."
Hegarty spent a total of 22 hours with Padilla. Join me, if you dare, as I summarize her findings and ponder some of the larger meanings of this important case.
First, some background. Padilla, who is an american citizen, was declared an enemy combatant by the POTUS, and held in "extreme" isolation in a South Carolina naval brig for 3 and 1/2 years, where he was denied access to counsel for 21 months. The windows to his nine by seven foot cell were blacked out; he had no clock or calendar; meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; and he slept on a steel mattress after a foam mattress and his Koran were taken from him as part of the interrogation plan (source). Until faced with a supreme court challenge in 2006, the current administration claimed it had the right to hold Padilla in military custody "forever."
Asked about the effects of 3 and 1/2 years of solitary confinement on Padilla, Dr. Hegarty had this to say:
...There was something wrong. There was something very "weird" -- was the word one of his siblings used -- something weird about him. There was something not right...the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us...
Also he had developed, actually, a third thing. He had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government....He was very angry that the civil proceedings were "unfair to the commander-in-chief," quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him...
Juan Gonzalez asked Dr. Hegarty if she had ever dealt with someone who had been in isolation for such a long time.
...his was the first time I ever met anybody who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period of time. I mean, the sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within days. And here we had a man who had been in this situation, utterly dependent on his interrogators, who didn't treat him all that nicely, for years.
Does this sound like a defendant who was able to contribute in a meaningful way to his own defense?
He was terrified. For him, the government was all-powerful. The government knew everything. The government knew everything that he was doing. His interrogators would find out every little detail that he revealed. And he would be punished for it.
The prosecution's case, according to the Miami Herald, was "riddled with circumstantial evidence". Their physical evidence consisted of a Mujahedin recruitment form which the CIA said was recovered from an al Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan.
From an editorial written by Padilla's lawyer in today's Washington Post...
The charges brought in Miami contained none of the allegations about the dirty-bomb plot, the apartment buildings or even Padilla's presence in Afghanistan in late 2001. Instead, the government alleged that Padilla had conspired in the 1990s to provide support to overseas jihadists in Bosnia and Chechnya. Commentators called even this weaker case notably thin, but Padilla was found guilty.
And how did Padilla react to the verdict?
Padilla... sat at the defense table, hunched over, staring blankly at the judge as the verdict was read. He betrayed no emotion. (source)
As Dr. Hegarty explained, for Padilla, a life sentence would be a blessing:
I think he would take almost anything rather than go back to that brig.
I guess I'm a little staggered by what took place yesterday, at the way so much of what I love about this country suddenly seemed like it might have never really been there at all.
Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, distinguished between two types of power. The power of the monarch was expressed in spectacular fashion, in public executions that entailed disemboweling someone while still alive and then tearing them apart with horses. That power, according to Foucault, changed in the era of elected governments to something secretive and suspicious, which Foucault illustrated using the visual metaphor of the panopticon. Loading people into bread trucks in the middle of the night and disappearing them, as they used to do in the old soviet union, would be an example of this kind of power.
What then, would Foucault make of the strange melding of these two types of power that is exemplified by the treatment of Jose Padilla? One way to view it would be as another segue, a transition that bodes ill for all of us...
We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play - isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the end bankruptcy.
--Chalmers Johnson
You can read the entire transcript of Amy Goodman's interview with Dr. Hegarty or hear the interview over at Democracy Now.