Padilla

As a matter of technique, we don’t need the kind of gruesome physical spectacle of torture depicted in the opening pages of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. In Foucault’s account, Damiens is publicly drawn and quartered in 1757, his limbs hacked at the ligaments in order to complete the task, and the living torso thrown onto the pyre. Today, we have American treatment of the now “mentally incompetent” Jose Padilla.

According to court papers filed by Padilla’s lawyers, for the first two years of his confinement, Padilla was held in total isolation. He heard no voice except his interrogator’s. His 9-by-7 foot cell had nothing in it: no window even to the corridor, no clock or watch to orient him in time.

Padilla’s meals were delivered through a slot in the door. He was either in bright light for days on end or in total darkness. He had no mattress or pillow on his steel pallet; loud noises interrupted his attempts to sleep.

Sometimes it was very cold, sometimes hot. He had nothing to read or to look at. Even a mirror was taken away. When he was transported, he was blindfolded and his ears were covered with headphones to screen out all sound. In short, Padilla experienced total sensory deprivation.

During lengthy interrogations, his lawyers allege, Padilla was forced to sit or stand for long periods in stress positions. They say he was hooded and threatened with death. The isolation was so extreme that, according to court papers, even military personnel at the prison expressed great concern about Padilla’s mental status…

Padilla’s lawyers contend that as a result of his isolation and interrogation, their client is so mentally damaged that he is unable to assist in his own defense. He is so passive and fearful now, they maintain, that he is “like a piece of furniture…”

…there are even some within the government who think it might be best if Padilla were declared incompetent and sent to a psychiatric prison facility. As one high-ranking official put it, “the objective of the government always has been to incapacitate this person.” [i]

This is a product of what the 1963 CIA manual calls “homeostatic derangement,” “the debility-dependence-dread state” that causes intense fear and anxiety, as well as a sense of extreme guilt.[ii] The technique is designed to turn a human life into pure instrumentality. This form of torture has the political advantage of naturally concealing itself from a public still accustomed to spectacle. Indeed, this is one of the objectives. There is nothing to see in a barren room inside a human mind driven mad. The spectacle is itself coldly instrumental without object.

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[i] Nina Totenberg. “U.S. Faces Major Hurdles in Prosecuting Padilla.” NPR. January 6, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6682846. As this article discusses, Padilla was originally accused publicly by the United States government of planning a “dirty bomb” nuclear attack. This accusation was later downgraded and shuffled in sequential steps along with his legal status. Padilla is now under indictment for allegedly helping to plan Chechen rebel attacks on Russian troops.

[ii] Mark Danner. Torture and Truth. (NewYork: New York Review of Books, 2004). Pp. 17-19.