Torture on Trial.

We all know that George Bush had no intention of ever bringing the case of José Padilla to trial. He was supposed to rot in legal limbo.

However, when his status as an enemy combatant faced a Supreme Court challenge, the Administration abruptly changed course, charged Padilla and transferred him to civilian custody. This was a way of avoiding the Supreme Court ever ruling on the legality of what they were doing. And, indeed, continue to do to the present day.

This decision, taken to avoid a court ruling on their actions, is one that they may - with hindsight - come to regret.

For the way that Padilla has been treated and, by inference, the way all prisoners detained as "enemy combatants" have been treated is now being put on trial.

For Padilla's lawyers are arguing that the treatment meted out to their client has been so severe that it has left him unable to participate in his own defence as he has been driven insane in the hands of his captors.

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 9-by-7-foot 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 defense. 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," that his treatment is irrelevant.

The barbarity and severity of the treatment meted out to "enemy combatants" is at last coming under the spotlight. The techniques used to break Padilla have been the standard operating procedure at Guantanamo Bay for the last five years. Many people subjected to this treatment have simply lost their minds. They have literally gone insane whilst undergoing interrogation techniques that the Bush administration maintains do not constitute torture.

These techniques are now coming under scrutiny in a court in Miami. The prosecution have alleged that Padilla is perfectly sane and fit to stand trial and have argued that the treatment meted out to him is irrelevant to the trial.

However, the judge has disagreed. She thinks the treatment meted out to him is highly relevant.

"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 at the hearings on Padilla's mental state, which begin 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."

What makes this significant is that Padilla is only one of many. The only reason he is on trial is because he is an American citizen. But his case will highlight what has been done to many of the men arrested by the US and held outside of the reach of any form of law, either international or domestic.

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 twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-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 door.

The way that these neo-con thugs have been conducting their War on Terror is finally going to come under public scrutiny, which will give them a considerable problem. It is one thing to talk about "tougher techniques" when interrogating prisoners, most Americans might even approve of something couched in those terms. However, I don't think the American public will maintain that approval once they realise just what has been done to these prisoners in their name.

People have been literally driven insane. Nor has this been accidental.

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."

At last a court will shine some light onto this hideous barbarity. At which point I fully expect the Bush administration to start running around like cockroaches caught under torchlight, claiming they knew little about what was going on and blaming over exuberance on the part of underlings further down the chain of command.

Before that day comes, be sure to acquaint yourself with the list of documents these people produced on the subject of interrogation, the casual way they dispensed with people's rights to trial or protection under any convention, and ask yourself if they seriously didn't know what was happening. Even a cursory reading quickly confirms that they were allowing themselves these arbitrary powers for a reason.

And that reason was to legitimise torture.

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Tags: José Padilla, Guantanamo Bay, torture, enemy combatents, Supreme Court