Jose Padilla in the Pit of Despair

I was extremely disturbed by this story in the NY Times today. We know, of course, that Jose Padilla has not only never been tried for or convicted of any crime, but he was held for years without even being charged with a crime.

Now we see an example of how an "enemy combatant" is treated:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

What purpose could this extremity of sensory deprivation possibly serve? I mean, I can see if Padilla had mutant superpowers, like Magneto...



But, and here I'm admittedly just assuming, Padilla can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, and he can't make a sonic boom out of his ears. Is this kind of extraordinary measure needed because he's so fiercely dangerous? Doesn't sound like it:

One of Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, Orlando do Campo, said, however, that Mr. Padilla was a “completely docile” prisoner. “There was not one disciplinary problem with Jose ever, not one citation, not one act of disobedience,” said Mr. do Campo, who is a lawyer at the Miami federal public defender’s office.

In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

Granted, that's Padilla's defense attorney talking. But it sounds right to me. Assuming Padilla had any fight in him when he was arrested, who would after treatment like this?

This whole sordid story reminds me of nothing so much as that famous experiment anyone who's ever taken Psych 101 will remember:



Harry Harlow showed that baby rhesus monkeys preferred "mothers" covered in terrycloth over stark wire mothers, even when the wire mothers gave them milk. They apparently needed social contact more than they needed food, even. And in a later, more radical, series of experiments, Harlow put monkeys into what he called the Pit of Despair:

Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to six weeks. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.
...
After 30 days, the "total isolates," as they were called, were found to be "enormously disturbed": two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After being isolated for a year, the monkeys were found initially to barely move, didn't explore or play, were incapable of having sexual relations. When put with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied by the other monkeys.

Pieces of furniture.