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In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront.
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK
Tuesday 12 December 2006
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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.
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José 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 more than 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 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.
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