Blinkered Stupidity

Just to go back to this disturbing story about the deliberate attempt to mentally destroy Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was not charged with anything for years while being held in complete solitary confinement and made to go mad. The New York Times report shows that, even when Padilla was allowed to leave his cell, he was kept in a state of sensory deprivation.

“Today is May 21,” a naval official declared to a camera videotaping the event. “Right now we’re ready to do a root canal treatment on Jose Padilla, our enemy combatant.”

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.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

Not only is this dehumanizing and unAmerican, it gives us less of an opportunity to actually convict this guy of the charges they eventually brought, since all of this is against the law. But, in what has to be the most absurd blog post of the year, law professor Ann Althouse (that's right, remember that after you read this, she's a LAW PROFESSOR) tried to justify this behavior:

Perhaps there is a fear that he will communicate in code by blinking... I'm not saying Padilla deserves to be treated the way he has over the years, but I am responding to the assertion that there is absolutely no conceivable reason for blindfolding him. Plainly, I have refuted that.

Yeah, plainly. She made the reasonable statement that Jose Padilla, in confinement for years, invented a system of code through blinking and distributed it to his supporters and colleagues, I guess through prison guards since nobody else saw him at that time. It's perfectly logical.

If you're a lunatic.