Padilla Injected with a "Truth Serum"

Further confirmation that MKULTRA never died:

Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. He was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured this 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 defence. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors.

And Klein has clearly done her homework:

Now that his mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. 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.

Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a declassified 1963 CIA manual for interrogating "resistant sources" was based on the findings of the agency's notorious MK-Ultra program. In the 1950s, it funnelled about $25 million to scientists to research "unusual techniques of interrogation." One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal's McGill University.

Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960, Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation "produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia."

There is no need to go so far back to prove that the U.S. military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army's field manual, reissued just last year, states, "Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior," as well as "significant psychological distress."

If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the U.S. government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man's mental state. It is the whole system of U.S. psychological torture.

The Darkest Corner of the Mind

From George Monbiot's article:

From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man’s mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds – physical or mental – produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man’s power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.

President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the “values of civilised nations”: terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation’s interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.

Torture doesn't always leave cuts and bruises -- and still the scars are deep, permanent, and life-destroying.

(Thanks to a reader for the Monbiot link)

This is what waterboarding looks like

Waterboarding -- it's not about gaining information.

It's about eliciting confessions.

From the article:

Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed specifically to generate a (usually false) confession, not to obtain genuinely actionable intel. This isn't a matter of sacrificing moral values to keep us safe; it's sacrificing moral values for no purpose whatsoever.