Jailers Testify About Padilla’s Confinement
(TM note: Jose Padilla is an American citizen who was arrested in the U.S., designated an enemy combatant, and thrown in solitary confinement in a military brig for three years and eight months without legal proceedings or representation. The Military Commissions Act has now approved ex post facto the imprisonment of any person designated an enemy combatant by the government, meaning American citizens can now be imprisoned by executive fiat.)
By DEBORAH SONTAG
New York Times
MIAMI, Feb. 27 — As Jose Padilla dropped his head and grew still, a senior official from the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., testified on Tuesday in federal court here that he had twice observed Mr. Padilla weeping in the electronically monitored cell where the military detained him for three years and eight months.
The brig’s technical director, Sanford E. Seymour, also said that Mr. Padilla, an American citizen who was designated an enemy combatant in 2002, sometimes slept on a steel bunk without a mattress, that the windows in his 80-square-foot cell were blackened and that brig employees covered up their nametags around him.
Mr. Seymour said that Mr. Padilla, a Muslim, occasionally visited with an imam and that his Koran was taken from him periodically; that he sometimes went outside to shoot baskets or sunbathe; and that when Mr. Padilla believed he had been administered LSD, it was really a flu shot.
These scattershot revelations, elicited by Mr. Padilla’s lawyers in a hearing of sharply limited scope, did not add up to a comprehensive portrait of Mr. Padilla’s time in the brig. But they were nonetheless significant, marking the first time Mr. Padilla’s military jailers were forced to speak publicly about the conditions of his secretive confinement without charges.
(Continued here.)
By DEBORAH SONTAG
New York Times
MIAMI, Feb. 27 — As Jose Padilla dropped his head and grew still, a senior official from the naval brig in Charleston, S.C., testified on Tuesday in federal court here that he had twice observed Mr. Padilla weeping in the electronically monitored cell where the military detained him for three years and eight months.
The brig’s technical director, Sanford E. Seymour, also said that Mr. Padilla, an American citizen who was designated an enemy combatant in 2002, sometimes slept on a steel bunk without a mattress, that the windows in his 80-square-foot cell were blackened and that brig employees covered up their nametags around him.
Mr. Seymour said that Mr. Padilla, a Muslim, occasionally visited with an imam and that his Koran was taken from him periodically; that he sometimes went outside to shoot baskets or sunbathe; and that when Mr. Padilla believed he had been administered LSD, it was really a flu shot.
These scattershot revelations, elicited by Mr. Padilla’s lawyers in a hearing of sharply limited scope, did not add up to a comprehensive portrait of Mr. Padilla’s time in the brig. But they were nonetheless significant, marking the first time Mr. Padilla’s military jailers were forced to speak publicly about the conditions of his secretive confinement without charges.
(Continued here.)
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