On the Jose Padilla Case
Jose Padilla, as you may know, is an American citizen detained by the Bush Administration for being an enemy combatant. He was aggressively treated/tortured, and since then he's been using the legal system to fight back (in his first two years of incarceration, he didn't have access to a lawyer).
How the courts treat Padilla will set a precedent on future hearings, and may even have an impact on the Anti-Habeas Corpus bill that was passed before the November elections. So it's in the Bush Administration's best interests to "nip this thing in the bud" as soon as possible.
I guess that's why they've decided to us the "torturing him must have made him crazy" argument: I mean, if he's crazy, how can his testimony be trusted in a court of law, right?
Now here's where I have to get A Few Good Men on that argument: If the "techniques" used are supposed to be considered successful in getting detainees to reveal information, yet they also make the person mentally unstable, how can anything a person say after undergoing such "harsh tactics" be believed? Are they trying to say in the first twenty minutes or so, the person is lucid and can't tell a lie, than right after that they go "Coocoo for Coco Puffs?" C'mon; you can't have it both ways.
Either Padilla was sane and tortured, or he was driven mad and therefore any information he gave is suspect. And if that's true, these methods for extracting information need to be re-examined.
How the courts treat Padilla will set a precedent on future hearings, and may even have an impact on the Anti-Habeas Corpus bill that was passed before the November elections. So it's in the Bush Administration's best interests to "nip this thing in the bud" as soon as possible.
I guess that's why they've decided to us the "torturing him must have made him crazy" argument: I mean, if he's crazy, how can his testimony be trusted in a court of law, right?
Now here's where I have to get A Few Good Men on that argument: If the "techniques" used are supposed to be considered successful in getting detainees to reveal information, yet they also make the person mentally unstable, how can anything a person say after undergoing such "harsh tactics" be believed? Are they trying to say in the first twenty minutes or so, the person is lucid and can't tell a lie, than right after that they go "Coocoo for Coco Puffs?" C'mon; you can't have it both ways.
Either Padilla was sane and tortured, or he was driven mad and therefore any information he gave is suspect. And if that's true, these methods for extracting information need to be re-examined.
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