Jose Padilla is shown in this undated file photo. A federal judge refused to dismiss the terrorism support charges against alleged al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla on Friday March 23, 2007 , rejecting defense claims that his 3-and-a-half years in custody as an enemy combatant violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial. (AP Photo/NBC News, File)
By Saul Landau
Counterpunch
March 29, 2007
Bush behavior--practicing torture, violating human rights and wrapping itself in secrecy while preaching the opposite--has given deceit a bad name. W didn't begin the double speak and double standards patter, however.
In 1971, US troops and bombers routinely massacred Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians. In that same year, Cuban police arrested a poet, Heberto Padilla, without charging him. Hundreds of US and European intellectuals and academics who had opposed the US wars reserved a special kind of outrage when unsubstantiated rumors spread that Padilla had undergone brutal torture. Petitions circulated demanding that Cuba stop torturing this great poet, although no one had seen or heard any direct evidence of such mistreatment.
After 38 days, Cuba's state security cops sprung Padilla, who then delivered his notorious speech (1930s Stalin purge style imitation confession) to writers and artists, condemning his "bourgeois" and "counterrevolutionary behavior", and naming other writers as also responsible for their misguided comportment. It didn't matter whether he invented the speech as a kind of literary ruse to mock state security or the cops had pressured him to deliver this mea culpa. Padilla became an instant pariah --a fink and coward -- in Cuban intellectual circles.
His book of poems, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), won the UNEAC (Artists and Writers Union) poetry prize in 1968. Cuba published the book with a foreword by UNEAC reprimanding Padilla for his behavior.
Over the ensuing months and years after his arrest, I talked with Padilla who laughed at the campaign to stop his supposed torture. He had suffered a severe nervous reaction to getting arrested, he recounted the cops panicked over his stomach pains and they rushed him to a seaside resort, fed him yogurt and provided on-call doctors.
Throughout the 1970s, Cuban intellectuals would cross the street when they saw Padilla. A few felt sorry for him and his reputation-blanching mistake: making the mea culpa statement. Padilla admitted to me that the security people had behaved considerately. But we agreed they had no right to arrest him--just because he had written and spoken dissenting words in brilliant poems and bad mouthed Fidel and the revolution to foreign visitors. His arrest correctly provoked leading world intellectuals to respond in outrage. Cuba deserved condemnation for having arrested Padilla, but not for torturing him since he wasn't tortured or threatened with torture.
Padilla lived quietly in Havana for several years afterwards, receiving a good salary from the state. In 1980, he moved to the United States where he taught at Princeton and then at Auburn University. He died of a heart attack in 2000, a lonely man.
Another Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Jose of Puerto Rican descent, holds no claim to the intellectual spotlight. Intellectuals have not rallied to the cause of this former street gang member who converted to Islam. In February, in a Miami courtroom, the world public learned--those few who read about it--that after September 11 US interrogators used "unusual" methods to "break" prisoners.
Unlike Cuban state security who fed Heberto yogurt, the US torturers offered Jose sleep interruption, sound blasting and mind altering drugs. They broke Padilla, but not exactly in the way they wanted. The Bushies had planned to try him as an international terrorist, but his lawyers argued that the long years of torture while in captivity had left him insane and therefore not fit to stand trial. The judge disagreed, but the gruesome details are starting to emerge.
In May 2002 US agents grabbed Padilla at Chicago's O'Hare airport, classified him "enemy combatant," and threw him into a tiny, windowless cell in a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. They shackled Padilla, covered his eyes with goggles and his ears with headphones -- for more than 3 years. His interrogators forbade him contact with lawyers or family members, but they did keep bright lights turned on him and blasted his auditory nerves with loud sounds. Padilla claims they injected him "truth serum," or, perhaps as his lawyers believe LSD or PCP.
Two professionals examined him and determined he had been physically destroyed, and thus unable to assist in his own defense. He thinks of his lawyers as interrogators, not as defenders. As Naomi Klein wrote (The Nation, March 12, 2007), in order to prove that "the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged," his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy brig. The government strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent," that the treatment he received is irrelevant.
Compare the intellectual outrage in Heberto Padilla's case with the relatively muted response by leading intellectuals and artists to Jose Padilla's treatment. The outcry of human rights violations around the Cuban poet was literally deafening; the silence on Jose Padilla rings louder still. His case drags on as torture claims from US prisons multiply...
(click
here to view entire report)
Peruvian opposition leader Ollanta Humala
