Is it legal to purposely drive someone crazy?

Jose Padilla had no history of mental illness when President Bush ordered him detained…but he does now.

That’s it in a nutshell, folks. The smartest and best scientists we have confirm that our country’s policies are literally driving people crazy. Warren Richey has a tremendous three-part series spelling it out. (Part 2 here, Part 3 here.)

If this were a movie, we’d call it Gaslight. But in the final act, someone would come in and save the heroine.

For Jose Padilla, there is no final act. His family and friends can hardly bear to see him; his lawyers are focused on keeping him alive. And our government is busy arguing that extreme solitary confinement and other elaborate, prolonged tortures are somehow going to save us.

They’re not.

posted by Sra. Bibliotecaria ⋅ tagged america, civil liberties, ethics, law, war

2 responses to “Is it legal to purposely drive someone crazy?”

1. August 27th, 2007 at 10:01 pm , Cafegirl says:
   

   I’m reading a fascinating book right now that speaks to an aspect of this issue. The book is The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is the researcher who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971, wherein student volunteers were randomly assigned to be guards and prisoners in a fake prison designed specifically for this research. The goal was to study how the “prisoners” responded to the conditions of imprisonment, and a great deal did come up along those lines, but even more important was the effect on the students who had been randomly selected to be guards. Psychologically healthy (they’d all been pre-screened), decent people increasingly began behaving in horrible ways. In this book, Zimbardo reports on and analyzes this famous experiment in much more detail that he has ever made available before, and then makes comparisons to Abu Ghraib and other real situations.

   Very important reading, and very compelling, too. I encourage others to read it.

2. September 3rd, 2007 at 12:54 pm , Sra. Bibliotecaria says:
   

   Thank you for the recommendation. The remarkable thing to me about Zimbardo’s work is that it blows away the idea that it could be “just a few bad apples,” by showing that the actual structure of prison means that otherwise humane and thoughtful people can become monsters.