The Systematic Destruction of Jose Padilla, a diary posted yesterday by stephen soldz, detailed the inhumane and indefensible treatment of Jose Padilla, before he was convicted of any crime. Padilla was subject to an program of sensory deprivation that rendered him a docile as a "piece of furniture." His mistreatment raises questions about the motivations of his tormentors, as Padilla's competence to stand trial is now in question.
The people who oversaw Padilla's torture are unlikely to be mad scientists or horror movie Nazis. How then do we explain the persistence of their dehumanization and abuse long past the point of diminishing returns, indeed past the point of any returns? What possible purpose did Padilla's torture serve?
One possible explanation is that Padilla was fodder for a continuing program of mind control experiments. This may also be the ultimate purpose of the CIA's network of black prisons as the CIA has long had a keen interest in mind control research and the agency has been operating on a very long leash since late 2001.
Our gov't has a long and proven history of human experimentation on non-consenting subjects, including children and prisoners. One typical aim of mind control, particularly with children, is the creation of multiple compartmented personalities through the dissociation induced by infliction of massive trauma.
There seems to be no point in creating compartmentalized fragmented personalities in the mind of Jose Padilla. If he is ever released, he is unlikely to ever be in a position of usefulness to anyone. His traumatization is likely to have made him a permanent member of the "tin foil hat brigade," unable to reliably bear witness against his tormentors because of the permanent damage they inflicted.
With Padilla, the ultimate aim appears to have been the destruction of his soul, insofar as a soul can be quantified through scientific methodology. Here I refer to the end of his existence as a self-aware, functioning human being, including his capacity to relate to other human beings in any meaningful way. But why?
The answer to this question lies not in social science or the archives of human experimentation, but in the work of Michel Foucault.
Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, writes about the shift in the visibility of power with the end of monarchies and authoritarian rule by divine right. In the old system, an offense against the king was punished by being drawn and quartered, the power of the monarch made visible in its spectacular effect on a human body which was literally torn apart. With the rise of republics like our own, a different kind of power evolved, suspicious and invisible. For Foucault this kind of power was symbolized by the Panopticon, a model prison where prisoners were rendered powerless through their unceasing exposure to the inhuman and emotionless gaze of invisible and limitless authority. This is the type of power exemplified by the agencies like the Stasi in East Germany.
It is not in the nature of a dictator's atavistic, limitless, and pathological appetites to be satisfied by the exercise of invisible authority alone. Few of them can resist the allure of the hammer of the gods, in the form of the regressive and very visible exercise of power typified by a public drawing and quartering. The result, in modern times, is the contradictory melding of spectacular and invisible power. In this formulation of power, invisibility is secured not just through stealth but through the imposition of blindness by force and with impunity. It is the type of power that expresses itself in a new and scientistically rationalized form of drawing and quartering, such as the ostensibly legal rending of the quantifiable yet invisible human soul, the rendering, in the sense of the abattoir, of a human being, the dissolving of personal identity and memory, and the methodical destruction of Jose Padilla.
It can be argued that the type of power described here is transitional, part of the process by which dictatorship is incubated within a democratic host. If this is the case, we have little to look forward to from the next phase.