From the administration that managed to make Iraq WORSE than it was under Saddam comes more evidence--in pictures and video, apparently--that we're being governed by the equivalent of the Stanford Prison Experiment guards:
To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.
What's amazing to me is that it's isn't as if the standard prison experience, if you can call it that, is any sort of picnic, contrary to the batty claims of wingnuttery (or the occasional genuine psycho like Richard Speck). Incarceration--the legal, habeas corpus variety, complete with hearings re: bail, charges, evidence, etc., leading up to trial, isn't a picnic, and I don't expect it TO be. And the government, far from being a weakling entity held in check by the social contract and other legislation, is quite powerful. It's not a good idea to get on its bad side, as Mr. Padilla--and numerous others incarcerated, or on parole--can attest.
To be honest, I have no idea if Mr. Padilla is an evil mastermind or unfortunate wretch...but neither does anyone else at this point. And Team Bush has managed to, in their blustering igorance, thoroughly poison the situation, well above and well beyond what was already an impossibly tainted legal situation anyway.
In other words, their "solution" is the equivalent of throwing gasoline on a fire. Come to think of it, that same metaphor comes to mind for just about every policy aim they've embarked on. And, as so many of us on the reality-based side of things have noted, we're going to get stuck cleaning the resulting mess...
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