You’ve expressed this so much better than I could…

Naomi, your articles are REAL WORK and they must take you away from valuable family time and I fully understand your choice of a sabatical.

But, oh, we have been missing you so bad…

they sensorilly deprive you
then over stimulate you
until you are putty in their hands,

you become incapacitated & cannot understand or defend yourself against their charges,

so you stay locked up until you’re well enough to stand trial…

It should be illegal for A government official to proclaim a person’s guilt before the case is tried in court if it isn’t already.

She is smart, funny (listen to her story about her visually challenged grandma’s driving if you don’t believe me!)and most importantly she does her homework and speaks with clarity.

My secret fantasy is that Muslim militants capture Cheney, Bush, Gonsalez, Feith, Perle, Rummy, and especially General Miller and give them a taste of their own medicine. Then the torturewrs release tapes of the whole affair on Youtube so that all the world can see what a bunch of macho patriots for profit behave like.

Okay it’s a little over the top but if the lady judge lives long enough to get the truth out from the torturers (give ‘em immunity it’s the civillian leadership we need to lock up anyway) that might be a more realistic consolation.

Jose Padilla was John Ashcroft’s original poster boy test case to show how ordinary American citizen civilians (who convert to Islam and consort with foreign jihadis so as to be labeled an enemy combatant by our great Commander in Chief) could be incarcerated indefinitely on US soil, in US military custody, and have no recourse to invoke the Bill of Rights in any federal court, just like them foreign rag heads.

But wait! Courtesy of a twisted course of litigational events and shifts in the political winds spanning several years, Mr. Padilla eventually gets re-designated back away from potential trial before a military tribunal, and into a more ordinary federal criminal prosecution, to be conducted in ordinary federal court (albeit on conspiracy charges notably far less dramatic than the dirty-nuke-in-downtown-Chicago bomb plot that was trumpeted to the media by the Justice Department at the time of Padilla’s arrest).

Like the “American Taliban” John Walker Lind, there is evidence of torture.

Like “the missing 9/11 highjacker” Zacharias Moussasaui, there are obvious mental competency issues.

But if Naomi Klein is reading the tea leaves right in Miami, this time there’s going to be a real evidentiary hearing (rather than a surreal courtroom spectacle), with real witnesses testifying about the real world conditions of the defendant Padilla’s confinement, all in order to determine if those conditions have driven him crazy – too crazy to stand trial at all.

How truly bizarre.

Lurking in the background is the ultimate question of remedy, should the Court conclude Mr. Padilla currently does lack the mental competency necessary to meet the required Constitutional standard to assist in his own defense.

In such circumstances, do we order the accused into a mental institution until his sanity is restored, and then bring him back to stand trial?

If the accused’s sanity cannot be restored, does that mean the government can indeed incarcerate detainees forever this way, and never give them a day in court – the precise, ominous unconstitutional evil that the Gitmo gulag was calculated to create – because the government’s own torture policies have driven the accused mad?

Madmen order the interrogation of madmen, and call it gathering useful intelligence.

To me, the whole thing reeks of Kafka, with a dollop of Catch-22 on the side.

Enough to drive anybody as crazy as an outhouse rat.

I love your articles and it is good to see you back (after having a child, U read somewhere) I alwys read your articles: they are so brillant

Thanks from us all!