Reading Them Their Rights…

“Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America,” Palin said, “and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

Palin’s response to Obama’s supporting of the Supreme Court ruling providing rights of habeas corpus to gitmo detainees.

It seems though, that the mindset which has led us to try to steal the most basic legal rights from our enemies, is trying to steal their human rights as well.

A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and provided to The Associated Press.

While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States….

…The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.

“I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we’re working with borrowed time,” an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of prisoner Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. “I would like to have some form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me….”

The paperwork show uniformed officials at the military brigs growing increasingly uncomfortable and then alarmed that they were being directed to handle their prisoners under the rules that governed Guantanamo.

The authors and recipients of the e-mails are censored from the documents. They appear to be going to either military or Pentagon legal counsel and policy offices.

The documents show that some officials at the Charleston brig were deeply skeptical about the mandate that Guantanamo rules should apply in the United States, a decision made by the defense secretary’s office, according to the documents.

-Marc-