Solitary Confinement as Torture

 

On January 22, 2009, President Obama issued executive orders outlawing torture. It is now January 2010, and solitary confinement, a form of torture, continues.

 

The words of Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor and regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, are stark reminders that torture continues, not only overseas but here, in the United States.  Following are verbatim excerpts from an interview with Dr. Gawande on the radio program, Democracy Now.  http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2010/1

DR. ATUL GAWANDE.....And what I did was I looked at the experience of hostages—John McCain, who spent years in solitary confinement in Vietnam, Terry Anderson, the journalist who was kidnapped in Lebanon. And their experience, the science of what happens to people deprived of social contact, is they have to fight for their sanity. And many lose their sanity. That reality, that we are social beings in our physiology, led me to ask the question, is solitary confinement, the way we’re practicing it now, torture? And you can’t read the cases—and I describe the cases of both hostages and people who are in prisons—and conclude that, number one, those experiences are different. They’re the same. Number two, you can’t conclude that it’s not torture.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: What happens exactly? I mean, there’s a physical change in the brain. Explain.

DR. ATUL GAWANDE: Yeah. They, physicians, took people who were confined in Serbia in concentration camps under conditions of isolation, and some of them were not in isolation, but beaten. And they did brain scans, and they found that people who had sustained head injuries had the same degree of brain injury as people who had sustained solitary confinement for long periods.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring up a case, ask you about the case of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a young US citizen who’s been held in twenty-three-hour-a-day solitary confinement for nearly three years. He’s charged with providing material support to al-Qaeda in a case that rests on the testimony and actions of an old acquaintance who turned government informant after his own arrest. Hashmi’s period in solitary confinement is believed to be one of the longest ever for a prisoner before trial.

We spoke to his brother Faisal last summer. This is how he described the prison conditions of [Syed Fahad] Hashmi, who’s really just down the road from us right here in New York.

FAISAL HASHMI: He has not gone to trial. He’s a pretrial detainee. In a civilized society, a pretrial detainee kept in complete solitary confinement for two years. Within his own cell, he’s restricted in the movements he’s allowed to do. He’s not allowed to talk out loud within his own cell. So, imagine for yourself, you’re a pretrial detainee, not convicted of anything, and you’re held in these conditions where you’re not allowed to move, not allowed to talk. ( For the complete interview go to:  http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2010/1  Scroll down to the program of January 5, 2010.)

If President Obama states that the U.S. will outlaw torture, then solitary confinement must be outlawed in observance of the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.  In addition, holding someone for over two years without going to court flies in the face of the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and the Sixth Amendment’s right to a speedy trial.

 

Now all of these protections of the Constitution may be moot as still in place are such draconian directives as the Military Commissions Act of 2009¹ and Special Administrative Measures. Since there has been more publicity on the Military Commissions Act, I will focus here on Special Administrative Measures which “became effective on May 17, 1996, (in which) the Attorney General may authorize the Director of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to implement "special administrative measures" upon written notification to BOP "that there is a substantial risk that a prisoner's communications or contacts with persons could result in death or serious bodily injury to persons, or substantial damage to property that would entail the risk of death or serious bodily injury to persons." Such measures include administrative detention, limits on correspondence,   phone calls, visits with family members and other outside groups including the press. http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usam/title9/24mcrm.htm

 

After you have read the full text (url given above) hopefully you will be moved to contact your congresspersons, Attorney-General Holder askdoj@usdoj.gov and President Obama http://www.whitehouse.gov/Contact/.

 

The case of Syed Fahad Hashmi.is particularly troubling.  From looking at his case he seems to have been innocently caught up in a net of coercion, implicated by an acquaintance who hoped he might get a lighter sentence. Who in the Obama Administration will find justice for this young man?

 
by Betsy Wolf-Graves

Additional References:

 

Gawandi,A,  Hellhole The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture? New Yorker, March 30, 2009’ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz0cBYiO5Sv

 

Grassian, Stuart, Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement, 1993

 

Hedges, Chris, One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists, December 28, 2009

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_day_well_all_be_terrorists_

 

Theoharis, Jeanne, Guantanamo at Home, The Nation, April 2, 2009

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/theoharis

 

http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/5285-update-on-our-brave-new-slavery-obama-kiboshes-the-great-charter-further.html

 

¹http://writ.news.findlaw.com/mariner/20091104.html  (Military Commissions Act of 2009)