Padilla's Blink Code

The other day, the New York Times published highly disturbing video footage of the government transporting Jose Padilla from his solitary confinement to a dentist appointment. He was shackled, subjected to visual and auditory sensory deprivation, and escorted by three guards in full riot gear. Keep in mind, this is a man who has been in custody for over three years without incident and, for most of that time, without charges.



Reacting to this footage, a commenter over at Professor Ann Althouse's blog made an obvious point:

There is no reason at all to make the accused wear a blindfold on the way to the dentist. . . . this is a case of overkill that says far more about those who ordered it, than it says about the accused.

To which the good professor responded:

Perhaps there is a fear that he will communicate in code by blinking.

Her commenter persisted:

With who? Mr. Padilla has been held in solitary confinement for years, and it's hard to imagine who would know he was going to the dentist and who and how they could continue to communicate with him. This seems to go to extremes. Frankly, I believe the blacked-out goggles and the attached sound suppressing device (so that he also couldn't hear anything) are a sadistic way of continuing his sensory deprivation.

But the esteemed professor was undeterred:

Since he was being filmed, anyone might get to see him. I think there's good reason to think that members of conspiracies have a code for signaling to each other after they are captives.

That's an excellent point. Padilla's co-conspirators, wherever they are, have probably been lying low for the last three years, patiently waiting for the right sequence of blinks from Padilla to indicate to them that it's time to commence . . . um . . . what exactly? Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's sinister, and we just can't take any chances when dealing with this sort of terrorist mastermind. But just who is this resourceful practitioner of blink code? How did we find him and what have we learned about him through torture interrogation of his alleged co-conspirators?

[Abu] Zubaydah . . . identified Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes. But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

Well there you go. Maybe that's what he would have blinked to the world had he not been blindfolded, the secrets to his 'human centrifuge' technique. We really dodged a bullet there.

Alright, that's enough snark. It's just that the Padilla case is so surreal to me that sometimes I don't even know what to say about it. It's unthinkable to me that a U.S. citizen could be picked up off the street in Chicago and held incommunicado for years by his own government. It's unthinkable to me that the U.S. government would subject one of its own citizens to years of mind-ravaging solitary confinement and sensory deprivation (and, allegedly, torture and drugging), all without even charging the person with a crime. Yet that's exactly what happened to Mr. Padilla.

Where is the outrage? What's the matter with people like Althouse? What's the matter with our media? Why is this not THE issue that dominates our political discourse? Do any of our constitutional rights have any meaning when the government claims the power to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely and without any process whatsoever? As Glenn put it the other day:

[W]hy isn't this most patent violation of our country's core principles, whereby our fellow citizens are being imprisoned and tortured by our government with no charges, prompting genuine anger?

It should. There's no excuse.