Reply #10: Chicago Tribune: Padilla sues ex-Justice official over torture [View All]

[L. Coyote]

Padilla sues ex-Justice official over torture
By Karoun Demirjian | Tribune staff - January 4, 2008 - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-padilla080104,1,6749180.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true


In May 2002, Padilla was arrested coming through Chicago's O'Hare International Airport with $10,000 cash and a list of suspected Al Qaeda agents. Soon after, he was held in New York and later taken to a military brig in South Carolina, where he remained for three and a half years without being charged-because, the Bush administration argued, he was a known terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda who was behind a plot to attack the U.S. with a so-called dirty bomb, or radioactive device.

While in detention, Padilla alleges, in this suit and others filed previously, he was routinely subjected to torture that was authorized as legal and defensible by Yoo.

Those include being subjected to noxious odors, extreme temperatures, sleep and sensory depravation, and standing in painful stress positions in a fashion similar to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He also says he was given what he thought were hallucinogenic drugs, was routinely threatened with physical punishment, death, or translocation to Guantanamo, and forbade access to a Koran.

Padilla first challenged his detention in New York, and won a case directed at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 2004, but the Supreme Court later remanded the case to a lower court in South Carolina ................