Attywood
Monday, December 4, 2006

Apparently not, when the U.S. government puts blackened goggles on terror suspect Jose Padilla -- for a trip to the dentist:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

Look, on one hand, the government's more dramatic claims about Padilla and dirty bombs have never panned out. That said, he stands accused of plotting terroristic acts against the United States, and so if that's true, he should be tried as a criminal, and if convicted, he should serve a long time in prison.

But seriously, what is accomplished by this kind of crap? It doesn't make America any safer -- in fact, it does just the opposite, by needlessly dropping respect for the U.S. even lower in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of Muslims.

More importantly, it's just flat out immoral and wrong -- regardless of what anyone else thinks.

We should be ashamed.

UPDATED: More commentary from Glenn Greenwald and from Digby.