Military Officer Warned that Hamdi Nearing Insanity Due to Brig Conditions
A military officer warned that a suspected enemy combatant being held in a U.S. naval brig was nearing insanity because of isolation and sensory deprivation, according to newly released documents.
Yaser Esam Hamdi, a onetime U.S. citizen who was eventually released to Saudi Arabia, was one of three men being held in military jails as enemy combatants. A Navy brig official warned that Hamdi needed some kind of incentive for good behavior “to keep him from whacking out on me,” the Associated Press reports.
“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,” he wrote. AP obtained the document from the American Civil Liberties Union, which got it under the Freedom of Information Act.
Hamdi and the other men were denied access to lawyers and mail, deprived of natural light for months, and denied minor privileges such as a soccer ball or dictionary, the AP story says.
The ACLU says in a press release that the documents it obtained show the military brigs housing Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri were ordered to follow the same operating procedure used at Guantanamo Bay. The group has posted portions of the documents (PDF).
The ACLU obtained the documents with the help of Jonathan Freiman, a lawyer with a human rights clinic at Yale Law School. “Guantanamo was designed as a law-free zone, a place where the government could do whatever it wanted without having to worry about whether it was legal,” Freiman said in the press release. “It didn’t take long for that sort of lawlessness to be brought home to our own country. Who knows how much further America would have gone if the Supreme Court hadn’t stepped in to stop incommunicado detentions in 2004?”
