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Cruel & Unusual

Published by marco on

The article, My Brother Faces a Lifetime of Solitary Confinement on a Spurious Terror Conviction by Mariam Abu-Ali (AlterNet), tells of a young student’s life in an American super-max prison in Colorado. He spent two years in a Saudi Prison, a stay during which a confession was extracted using torture. His stay in the U.S. is hardly better, where he’s

“[…] under 23-hour lockdown, in a 7x12 cell. He has one recreational hour in which he must get strip-searched if he wishes to leave his cell. He gets one unscheduled telephone call a month to his family.”

You may not care how he was convicted; only that he was. You may have the luxury of accepting the mistakes of a fallibly human justice system and vow to do better. You may see the PATRIOT act and its ramifications as a necessary evil. You may not even see these ramifications as evil.

All that is neither here nor there for the purposes of this article.

The question to which this article seeks an answer is this: How does treatment of human beings in this way comply with the stricture against “cruel and unusual punishment” guaranteed by the eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?

Neither of the prisoners discussed in the article are physically abused—mostly because they are so isolated, but that hardly stops the U.S. from endlessly patting itself on the back for its restraint—but the mental torment is widely acknowledged to be unbearable for human beings. In a famous example, when José Padilla finally came to trial late last year, he was a jibbering mess completely incapable of communicating with anyone at all.

And yet, not a peep about cruel and unusual punishment from the vaunted U.S. liberal press.

Ahmed, the gentleman on which the linked article focuses, is serving a life sentence of solitary confinement, under so-called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs).

“The SAMs limit certain “privileges,” including, but not limited to, correspondence, visits, media interviews and telephone use. SAMs also restrict conversations between inmates and their lawyers by allowing them to be monitored by prison officials, violating attorney-client privilege and depriving inmates of their right to effective counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.”

So it’s not just the the eighth, but also the sixth amendment being thrown overboard. And to what end? Assume that these men were not arrested on flimsy evidence; assume that they are not being squirreled away by a government ashamed of what it does in response to its primitive fear. Why solitary? Why these Magneto-like[1] incarceration conditions? Neither of these gentlemen are Lex Luthor[2] and their purported “team”, Al Qaeda, is not S.P.E.C.T.R.E.[3] What is wrong with America that it fears so much when it is so powerful? What is wrong with America that it punishes so extremely?


[1] The villain from the X-Men universe whose control over all forms of metal forces his captors to isolate him in a free-floating cube of plastic.
[2] The villain from the Superman universe whose evil genius and penchant for planning make him an omnipresent danger.
[3] The villainous organization from the James Bond universe with a tremendous, globe-girdling infrastructure and a planning capability equal to that of Lex Luthor.