WASHINGTON — A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of isolation and sensory deprivation in a military brig in Charleston, S.C., according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
The Bush administration ordered Yaser Esam Hamdi — the subject of the documents — and Jose Padilla, both U.S. citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident, to be held in military jails as “enemy combatants” and for years subjected them to interrogations without criminal charges.
The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home, as well as contact with anyone other than guards and interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months and, for years, were forbidden even minor distractions, such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.
“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,” an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of Hamdi in 2002.
Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic got the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Associated Press
