America is going fascist

[Nur]

America is going fascist

 

The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting short for action

 

By Michael Nenonen

 

12/04/07 "The Republic" -- -- Reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later than I thought.

 

Many of us have watched the Bush regime’s actions with a growing feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we’ve seen all of this before, but we aren’t sure where. We’re confused because what we’re seeing conflicts with unexamined and deeply held assumptions we have about American freedom. Wolf’s short but meticulously documented book shows that what is happening in America has indeed happened many times before, not in the United States, but rather in places like Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn’t understand why they didn’t recognize where they were heading before they passed the point of no return.

 

It's shifting fast

 

Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a “fascist shift” from an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian society. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over. These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies.

 

1. They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers.

 

2. They establish secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply and soon imprison “opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers, publishers, and journalists.”

 

3. They develop a paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint.

 

4. They set up a system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens.

 

5. They infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens’ groups.

 

6. They arbitrarily detain and release citizens, especially at borders.

 

7. They target key individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to ensure their complicity or silence.

 

8. They take control of the press.

 

9. They publicly equate dissent with treason.

 

10. Finally, they suspend the rule of law.

 

All of these strategies are being employed in America today.

 

Consider the evidence

 

The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and paranoia.

 

The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA “Black Sites” torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo’s inmates are innocent victims of mass arrests. The inmates are designated as “enemy combatants” who have no rights under international or American law. And there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, “the president has the power to call any US citizen an ‘enemy combatant’. He has the power to define what ‘enemy combatant’ means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define ‘enemy combatant’ any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial.” She points out that while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the final stages of a fascist shift.

 

They're called "mercenaries"

 

Military contractors are the regime’s paramilitary force. Blackwater’s mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America’s most horrific police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with impunity. Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds of armed security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and there’s evidence that they fired on civilians. Blackwater’s business plan calls for their use in future disasters and emergencies throughout the United States, and it’s supported by some of the biggest powerbrokers in America.

 

American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to wiretap citizens’ telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations, booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously confidential information about Americans to the state.

 

Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens’ groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups’ solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.

 

Political opponents listed

 

America’s Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to security searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.

 

US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants who’ve disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward Churchill. The regime’s supporters have organized campaigns to damage the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the president and his policies.

 

The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the media, and it’s ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high. The Bush administration’s outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed lies that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war. Worse than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death by American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes, “The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. . . . In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.” The goal of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to create “a new reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.”

 

Dissent = treason

 

In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young said “Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be hanged.” This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration’s revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century’s slumber.

 

And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated “Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.” He has also gutted the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the president from maintaining a standing army for use against American citizens. Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the president “expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when ‘public order’ has been lost; he can send these troops out into our streets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or ‘other condition.’” On its own, this is an incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined with the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives the president almost dictatorial authority.

 

Wolf shows that fascist shifts don’t happen overnight, but rather over a course of years during which the fascists’ plans unfold at an accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933. Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in 2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn’t reverse the shift while there’s still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential election won’t do the job unless the institutional and legal environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a democracy simply can’t tolerate.

 

Left behind

 

Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are no longer operating within this frame. As the opposition is tying its boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the machetes.

 

Wolf’s work has its problems. She doesn't acknowledge that Black and Indigenous Americans have long lived under quasi-fascist rule, she doesn't examine the role that previous administrations have played in setting the stage for the Bush regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the roles played by corporatism, widespread social dislocation and the radical Christian right in the rise of a fascist American zeitgeist. Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as possible.

 

Wolf writes about America, but Canadians don’t have any cause for comfort. Canadian and American military forces are already deeply enmeshed. Thanks to NAFTA, we’re tied at the hip to the American economy, while the Security and Prosperity Partnership is integrating our countries’ security forces and harmonizing our no-fly lists. The Harper government is eager to kowtow to the Americans, even to the point of refusing to advocate for Canadian citizens on American death rows. The powerful think tanks and lobbying groups that influence our provincial and federal governments, such as the Fraser Institute and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, either can’t see the shift for what it is or they don’t care. More than all of this, however, is the simple reality that once the shift is complete, the American government will act even more irrationally and belligerently than before. Canada has resources like oil and water the United States is going to need, and the Canadian border is less defensible than the French border was in 1940.

 

Americans and Canadians have to fight back more fiercely than ever before, to organize and lobby and fill the streets with mass protests, to raise awareness and forge alliances with anyone opposed to totalitarianism regardless of whether they’re liberals, socialists, or conservatives. We have to take all the steps that have rescued dying democracies in the past, and to take them immediately, in the desperate hope that it isn’t already too late.

[Sharmarkee]

^^Too long to read but anyways ShakaraAllahu Sacyak ya sheekh Nuur, kathar khairka!

 

if I comment from the title - just to say:

 

Governmental states - old and new since the first communities under this blue sky are just like individuals and children, they born, crawl and run and they become very strong from 18 to 45, That is where the arrogance, the greediness and trying to impose their will to the others overcome them generally.

 

Then the power dwindles,sags and they become compromising, tolerating, sharing with others and pragmatic, they become same like old couples who have no one to talk to them, just dress neatly in the morning and look out at window because their children are gone chasing their dreams and they are feeling lonely and later dies on their sofas while watching TV.

 

Governments are typically just like that, some are in their zenith of their power others are waiting to die and some are already History - finished. "Umam Al qaabirah" or u say under the sand dunes.

 

Who was thinking about CCCP or Soviet Union in 1970s that within 15 years they will be finished and come up with a new flag, new monetary and new country.

 

Its possible America will have a new name with a 30 or 40 years. As all Powerful Almighty the Creator of Heavens and Earth is there and swift to take humanity to an account in this life and the one after, it’s unlikely that America the sole super (sic) power will arrest its decline, just like the Roman Empire as it become dust to dust – Fa Subxaanah Allahi aladii biyadihi Alamru ku luh, Wa Ilayhi Turjacuun.

 

Sharmake @ Biciid Joogeen.

[Khalaf]

maxa America laga raaba? America accepted millions of somali refugges, when the arabs our "muslim brothers" were cutting off their heads no? Of course i don't thank America for it, but Allah but lets give credit where credit is do. There is a reason why we live in the states, Europe and not else where. When i was in HS i read a lot of books guess by whom that made me really angry of many things. Alxamdullah i gained a lot of wisdom since my "younger days" not long ago. The entire problem are the Muslims. Allah say's what happens to u is what your own hands committed. Lets stop the blame game. One of the two biggest crisis today in the world are in two countries, apart from iraq and falistine of course. They are Somalia and Sudan (Darfur case). Tell me if the arab booqors or sheikhs have shown concern for these black countires.

 

i think um just venting and not using my better judgement, but its also truth at the end of the day.

 

wa salaamun

[Nur]

Dea Brother Khalaf

 

 

America is Allah's land, the orginal settlers were American Indians, they hosted the Eurpean settlers and served them turkey, only to be squeezed to reservations and vanish.

 

Today, America is a melting pot of many nations, all came to these shores seeking better life, no one is entitled of American-ness than you, do not feel like a second tier citizen just because you were hauled by an American plane from Nairobi Refugee camp to Davenport Iowa, to work the farms which you are ill prepared.

 

Bother, the difference between Arabs and Americans when t comes to Somalia, is the America has a direct interest, thus the outcome of any initiative it carries out in the region, America has oil interest in Somalia, and one other little problem, which is an obstacle to its interest, ISLAM, so, it has to fight Allah trying to get that oil, which is making it poorer these days, Allah is no weak god you know, although Muslims are.

 

 

Nur

[Khalaf]

^LOL...U missed the point akhi, but its cool.

 

lol@ from refugee camp to Iowa. You got jokes yaa Nur. Alxamdullah, never been in no camp or suffered as many of our people have. The irony is, it was Muslims that killed other muslims and made them refugees of the world and kufars that took them in, and gave them homes, medicine, ect. As Muslims we thank Allah and realize the good or bad comes from Allah.

 

As for me, I am not American bro and will never consider myself one. Mida labad can never feel like second class to anyone whereever in this world i maybe in this life, cause i believe none is above me. Um only a servent to Allah and His Messenger scw. But this is a great country in many ways and i make du'a for it, for Allah to bless it and to guide it. Not for Allah to destroy it.

[Fabregas]

for Allah to bless it and to guide it. Not for Allah to destroy it.

 

 

Ducadi Sheikh Mohsainy yey idin so gaadhin, meesha ka carara ninyahow

 

Khalaf, u consider urself only Somali, Muslim wat?

[Nur]

Khalaf bro.

 

Looool at Nairobi Refugee camp, be careful, eNuri resorts to jokes a times to drag unsuspecting Nomads to Jannah.

 

Being American is like being a Xamarawi, Hargeisawi, or a Londoner, its a geographical classificaion and residency desription, and at times , loyalty to its national constitution which is being vaiolaed these days by its own caretakers, besides, America is two continents, south and North, Chavez is an American in that sense, a south American hero of the poor, and the very word America is Italian, in recognition of Amerigo Vespucci, who "discovered" the continent( an its Indians residents). You see not all people in America think alike, nor agree on any political/economic or religious issue or philosophy completely, but its an interesting place on Allah's earth to be, some great people live in it, and some real evil people do too, just like any other place else on earth, so America bashing can get out of hand at times if one is not careful, mostly due to reaction against Bushite politics (with least political constiyuency in History), but people who live in America can be some of the best humans, and if they are misinformed, they can be the worst.

 

 

Nur

[Khalaf]

^^Indeed bro. Real good lecture by Khalid Yasin, the responsbilities of Muslim here in the West, i think he was speaking of. Real good, i recommend it to all.

 

lol@ Geel. Precisely why i made the du'a. I know there are many curses from other countries because of foreign policy, lakiin naga daaya nooh!

 

The reason why i said i am not american per se, is because i believe to be american (or british, french, any nationality) you have to be a patriot, flag, glory history, u know that sort of stuff. And i have no pride or idenity w/ that, but this is my home and i love it here. I consider myself Muslim, only thing which gives me pride/idenity, and somali because for obvious reasons, ethnicity can't escape that.

[Nur]

CIA Destroyed Torture Tapes Despite Court Orders

 

By Matt Apuzzo

Associated Press Writer

 

12/12/07 "AP"--- - WASHINGTON — The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

 

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

 

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

 

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."

 

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.

 

At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren't at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books — and apparently beyond the scope of the court's order.

 

Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, asked Kennedy this week to schedule a hearing on the issue.

 

Though Remes acknowledged the tapes might not be covered by Kennedy's order, he said, "It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation concerning our client."

 

In legal documents filed in January 2005, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler assured Kennedy that government officials were "well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation."

 

For just that reason, officials inside and outside of the CIA advised against destroying the interrogation tapes, according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation.

 

Exactly who signed off on the decision is unclear, but CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.

 

Remes said that decision raises questions about whether other evidence was destroyed. Abu Zubaydah's interrogation helped lead investigators to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Remes said Abu Zubaydah may also have been questioned about other detainees. Such evidence might have been relevant in their court cases.

 

"It's logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained," Remes said.

 

He stopped short, however, of accusing the government of obstruction. That's just one of the legal issues that could come up in court. A judge could also raise questions about contempt of court or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in "pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation."

 

Kennedy has not scheduled a hearing on the matter and the government has not filed a response to Remes' request.

 

___

 

Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this report.

 

Copyright 2007, The Associated Press.

[Nur]

Evidence Grows of U.S. Use Of Drug On Prisoners

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

06/04/08 "CQ" -- - There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs on terrorist suspects that are designed to weaken their resistance to interrogation. All that’s missing is the syringes and videotapes.

 

Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s instantly infamous 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects.

 

Yoo advised top Bush administration officials that interrogators could employ mind-altering drugs if they did not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”

 

Yoo had first rationalized the use of drugs in a 2002 memo for top Bush administration officials.

 

But this latest revelation shows Yoo reiterating conditions on the use of drugs a year later, despite the rising resistance to harsh interrogation techniques by military lawyers and the FBI.

 

“The new Yoo memo, along with other White House legal memoranda, shows clearly that the policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs was being laid,” says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.” “The recent memo on mood-altering drugs does not extend previous work on this area,” he said. “The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs.”

 

“Yes, I believe they have been used,” Jeffrey S. Kaye, a clinical psychologist who works with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, told me.

 

“I came across some evidence that they were using mind-altering drugs, to regress the prisoners, to ascertain if they were using deception techniques, to break them down,” said Kaye.

 

Yet the situation remains unclear.

 

No ‘Truth Serums’

The Pentagon’s use of sedatives to help calm shackled and hooded prisoners during long “rendition” flights from the Middle East to Guantanamo has been widely reported,

 

But hard evidence that U.S. interrogators today are employing hallucinogens, like the LSD the CIA tested on unwitting subjects for at least 20 years beginning in the 1940s, has yet to surface.

 

Michael Caruso, the chief federal defender appointed to represent al Qaeda suspect Jose Padilla, asserted in a motion last year that his client “was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations.”

 

Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees

But he could offer no proof.

 

It could have been a placebo. A 1963 CIA interrogation manual, code-named KUBARK, advocated the use of placebos, as well as the real thing, on prisoners.

 

But Michael Gellers, a psychologist with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at Guantanamo, who had objected to harsh interrogation methods, told me “he never saw anything related to drugs.”

 

“I never saw that raised as an issue,” he said.

 

In any case, hallucinogens don’t make subjects “tell the truth.”

 

“Their function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation,” the KUBARK manual explains.

 

Yet there is tantalizing evidence that the use of such drugs since 9/11 has been, at a minimum, seriously contemplated, if not implemented.

 

On July 17-18, 2003, for example, the CIA, the RAND Corp. and the American Psychological Association hosted a workshop entitled the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory.”

 

One session focused on the question, “What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?”

 

Desperados

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, top Bush administration officials pushed military commanders for intelligence about any other impending attacks, as Philippe Sands, an international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers and a professor at University College London, details in a forthcoming piece in Vanity Fair.

 

Sands demonstrates that the offending interrogations weren’t conducted by a few bad apples, as the White House and Pentagon have long maintained.

 

They were reacting to pressure from above, to go to “the dark side” and “take the gloves off,” as Vice President Cheney put it.

 

Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees

But they didn’t know how, a December 2006 study by the Intelligence Science Board, a wing of the National Defense Intelligence College in Washington, D.C., suggested.

 

Under pressure, interrogators started to “‘make it up’ on the fly,” the study said.

 

“This shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods,” it said, “at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light.”

 

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate at Guantanamo, who tried to throttle the excesses, told Vanity Fair that prison officials and interrogation managers drew inspiration from Jack Bauer, the fictional action-hero of FOX’s counterterror drama, “24,” who uses torture and drugs on terrorists.

 

“It was hugely popular,” Beaver said. Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”

 

Beaver makes no mention of drugs in the piece.

 

She may not have seen or heard about their use, says Ewe Jacobs, the director of Survivors International, which specializes in the psychological and medical treatment of torture survivors.

 

“The Guantanamo camps were isolated from one another,” he says.

 

FBI interrogators and naval investigators, fearing involvement in illegal acts, were told to leave the island.

 

Professor Miles says, “I suspect that most of the use of interrogational drugs was by CIA and Special Ops interrogators, and thus still remains classified.”

 

We just don’t know — yet.

 

The CIA kept its MKULTRA, a mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, and other drug-testing programs secret for more than 20 years.

 

In the early 1970s, when then-CIA Director Richard Helms got wind of congressional investigators sniffing around, he ordered its records destroyed — a precursor of the agency’s recent destruction of interrogation videotapes.

 

Evidence Grows of Drug Use on Detainees

But it turned out that Helms missed a box.

 

A disenchanted State Department official, John D. Marks, who had resigned over Vietnam, got hold of the remaining files and produced an astonishing book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”

 

Many more books, some by persons who said they were victims of the mind-altering experiments, were produced.

 

Few believed them. Their tales sounded looney absent patient records (which Helms had ordered destroyed) of the drug experiments (many carried out in a secret wing of Georgetown University Hospital).

 

Likewise, few believe Padilla. Even fewer will believe the other prisoners, a number of whom are deranged from prolonged interrogation — if they ever get out.