Guantanamo: The Separate Prison

Today's Canberra Times featured an opinion piece I wrote about sensory deprivation. Read the excerpt below, or check out the whole piece:

LAST Monday, David Hicks's Australian solicitor, David McLeod, told an audience at the University of Technology Sydney about his client's mental state. "He shows all of the signs and exhibits all of the features of someone who has been in solitary confinement for a very long time," he said. "He's in his own little world."

Sensory deprivation an innocuous name for a debilitating torture. The use of solitary confinement in prison is not new; wardens at Tasmania's Port Arthur penal settlement once called it "separation". At the Separate Prison, inmates too violent to control were housed in 2m by 2.5m cells. Speaking was forbidden. The prisoners were addressed by number, not name. Masks were placed on prisoners when they were moved from their cells to prevent them recognising fellow prisoners. To maintain utter silence, guards wore soft slippers and communicated by hand signals.

Isolation, it was then believed, led to reflectiveness. In turn, this led to repentance. As one observer noted on July 22, 1860 in the Advertiser, this transformation was "harrowing in the extreme".

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US-government-funded researchers discovered that a person will lose the ability to reason if cut off from all stimuli for eight to 12 hours. "The patient first becomes anxious, then becomes quite anxious, and then begins to hallucinate usually, and finally becomes completely disoriented", then director of the National Institutes of Health Dr RobertH.Felix reported to the US Congress in 1956.A 1963 CIA interrogation manual incorporating these findings explained: "The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject's tendencies towards compliance."

The US Army, according to its latest interrogation field manual, permits "separation" to be used only upon "unlawful enemy combatants". The technique aids in "decreasing the detainee's resistance to interrogation" and should be used to "foster a feeling of futility". At Guantanamo Bay's Camp Echo, Hicks was kept in a small cell with no natural light for 244 days under 24-hour supervision by military police. He lost 14kg from his already wiry frame during this ordeal. Moazzam Begg, one of nine British detainees freed from Guantanamo, spoke with Hicks after his stint in isolation. "One of the things he said to me is, 'Please, when you get out from here, please tell people that my sanity is at risk here.' He used to tell me quite often that he felt like just banging his head so hard against the walls that he just ends up killing himself."

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It was for this reason that in 1986 the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Peter Kooijmans, listed isolation, sensory deprivation and "being kept in constant uncertainty in terms of space and time" as conditions that rose to the level of torture. This designation is well deserved. As one Separate Prison observer noted in the Advertiser in 1860 about Port Arthur: "The punishment inflicted here is said to be of the most unendurable kind. The isolation, the silence, the total separation from all human fellowship and communion, the monotony of the bare white-washed walls makes confinement in the model prison a horrible torture to all confined in it."