On the effects of small, dark enclosures

Atrios posts this piece:

About 10 years ago or so I was living in Providence, RI. They had demolished some downtown buildings because they were going to build a mall on the site. On the site they found the some old foundations, which delayed construction for awhile as they allowed some urban archaeologists to come in and figure out what was up. They'd found an 1830s or so era prison (IIRC). After they did their thing they conducted a few public tours of the site, which included descriptions of the prisoners' rooms, and some discussion of the warden's diary and other things. [This is from memory, so my details may not be precise - it may not have been the warden, but some other prison official, or outside observer]

Anyway, in the diary were observations about the mental health of the prisoners. The prisoners lived in solitary confinement, in small rooms lacking natural light. The diarist expressed genuine surprise that it didn't take very long (6-12 months) for prisoners - many of whom were in for minor offenses - to start displaying signs of profound mental illness.

What this has to do with current events is left to the reader.

Now, just in case you didn't make the connection, go read this:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The videotape of that trip to the dentist, which was recently released to Mr. Padilla’s lawyers and viewed by The New York Times, offers the first concrete glimpse inside the secretive military incarceration of an American citizen whose detention without charges became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the fight against terror. Still frames from the videotape were posted in Mr. Padilla’s electronic court file late Friday.

To Mr. Padilla’s lawyers, the pictures capture the dehumanization of their client during his military detention from mid-2002 until earlier this year, when the government changed his status from enemy combatant to criminal defendant and transferred him to the federal detention center in Miami. He now awaits trial scheduled for late January.

Together with other documents filed late Friday, the images represent the latest and most aggressive sally by defense lawyers who declared this fall that charges against Mr. Padilla should be dismissed for “outrageous government conduct,” saying that he was mistreated and tortured during his years as an enemy combatant.

Now lawyers for Mr. Padilla, 36, suggest that he is unfit to stand trial. They argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

One final comment that's completely off the point. As at least one person at the NY Times knows (Will Shortz, the Times' Crossword Puzzle editor, that is) the plural of "serum" is "sera."