The prison where Moussaoui is going is the federal SuperMax in Florence, Colo. Prisoners spend 23 hours a day in their cell, with virtually no human contact and nothing to do. Just holding onto your sanity is difficult.

“It’s beyond rotting,” he said. “Rotting at least implies a slow, gradual disintegration.”

He said there were a lot of prisons where inmates rot, where the staff “plants you in front of your TV in your cell and you just grow there like a mushroom.”

“But Supermax is worse,” he said. “It’s not just the hothouse for the mushrooms. It’s designed in the end to break you down.”

If it’s designed to destroy you, well then, it’s torture, isn’t it? Sounds like ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ to me.

I spoke once with a man who had spent several years in the California equivalent of SuperMax. He said when you get out, you’re a walking time bomb. Not that anyone in Florence will ever get out, they’ll just slowly go insane. Slow motion torture is what it is.

This is torture too.

Teen suffocated at Florida boot camp: autopsy.

Someday these barbarities will be looked back upon as we now look at the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, wondering how a society could have been so deranged.

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