Padilla's dental visit -- photos of the exercise are in the federal court files -- reach beyond the legal questions. It has the look of gratuitous cruelty.

The treatment of an American citizen in pretrial detention seemed to be taken from the imaginings of Kafka. It appeared to be sensory deprivation just for the hell of it.

The accused was held in extreme isolation for 1,307 days. Held in a nine-by-seven-foot cell. The only window blacked out. He was the lone prisoner on the two-tier cellblock. He was given food through a slot in the door. He slept on a steel mattress. No reading material. No calendar. No clock. Nothing to connect him to the outside world.

But it was the short trip down the hallway for a dental examination that captured the utter isolation and sensory deprivation inflicted on Jose Padilla during his 3 ½ years in the Navy brig at Charleston, S.C.

Helmeted guards, their faces obscured behind dark plastic visors, manacled his hands and feet through slots in his cell door. They covered his ears with sound-canceling headphones, covered his eyes with blacked-out goggles.

Padilla, mind you, has been described by his jailers as docile ``as a piece of furniture.''

In light of the Padilla case, the rest of us might take the extra time to ponder our own post-9/11 psychological state.