The Zong

The verdict on Jose Padilla is in, and Tim Grieve over at Salon’s War Room really stated it as well as anyone. He points out that inevitably, this will be covered as a victory for the Bush Administration, but it’s important to remember the circumstances surrounding his original arrest and the suspension of Habeas Corpus which commenced as they threw him in a military brig without counsel or access to due process.

When Padilla was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in June 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft interrupted a trip to Russia to tell the American people of a “significant step forward in the war on terrorism.” “We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States,” Ashcroft said.

For the next three years, the Bush administration held Padilla — without charges — in military custody, where he was subjected to “sensory deprivation” and God knows what other “interrogation techniques” while being denied access to counsel. In the midst of it all, the Justice Department declared in June 2004 that Padilla had been recruited by al-Qaida and trained to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas.

Then in November 2005, just when it appeared that the Supreme Court might order him released, the administration abruptly moved Padilla out of military custody and handed him over to the civilian criminal justice system, where he was lumped in with two other defendants already facing federal charges.

For the last three months, prosecutors have put on their case in Miami. “For long stretches of time,” writes a reporter whose followed the case, the prosecutors “barely mentioned” Padilla. Dirty bombs? They never came up at all.

This is hopefully not the end of the line for this story. While Padilla doesn’t seem like a very nice guy, he should be held up as an example of one of the most heinous threats posed towards American Democracy; Not from dirty bombs or exploding buildings, but from our very own government which, given the abilities we’ve endowed ours with since 9/11, can listen to our phone calls, read our emails, and detain us indefinitely for reasons they’ve made up out of thin air.

Extra Credit: I’ve been following the Padilla story for a long time now, ever since an amazing episode of This American Life called “Our Secret Government” back in 2003, when Jack Hitt did a story on him. I really encourage you to listen to the entire episode (it’s free!), as all three segments are scintillating. My personal favorite is the FISA court segment, and that also holds a lot of significance in the recent news.

- M.G.