José Padilla: The Bush Admin's Poster Child of Terrorism

I first heard about José Padilla's case when I read How Would A Patriot Act? by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald uses Padilla as one example of the Bush Administration's illegal detaining of American citizens in the War On Terror.

Arrested in April 2002, Padilla was named "The Dirty Bomber" and declared an "enemy combatant" by George Bush and held for 3 1/2 years before charges were ever brought against him.

On Thursday, over 5 years after he was originally detained, a federal jury in Miami unanimously found José Padilla guilty of "conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas."

According to Greenwald, "That Padilla was finally tried in a court of law is hardly a cause of celebration. The only reason why, after almost four years, the administration finally charged Padilla with crimes was because it wanted to avoid a looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether the President has the power to imprison U.S. citizens without charges.

By finally indicting him, the administration was able to argue, successfully, that the Court should refuse to rule on that question on the ground that the claims were now "moot" by virtue of the indictment. As a result, a ruling by a very right-wing appellate panel in the Fourth Circuit, which held that the President does have these imprisonment powers, still remains valid law, and the administration still claims the authority to imprison U.S. citizens with no charges. "

So, bad news there. I'm worried about use of Presidential Authority to imprison US citizens without even charging them with a crime. And so I'm holding out for the hope that Padilla's conviction will be appealed, the Bush Administration's illegal behavior will be reexamined, and the Fourth Circuit appellate panel's ruling will be reversed. Although there is the question of whether Padilla is more fall guy than terrorist, I'm focusing on the Bush Administration's abuse of power and total ineptitude, as opposed to Padilla's complicity. Because, in theory, it could be any one of us in his shoes.

Regardless of whether Padilla does or does not belong behind bars for being a terrorist, the Bush Administration gathered intelligence on him illegally, detained him illegally, planned to put him away forever and ended up sabotaged by their own disregard for the law in building a case against him. And all the while, it couldn't produce enough evidence to convict him of more than "conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas", which will likely be appealed. What happened to "The Dirty Bomber"? How did we go from blowing up Chicago with a radiological bomb to a disgruntled gangbanger who allegedly attended a "Death to America" training camp? Allegedly. They found his fingerprints on an application? That's all the evidence they have on this dangerous criminal mastermind? Are you kidding me? And there are how many more of these cases waiting in the wings at Guantanamo Bay?

This is a big problem. I would like the Bush Administration to stop using the War on Terror as an excuse to bypass the Bill of Rights. Padilla's case is a perfect example of why this should never happen. I maintain that our government should not have the power to detain us illegally or spy on us. If you agree, then speak up to your representatives. Our congress still doesn't get it. For example, on August 5, President Bush signed S.1927, a bill amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The bill gives more authority to the National Security Agency and other agencies to monitor emails, phone calls, and other communications that are part of a foreign intelligence investigation.

We're going in circles, spiraling toward a police state under the cover of security while practicing ineptitude and forgoing the country's basic premises.

Back to Padilla, here's a history and some thoughts by David Cole, The Nation's legal affairs correspondent and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

The Real Lesson of the Padilla Conviction
posted August 18, 2007

José Padilla's conviction by a federal jury in Miami has already become something of a Rorschach test. Critics of the Bush Administration have argued that the conviction proves that the ordinary criminal justice system works for trying terrorists, and that therefore President Bush did not need to assert the truly extraordinary power of detaining an American citizen arrested on US soil in military custody for more than three years. Meanwhile, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has hailed the conviction as "a significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters."

Both sides are wrong. In fact, Padilla's criminal conviction was a stroke of luck for the Administration. It took a huge gamble in his case, trying him on very weak evidence in the hope of avoiding a Supreme Court test of the President's asserted power to hold American citizens arrested here as "enemy combatants." For the moment, the bet has paid off--at least until an appeal overturns it. But do we really want the Administration gambling on our national security?

The gamble began in 2002, when the Administration took Padilla, arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, into military custody, denied him access to a lawyer and interrogated him for extended periods of time under circumstances that would render anything they learned from him unusable in a trial against him. It continued the gamble when it "disappeared" high-level Al Qaeda suspects into CIA secret prisons, or "black sites," where it subjected them to waterboarding and worse in an effort to coerce information from them. There, too, the Administration allegedly gained intelligence about Padilla--but that information will also never be admissible in a court of law because of the brutal way in which it was obtained.

The short-term decisions to gather information in illegal ways made it impossible to bring Padilla to trial on the Administration's press conference charges that he was pursuing plans to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb," or, somewhat less dramatically, to explode an apartment building by leaving the gas on and setting it afire. Instead, it was relegated to trying him in Miami as part of a hazy conspiracy that involved no plans to commit any specific terrorist or violent act.

The charges in Miami were that Padilla had attended a terrorist training camp sometime before 9/11. Vast stretches of the three-month trial concerned a conspiracy of two other men to provide support to jihadist fighters in Chechnya and Bosnia. Of 3,000 tape-recorded phone calls introduced into evidence, only two concerned Padilla. The main piece of evidence against Padilla was a "mujahadin data form" that appeared to place him at a terrorist training camp--but prosecutors never offered any evidence that Padilla had used that training to further terrorist activity.

In the end, the prosecution succeeded, as the jury found Padilla guilty of attending the training camp and of one count of conspiracy to maim, murder or kidnap overseas. But given how weak the evidence was, the case could easily have come out the other way--and may not withstand appeal.

If what the Administration says about Padilla is true, this should not have been a close case. But because the Administration obtained its evidence against him through unconstitutional means, it was never able to tell the jury what it really thinks Padilla was up to--planning serious terrorist attacks within the United States, not just training abroad and seeking to support Muslims in Chechnya.

And Padilla is only the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of people at Guantánamo whom the government accuses of much more serious crimes, including the masterminding of 9/11 itself. Those men may never be tried at all, because of the way the Bush Administration chose to treat them and their fellow suspects.

Our national security should not rest on a wager that we can convict terrorists on weak charges that do not even speak of their most serious crimes. Had it chosen to follow the rule of law at the outset, the Bush Administration could have brought many real terrorists to justice by now. Instead, it is left to declare a major victory when it manages to convict a marginal player for crimes that do not even come close to those the Administration claims he actually committed.