White House Wins and Loses Padilla Case

Last week, US citizen Jose Padilla was convicted of helping terrorists, and although he will appeal the verdict, he’s going to do some jail time. Or more accurately, more jail time, since he was declared an “enemy combatant,” and spent more than three years in custody without charges or a lawyer. All of that changed as the Supreme Court prepared to rule on the constitutionality of his treatment. The Department of Justice and the White House quickly reclassified him (making a decision by the Supremes unnecessary) and trying him in a civilian court. In other words, after arguing for years that special treatment was necessary to fight terrorism, the Busheviks proved themselves wrong by getting him convicted in a Miami courtroom.

Mr. Padilla was arrested in Chicago after getting off a flight from Pakistan. He spent three and a half years in a military brig in South Carolina where the government admits he was subjected to continuous loud noises, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and constant artificial light. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez claims this isn’t torture. One respectfully disagrees with the most incompetent AG the country has ever had.

Mr. Padilla confessed to being an Al-Qaeda member, but even then, he denied he was part of a “dirty bomb” plot to set off a radiological device in an American city. The evidence was so weak on this that the prosecution never even presented it to the jury. The same held with the non-story that he was plotting to blow up US apartment buildings using natural gas. What he was convicted for, and this is important because the media have largely ignored it, was aiding jihadis in Bosnia and Chechnya in the 1990s. He was largely convicted by the presence of his thumbprint on an Al Qaeda membership application (what a bunch of amateurs, leaving written evidence lying around).

The good news for the White House is that, after five years of playing silly buggers with Mr. Padilla, it finally proved he committed a crime. It can now lock him up and throw away the key. AG Gonzales and his boss now look even tougher on terror than they did before (unless, of course, one is still wondering where Usama bin Laden is).

The bad news for the White House is the civil courts proved perfectly capable of trying terror suspects. All of this “enemy combatant” stuff and the denial of constitutional freedoms (remember Mr. Padilla is an American citizen; the same thing could happen to any other American citizen now that the precedent has been set) has been proved pointless and dangerously unnecessary. It proves terrorism is a crime, not a military action, and that, therefore, the Bush administration has been wrong in handling it like a war since September 12, 2001.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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