NYT editorial: The Padilla Conviction

It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism.

On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of — conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas — bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases.

When Mr. Padilla was arrested in 2002, the government said he was an Al Qaeda operative who had plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb inside the United States. Mr. Padilla, who is an American citizen, should have been charged as a criminal and put on trial in a civilian court. Instead, President Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and kept him in a Navy brig for more than three years.

The administration’s insistence that it had the right to hold Mr. Padilla indefinitely — simply on the president’s word — was its first outrageous act in the case, but hardly its last. Mr. Padilla was kept in a small isolation cell, and when he left that cell he was blindfolded and his ears were covered. He was denied access to a lawyer even when he was being questioned.

The administration also insisted that the courts had no right to second-guess its actions. It was only after the Supreme Court appeared poised last year to use Mr. Padilla’s case to decide whether indefinite detention of an American citizen violates the Constitution, that the White House suddenly decided to give him a civilian trial. It was obvious that the administration was trying to game the legal system and insulate itself from Supreme Court review. J. Michael Luttig, a federal appeals court judge who heard Mr. Padilla’s case, warned about the consequences “for the government’s credibility before the courts in litigation.”

(Continued here. Why was Jose Padilla's treatment in prison a "state secret?" More from the HuffPo:)

by Jane Lyn Stahl

Now that a U.S. citizen has been convicted of being a "terrorist," one can only hope that his treatment in the brig, which has been declared a "state secret," will be declassified so that it may see the light of day in appeals court which is where this case is heading.

Psychologists, and those who have visited with Jose Padilla over the past three plus years of his incarceration say that they see profound emotional wreckage as a result of his detention. Regardless of whether Mr. Padilla's treatment can be tweaked such that it conforms with his constitutional entitlements, as an American, there is no way in hell that anyone can justify turning an otherwise healthy 36 year old into the shell of a man. If the treatment he received at the hands of his captors is ethical and aboveboard, then why is it classified?

Clearly, too, the time has come to put the entire infrastructure of an illegal, and ominous so-called war on terror on trial, and show that those who maim, humiliate, kill, and psychologically torture in the name of counterfeit, homogenized purity are the true terrorists.

Padilla's conviction would not have been possible were it not for more than 300,000 FBI "wiretap intercepts" (AP) of conversations, many of which took place in Arabic.

Yesterday in a courtroom in San Francisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation continued their fight against telecommunications behemoth AT&T for its assault on the Fourth Amendment as a result of complying with the government to illegally tap citizen's phones. The phrase "state secret" reared its ugly head, too, in this San Francisco district courtroom. An attorney working with EFF laments that if the case against AT&T is lost, it may be the last time that any court challenges the executive branch on warrantless wiretapping.

Any government that withholds information from court, regardless of the context, on the basis that the data withheld constitutes a "state secret" is not merely insidious, and pernicious, but is one that converts justice itself into a dirty bomb.

One can only hope that, on appeal, Mr. Padilla's lawyers will demand declassification of his days in the brig, and that each and every gruesome detail of how he suffered during confinement surfaces, so the word "terrorist" may be seen to mean about as much as the word "Communist" did during the Red scare days of the 1950's; only instead of hiding under a desk in a deserted classroom, justice now hides under the robes of counterfeit judges

Is it ever okay to compromise someone's sanity in the name of combatting an elusive enemy? Do the ends justify the means and, if so, whose ends are we justifying, and by what means? If this is what the framers had in mind by the Bill of Rights, they would have called it the Bill of Wrongs instead.

(Here's the LA Times take on the case:)

The lost Padilla verdict
By Stephen I. Vladeck

If there has been one common theme in the Bush administration's handling of the myriad legal challenges to its conduct of the "war on terrorism," it has been the government's tendency to change the playing field just when defeat seemed imminent. No case has better encapsulated this trend than that of onetime alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, who was convicted by a Miami federal jury Thursday on all three of the lesser terrorism charges against him.

Those verdicts are being called a vindication for the White House, but the real triumph came when the government succeeded in avoiding a decision on bigger, more crucial issues. That is the important Padilla precedent.

Padilla's saga began more than 63 months ago, when he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. Dubbed an "enemy combatant" by then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was transferred to a military brig and held without criminal charges in solitary confinement. He was allegedly mistreated -- and possibly even tortured -- by his captors.

Court-appointed lawyers filed suit on Padilla's behalf, arguing that the government either had to charge him with a crime or release him. When the case went to the Supreme Court the first time in June 2004, a 5-4 majority threw it out on a technicality, holding that Padilla had to sue in South Carolina (where he was then being held), rather than in New York (where he was initially confined). But the opinions filed that day and in the separate case of another detained U.S. citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, also made clear that at least five of the justices believed that Padilla's detention was unlawful; he just had to go through the right court first.

(Continued here.)