The End of American Justice

The Jose Padilla trial is in deliberations right now, and attention must be paid. This man was locked up and held without charges for years, most of which with near-total sensory deprivation designed to break him down and give him no hope of survival. He was totrtured mentally and physically without benefit of counsel and without even being charged. At the moment when the Supreme Court was about to step in and rule that it is completely illegal to hold an American citizen in this fashion, the Justice Department decides to find some other charge, totally unrelated to his initial detention, and attach Padilla to it. In order for you to believe the government's case, you have to believe that he understood an invented terrorist code language.

Shorter version from Jose Padilla's lawyer: He was a student, not a terrorist. As to the mujahedeen form with Padilla's fingerprints:

The critical piece of prosecution evidence is a "mujahedeen data form" Padilla allegedly filled out in July 2000 to attend an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan. The form bears seven of his fingerprints, but Caruso said they are found only on the first page and the back of the final page — consistent with Padilla simply handling the form, rather than writing on it.

Of the 3,000 taped telephone calls, Padilla's voice was only on 7 of those introduced at trial.

As to the use of code words, Padilla didn't use any on the taped calls. The Government wants the jury to believe that when the other two defendants used words like "tourism" and "football" they meant "jihad" and that the words "eggplant" and "zucchini" were references to military weapons and supplies.

So Padilla is on trial for 1) holding a piece of paper, and 2) hearing the words "football," "eggplant," and "zucchini."

Some justice system we have in this country, eh?

Actually, the real reason Padilla is on trial is that the government can never live down what they did to him in the name of fighting terrorism. We took an American citizen and systematically denied him access to counsel, contact with anyone but interrogators, full sensory deprivation, and really mental torture so that they could "get good information" out of him, none of which has been proven to be accurate or actionable. The gloves came off in 2002 and 2003 and these guys broke every law they could think of so they could show their superiors that they were on the case. Here's Jack Balkin:

Contrary to Jack's suggestion below, then, the Administration did not try to defend Padilla's indefinite, isolated detention -- and the denial of an attorney and of any judicial oversight -- on the ground that "the President thought that Padilla was a dangerous man." If dangerousness had been the issue, the Administration could have simply kept Padilla detained in the ordinary criminal justice system, where he had been. As Jacoby explains, the reason Padilla was moved to indefinite military detention resembling (as Jack notes) classical authoritarian models, was not dangerousness, but instead the Administration's desire to break him in order to obtain possible actionable information about al Qaeda training, planning, recruitment, methods and operations.

So they put Padilla into a secret, undisclosed location and cut off his access to everything we know about American law. THe government defends indefinite detention by saying that they're just trying to protect the public. In that protection, we've completely lost everything about America they mean to defend.

UPDATE: And he's been found guilty. But what of the interrogators and the military commanders and the civilian leadership, who put him into an illegal, unjust detention system for 3 1/2 years, before even bringing this charge? When will they be found guilty?