He’s the American citizen arrested 6 years ago on charges he was working to build and detonate a “dirty bomb” on behalf of Al Qaeda. His case got interesting quickly, since the government maintained that he wasn’t entitled to any legal protections because he was held as an “enemy combatant”.
The courts eventually intervened, and the government was forced to try him in the regular courts, finally according him the same rights that ANY of us should have. Remember, this is a CITIZEN that the government simply declared to be beyond the reach of the rule of law. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, we don’t know what will.
He may well have been a bad guy, but we’ll never really know, now, because our own government basically destroyed Padilla over the course of his 6-year incarceration (much of it in solitary confinement, and subject to CIA “interrogation techniques” designed to dismantle Padilla’s mental health) and only then tried him in public. He was found unfit to stand trial by a forensic psychiatrist, but they overuled her and tried him anyway. He was found guilty on all counts yesterday. From Lindsey Beyerstein:
Over Dr. Hagerty’s objections, Padilla was deemed fit to stand trial for conspiracy to murder people abroad and providing material support to terrorists operating in Bosnia, Chechnya and other foreign countries. A Florida court found Padilla guilty on all counts, Thursday.
By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted while he was still of sound mind. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and thereby undercut the legitimacy their prosecution.
For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an “enemy combatant,” with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations.
The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power — a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King — because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today’s verdict — along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England — gives the lie to that claim.
All along, the Bush administration could have, should have, and was constitutionally obligated to charge Padilla with crimes if it wanted to imprison him. There is no more defining American liberty than the right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment, and like so many other basic liberties, the Bush administration violated and assaulted this right for no reason whatsoever.
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Worse still, the notion that Padilla received a “fair trial” is dubious, to put it mildly, and will undoubtedly be vigorously contested on appeal. Last year, the New York Times obtained a copy of a video from Padilla’s imprisonment which showed techniques that can only be described as torture — systematic sensory depravation and gratuitous humiliations which clearly broke Padilla as a human being in every sense that matters, all before he had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything.