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August 16, 2007
Padilla Convicted
The sad case of Jose Padilla inched closer to a conclusion today, as he was convicted by a Miami jury of "conspiracy to support Islamic terrorism overseas." A serious charge, to be sure, but far from the dirty bomber rap the Bush Administration initially tried to put on him after four years of imprisoning him without charging him at all. The inimitable Glen Greenwald has the rundown.
Padilla was arrested in April 2002 on suspicion of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S., declared an enemy combatant, and held (as well as possibly tortured) for nearly four years in military custody before actually being charged with a crime. Is Jose Padilla an illegal immigrant? An Afghani member of the Taliban? No, Jose Padilla is an American citizen. That's right folks, Jose Padilla's constitutional right as an American to habeus corpus -- to be charged with an actual crime -- was simply ignored by the Bush Administration, until the threat of a Supreme Court ruling rejecting its conduct forced them to finally charge him with something.
To boot, it became clear late last year that Padilla's confinement and treatment had completely dehumanized him and broken him psychologically. In fact, his treatment while incarcerated may well have amounted to torture.
Why, you may ask, should we care what happened to Jose Padilla? After all, Padilla was basically a career low-level criminal, and he was a radical Islamic sympathizer. Because he is an American citizen, and he, whether we like him or not, is entitled to basic rights. Those rights include the right to be charged with a crime in order to be detained for a lengthy period of time, and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, both of which were clearly and egregiously violated.
By so brazenly denying an American citizen these rights, the Bush Administration simply gave the Constitution, and thus all Americans, the big middle finger. If the very Americans who need to avail themselves of their constitutional protections don't have them, then what good are they? The Supreme Court did ultimately reject the adminstration's actions in the Padilla case as unconstitutional, but the damage to Padilla was done.
Jose Padilla was no saint. But his treatment at the hands of the United States government is nothing less than a travesty, and we should all be disgusted and ashamed.
Posted by houtopia at August 16, 2007 07:05 PM