The sad case of Jose Padilla

Even if Jose Padilla is guilty of these charges he shouldn't have had this. If he is guilty he should be charged and punished to the maximum extent of the law, the law as we understand it, not this



By Mike Whitney

“For most of the 1,307 days, Mr. Padilla was tortured by the United States government without cause or justification.” Michael Caruso, acting Federal Public Defender; “Motion to Dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct”, US District Court, Miami Division

“This is conduct that shocks the conscience.” Supreme Court 342 US at 166 ibid

10/14/06 Jose Padilla is an innocent man. His story tells us everything we need to know about the Stalinist regime currently operating in Washington and their utter disdain for human rights, civil liberties and American citizenship.

Padilla was taken into custody on May 8, 2002 at Chicago’s O’ Hare Airport by Federal agents and placed in solitary confinement. He was stripped of his constitutionally-guaranteed rights and forbidden to see an attorney. He was detained as a material witness although Attorney General John Ashcroft accused him publicly of being a “dirty bomber”; alleging that he was planning to detonate a nuclear device within the United States. He was not charged with a crime.

For the next 4 years he was isolated, tortured and used as a lab-rat in drug experiments with LSD and other mind-altering hallucinogens. To date, the government has never produced a scintilla of evidence proving that Padilla is guilty of anything. Still, no attorney, no court, and no law have been able to set him free. The entire system has buckled under the load of imperial power leaving every American exposed to the capricious actions of the president. What happened to Padilla can happen to any of us and no one is truly safe until the case is fairly resolved.

The Padilla case proves that Bush was planning to overturn habeas corpus and institute a de-facto dictatorship from the very beginning. Padilla has never been a threat to national security; in fact, the government has changed its story nearly every time it makes a public statement. There was no dirty bomb, no fissile material, no weapons, no explosives, no conspiracy, and no provable link to terrorists. The government has no case and they know it. Padilla is merely the unwitting victim of a plan to discard the Bill of Rights and establish the supreme power of the presidency. The passing of the “Military Commissions Act of 2006” last month has made the Padilla case unnecessary. The congress approved Bush’s request to expand his powers so that he can imprison anyone he chooses and do with them whatever he likes. The legislation creates a modern-day monarch who can ignore the due process provisions in the law and apply the Geneva Conventions however he sees fit. If Bush wants to round up citizens or non-citizens and torture them as “enemy combatants”; he is now free to do so. The congress rubber-stamped everything that Bush was trying to achieve in the Padilla case.

That doesn’t mean that Padilla will be set free; far from it. But at least he will get his day in court. Before he was charged with a crime (a period which lasted 3 and a half years) one government spokesman candidly admitted:

“Providing him with counsel would break –probably irreparably, the sense of dependency and trust that the interrogators are hoping to create. If he had access to counsel or if he learned that a court was hearing his case could provide him with the expectation that he would some day be released.” (Motion: Michael Caruso)

Isn’t this a tacit admission that Padilla was being tortured while he was in military custody? It also shows that Bush’s agents were extorting information from Padilla in violation of his civil liberties.

According to his attorney, Padilla has been the victim of cruel and relentless abuse from the very beginning of his confinement. He was kept in complete isolation in a windowless 9’ by 7’ cell where he was repeatedly exposed to various techniques of sense deprivation, sleep deprivation, and radical temperature changes. All reading materials, TV, radio and newspapers were banned. His exercise regimen was limited to a short stroll during the night to prevent him from seeing the sun. He was constantly deceived as to his real location and “hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long periods of time”. These types of abuse are normally associated with tyrannical regimes, but they have become standard procedure for the Bush administration.

The abusive treatment of Padilla is chronicled in Defense attorney Caruso’s brief:

“Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run.”

“Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake, and assault Padilla. Additionally, he was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP) to act as a form of truth serum during his interrogations.”

“The deprivations, physical abuse, and other forms of inhuman treatment visited upon Mr. Padilla caused serious medical problems that were not adequately addressed. Apart form the psychological damage done to Mr. Padilla, there were numerous health problems brought on by the conditions of his captivity. Mr. Padilla frequently experienced cardiothoracic difficulties while sleeping, or attempting to fall asleep, including heavy pressure on his chest and an inability to breathe or move his body.”

“However, it is important to recognize that all of the deprivations and assaults recounted above were employed in concert in a calculated manner to cause him maximum anguish. It is also extremely important to note that the torturous acts visited upon Mr. Padilla were done over the course of almost the entire three years and seven months of his captivity in the Naval Brig designed to create dependency and destroy his will to live.”

Padilla has been of no consequence to Bush in his war on terror. He’s simply provided the means to overturn the traditional protections of habeas corpus and the 8th amendment’s provisions against “cruel and unusual punishment”. The case sets an important precedent that the president is no longer required to comply with the law. Bush can arbitrarily repeal anyone’s “inalienable rights” by simply declaring him an enemy combatant. The presumption of innocence is no longer assured.

The Padilla case reflects the inherent dangers of an all-powerful and unaccountable executive. Those who would sacrifice their freedom for the false promise of security should take note of Padilla and consider the risks of removing the safeguards which have traditionally protected us from the brutality of the state.

Robert Bolt makes this very point in his play “A Man for All Seasons” when the protagonist Sir Thomas More warns:

“And when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast. Man’s laws not God’s! And if you cut them down do you think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes. I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake!”

It would be far better to let a terrorist go free than to destroy the law. The law is our only refuge from the terror of the state.

Bush must be stopped.

This is exactly what awaits many more under The Military Commissions Act of 2006 just passed by the senate. This is only the beginning.

WHAT THE MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT OF 2006 "LEGISLATES"

- Doesn't suspend, as is accommodated for in the Constitution, but completely abolishes Habeas Corpus permanently - the right of the detainee to see the evidence against him and not be locked up for eternity based on the arbitrary will of the state.

- Contains a definition of "wrongfully aiding the enemy" which labels all American citizens who breach their "allegiance" to President Bush and the actions of his government as terrorists subject to possible arrest, torture and conviction in front of a military tribunal.



- The definition of torture that the legislation cites is US code title 18 section 2340. This is a broad definition of torture and completely lacks the specific clarity of the Geneva Conventions. This definition allows the use of torture that is, "incidental to lawful sanctions." In alliance with the bill's blanket authority for President Bush to define the Geneva Conventions as he sees fit, this legislates the use of torture.

- Destruction of any property is defined as terrorism, which is deemed punishable by any means of the military tribunal's choosing.

- Any violent activity whatsoever is defined as terrorism if it takes place near a designated protected building, such as a charity building.

- A change of the definition of "pillaging" turns all illegal occupation of property and all theft into terrorism. This makes squatters and petty thieves enemy combatants.



- The bill allows hearsay evidence (obtained via phony confessions after torture) to be considered by the military tribunal and bars the suspect from even having knowledge of the charges against him - making a case for defense impossible. This is guaranteed to produce 100% conviction rates as you would expect in the dictatorships of Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe and other torture protagonists who are in many cases allied with the Bush administration and provide phony confessions obtained from torture that allow the U.S. government to scare its people with the threat of imaginary Al-Qaeda terror cells waiting to kill them.

- All of these provisions apply to American citizens. Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights." Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."

- In section 950j. the bill criminalizes any challenge to the legislation's legality by the Supreme Court or any United States court. Alberto Gonzales has already threatened federal judges to shut up and not question Bush's authority on the torture of detainees.

Why Is Bush Waiting On Military Commissions Act?

I tried to draw attention to this in the thread discussing habeas corpus eliminated in the US.

The Horrors of Extraordinary Rendition

By Maher Arar

Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who is barred from entering the United States, delivered his acceptance speech for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award in a pre-recorded videotape. This is a transcript of his speech, which was viewed at the award ceremony hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies on Oct. 18, 2006 in Washington, DC.

10/27/06 "Counterpunch' --- - Hello my name is Maher Arar. Sorry I could not join you for today's ceremony.

All Center for Constitutional Rights Staff and I are humbled to have been chosen this year's recipient for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. This award means a tremendous amount to us. It means that there are still Americans out there who value our struggle for justice.

It means that there are Americans out there who are truly concerned about the future of America. We now know that my story is not a unique one. Over the past two years we have heard from many other people who were, who have been kidnapped, unlawfully detained, tortured and eventually released without being charged with any crime in any country.

JFK Stopover

My nightmare began on September 26, 2002. I was transiting through New York airport, JFK Airport, when they asked me to wait in a waiting area. I found that to be strange. Shortly after, some FBI officials came to see me and they asked me whether, I was willing to be interviewed.

My first immediate reaction was to ask for a lawyer and I was surprised when they told me that I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen.

Then I asked for a phone call, I wanted to call my family to let them know what was going on. And they just ignored my request.

Then they told me, we only have couple of questions for you and we'll let you go. So I agreed. I had nothing to hide. And the interrogation started. Soon after, you know, they asked me about people I knew. It was deeper, until the interrogation was going deeper and deeper and deeper.

During this time, they played mind games with me. They would sometimes insult me; say to me something like you're smart. Other times they would accuse me of being dumb.

And, I repeatedly ask for a lawyer, to make a phone call. They always ignored my question.

The interrogation that day lasted about four hours with the FBI officials and another four hours with immigration. At the end of that day, instead of sending me back to Canada, they shackled and chained me and sent me to another, another terminal in the airport where I stayed overnight and in that place, in that room they kept me in, the lights were, were always on. There was no bed in that room and I could not sleep that night.

The next day another set of interrogations started. This time it was about, they asked me about political opinions--I answered openly, I didn't try to hide my political opinions. The asked me about Iraq. They asked me about Palestine and so many other issues. And they also, if I remember correctly, asked me about my emails and some other questions.

Going to Syria

And they told me that day we are about to decide about your fate. At the end of that day, surprisingly, one of the immigration officers came and asked me to volunteer to go to Syria. I said to them: why do you want me to go to Syria, I've never been there for 17 years. And they say, "You are special interest." Of course, back then I did not know what this expression meant. But it was clear that the Americans, the officer did not want me to go to Canada.

When he insisted, I said, let me go back to Switzerland. That was my point of departure before I arrived at JFK and he refused. Eventually they took me into the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison, where they kept me for about 12 days. During this time I was interviewed for six hours by INS. It was a very exhaustive interview from 9PM to like around 3AM in the morning. When I asked them to, during this interview to go, to allow me to go back to my cell to perform my prayer, they refused, completely refused.

Also during my stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center I could clearly see that I was being treated differently from other prisoners. For example, they didn't give me toothpaste they would allow me to go for recreation for about a week. They always ignored my demand for making a phone call. Eventually they allowed me to make a phone call. Up until that time, which was a week after I was arrested, no one in my family knew where I was. My wife thought I was disappeared, I was killed. No one knew exactly what happened, until I informed my mother-in-law that I was arrested.

Eventually on October 8th, against my will, they took me out of my cell. They basically read the pieces of document to me saying, that we will be sending you Syria. And when I complained, I said to them, I did explain to you if I'm sent back I will be tortured and they, I remember, the INS person flipped a couple of pages in this document, to the end of this document and read to me a paragraph that I still remember until today, an extremely shocking statement she made to me.

She said something like: The INS is not the body or the agency that signed the Geneva Convention, convention against torture. For me what that really meant is we will send you to torture and we don't care.

So they put me on a private jet, which I found extremely strange. I was the only passenger on that, on that plane. Its a luxurious plane, with leather seats in it. My only preoccupation during this trip is how I could avoid torture. By then, I realized that they were exactly sending me to Syria for torture. And that became very clear to me. Then the plane flew to Washington from Washington it flew to Maine then to Rome, then from Rome to Jordan.

Shackled and Chained

And I remember on the plane I was most of the time I was shackled and chained except the last two hours when they offered me a shish-kabob dinner. Up until this day I do not, I cannot explain why they did that. If I was a dangerous person like they claimed in the beginning, why they would remove my chains and shackles the last two hours of the trip?

During also the trip, whenever I wanted to use the bathroom, one of the team members would go inside with me. Even though I complained that this was against my religious belief.

The plane landed in Jordan on three in the morning October 8th. And a couple of Jordanians were waiting, men, were waiting for me. They took me, they blindfolded me, they put me in a car and shortly after they started beating me on the back of my head. Whenever I complained about the beating they would actually start beating me more. So I just kept silent.

I stayed in Jordan for about 12 hours in a detention center. I still don't know what that place is.

I was always blindfolded whenever they took me from one cell to another or when they took me to see the doctor. But I felt something strange in that prison. I felt, what, that I used an elevator, which is quite strange for a Middle Eastern prison.

After 12 hours of detention, unlawful detention in Jordan I was eventually driven to Syria. And I just didn't want to believe that I was going to Syria. I always was hoping that someone, a miracle would happen--the Canadian government would intervene. A miracle would happen that would take me back to my country Canada.

I arrived in Syria that same day, at the end of the day and I was able to confirm that I was in fact in Syria after my blindfold was removed and I was able to see the pictures of the Syrian President. My feeling then is I just wanted to kill myself because I knew what was coming. I knew that the Americans, the American government send me there to be tortured.

Sometime later the interrogators came in. They started asking questions, routine questions at the beginning, but whenever I hesitated to answer their questions or whenever they thought I was lying one of them would threaten me with a chair, a metallic chair with no seats in it, only the frames. And back then I did not understand or I did not know how they would torture people with it. I later learned that from other prison inmates.

But the message was clear: if you don't speak quickly enough we will torture you. That day, the interrogation lasted about four hours. There was no physical beating; there was only verbal threats. Around midnight, they took me to the basement. In the basement, the guard opened a door for me, a metallic door. I could not believe my eyes. I looked at him and I said, what is that? He didn't answer. He just said to me: Enter.

The Grave

The cell was about three feet wide, six feet deep and about seven feet high. It was dark. There was no source of light in it. It was filthy. There were only two thin covers on the floor. I was naïve; I thought they would keep me in this place for one, two, maybe three days to put pressure on me. But this same place, the same cell that I later called the grave was my home 10 months and 10 days. The only light that came into the cell was from the ceiling, from the opening in the ceiling. There was a small spotlight and that's it.

Life in the cell was impossible. At the beginning--even though it was a filthy place, it was like a grave--I preferred to stay in that cell rather than being beaten. Whenever I heard the guards coming to open my door I would just think, you know, this is it for me that would be my last day.

The beating started the following day. Without no warning...(long pause as he fights tears) without no warning the interrogator came in with a cable. He asked me to open my right hand. I did open it. And he hit me strongly on my palm. It was so painful to the point that I forgot every moment I enjoyed in my life.

Torture

This moment is still vivid in my mind because it was the first I was ever beaten in my life. Then he asked me to open my left hand. He hit me again. And that one missed and hit my wrist. The pain from that hit lasted approximately six months. And then he would ask me questions. And I would have to answer very quickly. And then he would repeat the beating this time anywhere on my, on my body. Sometimes he would take me to a room where I could, where I was alone, I could hear other prisoners being tortured, severely tortured. I remember that I used to hear their screams. I just couldn't believe it, that human beings would do this to other human beings.

And then they would take me back to the interrogation room. Again another set of questions, and the beating starts again and again. On the third day the beating was the worst. They beat me a lot with the cable. And they wanted me to confess that I have been to Afghanistan. This was a big surprise to me because even the Americans who interviewed me, the FBI officials who interviewed me, did not ask me that question. I ended up falsely confessing in order to stop the torture. The torture decreased in intensity.

From that moment on they rarely used the cable. Mostly they slapped me on the face, they kicked me, they humiliated me all the time.

The first 10 days of my stay in Syria was extremely harsh and during that period I found my cell to be a refuge. I didn't want to see their faces. But later on living in that cell was horrible. And just to give you an idea about how painful it is to stay in that place--I was ready after a couple of months, I was ready to sign any piece of document for me, not to be released, just to go to another place where it is fit for human being.

During this time I wasn't aware that my wife launched a campaign with other human rights organizations like Amnesty International and others. My wife lobbied the media, she lobbied politicians and eventually I was released. The Syrians released me and they clearly stated through the ambassador in Washington that they did not find any links to terrorism. I was not charged in any country including Canada, United States, Jordan and Syria.

Since my release I have been suffering from anxiety, constant fear, and depression. My life will never be the same again. But I promised myself one thing, that I will continue my quest for justice as long as I have a breath. What keeps me going is my faith, Americans like yourselves and the hope that one day our planet Earth will be free of tyranny, torture and injustice.

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was a victim of the U.S. policy known as "extraordinary rendition." He was detained by U.S. officials in 2002, accused of terrorist links, and handed over to Syrian authorities, who tortured him. Arar is working with the Center for Constitutional Rights to appeal a case against the U.S. government that was dismissed on national security grounds.

Padilla Jury to Come From Pool of 3,000

By CURT ANDERSON
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 26, 2006; 3:14 PM

MIAMI -- The jury selection process in the terrorism trial of alleged al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla will begin next month with an unusually large group of 3,000 Miami-area residents, a judge said Thursday.
Court officials had intended to start with a jury pool of 2,300 _ still several hundred more than other recent high-profile cases _ but U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke increased it to 3,000, because "we are now talking about a trial on a global scale."

Cooke said jury duty letters will go out in mid-November to start a process that will ultimately produce 12 jurors and several alternates. The trial of Padilla and two co-defendants, currently scheduled to begin Jan. 22, is expected to last several months.
"I don't think we should wait until the last moment," Cooke said at a hearing.
Also charged are Adham Amin Hassoun, allegedly Padilla's al-Qaida recruiter, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, who published a newsletter describing global Islamic jihad. All have pleaded not guilty.
Padilla, 36, a U.S. citizen and former Chicago gang member, was held without charges for 3 1/2 years by the U.S. military as an enemy combatant. He was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, purportedly on an al-Qaida mission to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a major U.S. city.
Padilla became the subject of a legal battle over President Bush's wartime detention powers, which ended when he was added late last year to an existing terrorism conspiracy and support case. The "dirty bomb" allegations are not included in the case.
Prospective jurors will be questioned closely about their knowledge of Padilla's case, according to a draft questionnaire. They will also be asked about their opinions about Muslims and Arabs, and whether "Islam endorses violence to a greater or lesser extent" than other religions.
Prosecutors are appealing Cooke's dismissal of a terrorism conspiracy count that she concluded repeated other charges in the indictment. The trial could be delayed several months while the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers the appeal.

what the 'justice' system has done to padilla (who very well could be a terror-plotting scumbag), is a stain on america that will not come out easily.

This is an issue that has resurfaced.

Hence, me do bump.

you're a lazy bastard Milkman.
Can you summarise the first couple of posts and give us an update.
Ta.
:)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ChiangMai noon

you're a lazy bastard Milkman.
Can you summarise the first couple of posts and give us an update.
Ta.
:)

---

I'll paste the latest article that came out about 2 days ago. This article is why I brought this thread back up.

Apologies.

So the US and Britain invaded Iraq because Saddam was a monster who locked up people without trial and tortured them. And to combat such behaviour we now lock up people without trial and torture them.

Yup. Exactly.

The USA: It's all our fault.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by themook

Yup. Exactly. The USA: It's all our fault.

---

OK, admitting ones mistakes is a first step in the right direction.
So what now ?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benbaaa

So the US and Britain invaded Iraq because Saddam was a monster who locked up people without trial and tortured them. And to combat such behaviour we now lock up people without trial and torture them.

---

Hypocrisy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by benbaa

So the US and Britain invaded Iraq because Saddam was a monster

---

No,no,no, it was because he was planning to launch a 'nucelar' strike against the US, and he was helping Al-Quaeda do 9/11.

And then, god told both Bush and Blair, that it was a good thing to invade anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by lom

Quote:

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Originally Posted by themook

Yup. Exactly. The USA: It's all our fault.

---

OK, admitting ones mistakes is a first step in the right direction.
So what now ?

---

Next stop, Tehran...:D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Next stop, Tehran...:D

---

We'll see.

I was quite convinced. Now, I don't....know.

:saythat:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Milkman

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Next stop, Tehran...:D

---

We'll see.

I was quite convinced. Now, I don't....know.

---

Yep, there's still an outside chance of an internal change of government but, and it's a big but, they will still have the nuclear bomb(s) and Israel (+ others) are not going for that.:)

According to new information, accused Al Qaeda plotter Jose Padilla was recruited for the jihad while on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca: Padilla recruited for al Qaeda jihad.

Quote:

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Padilla trial doesn't fit its initial billing

By CURT ANDERSON
The Associated Press


https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2007/07/123.jpg

Jose Padilla: Defense to begin next week.


Padilla trial
Prosecution rests: After nine weeks, 22 witnesses and dozens of FBI wiretaps, prosecutors finished presenting their case to jurors in the terrorism support trial of Jose Padilla and two co-defendants.
The history: The government once heralded Padilla's arrest as a success in the country's war on terror, accused him in an al-Qaida "dirty-bomb" plot, and held him for 3 ½ years as an enemy combatant. The dirty-bomb allegations have been dropped.




MIAMI — For a defendant whose name is known around the world, Jose Padilla has become almost a bit player in his terrorism support trial.
Prosecutors rested their case Friday after nine weeks, 22 witnesses and dozens of FBI wiretap intercepts played at trial, most of them in Arabic with written translations for jurors. Defense lawyers for Padilla and his two co-defendants begin presenting their case next week.

Much is at stake for the government, which once heralded Padilla's arrest as a success in the war on terror, accused him in an al-Qaida "dirty-bomb" plot, and held him for 3 ½ years as an enemy combatant.
Padilla's voice was heard on only seven intercepts, a tiny fraction of the 300,000 collected by the FBI during the long investigation.

Padilla was never linked to any specific acts of terrorism or murder and, unlike his co-defendants, he was not accused of using purported code words such as "tourism" for "jihad" or "eggplant" for "rocket-propelled grenade."

"Although everyone has been referring to this case as the Padilla trial, the government's case against Padilla has been pretty thin," said David Markus, a Miami defense attorney who has written frequently about the case on his legal blog. "I'm sure the government lawyers are sweating quite a bit right now."

---

Link: Nation & World | Padilla trial doesn't fit its initial billing | Seattle Times Newspaper

It's too early to comment but this may be another mistake, or deception.

It sounds what happened to these men was terrible, but how or why were they singled out?

^USA Intelligence....

^Oh.





Isn't that an oxymoron?:)

From Christian Science Monitor



Miami - Jose Padilla is known worldwide as the man who plotted with Al Qaeda to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in a major US city.
He allegedly presented his plan to top Al Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But according to US intelligence reports, both men doubted Mr. Padilla could pull off the attack.
For his part, Padilla told military interrogators that he never intended to carry it out. The former Taco Bell employee made the proposal in early 2002 as a way to justify fleeing Pakistan to avoid being sent to combat US forces in Afghanistan, says a government account.
So is Padilla – whose terror conspiracy case could go to a Miami jury Wednesday – a committed Al Qaeda operative, or merely a big-talking mujahideen wannabe who ultimately wanted to go home?
The answer to that question is important. Padilla isn't a run-of-the-mill enemy combatant apprehended on a foreign battlefield. He is a United States citizen, arrested on US soil, who was held in a military prison for 43 months and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques until he confessed.
Padilla was given due process to file a lawsuit challenging his treatment by the government. But as an enemy combatant, he was stripped of every other constitutional protection and right, including the right to know that a constitutional challenge had been filed on his behalf.
Many legal scholars and intelligence experts say Padilla's ordeal highlights the danger of a government that obtains information through secret, coercive means and then selectively releases some of it to justify its actions.
"This is the hallmark of an authoritarian state," says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official and former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.
"At many of the points at which the government said 'dirty bomb,' there was no opportunity to respond for the reason that Mr. Padilla was in solitary confinement and no lawyer had been able to talk to him about the charges," says Diane Amann, visiting law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The release of some details about Padilla and the dirty-bomb plot was justified by administration officials as supporting the public interest. But some information about Padilla and his interrogation must remain secret, officials say, to prevent revealing US intelligence sources and methods to Al Qaeda.
In the court of public opinion, Padilla stands convicted. His name is almost synonymous with dirty bomber. Yet, when it came time to put Padilla on trial, the government's case in Miami included no mention of a dirty bomb.
In his trial, Padilla is accused of providing material support to a terror group by attending an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Federal prosecutors are using a broad conspiracy charge to allege that Padilla was a willing participant in a global terror campaign to wage violent jihad by murdering, kidnapping, and maiming people. Padilla denies it.
Although they seek a life sentence, prosecutors introduced no evidence of personal involvement by Padilla in planning or carrying out any specific terrorist plot or violent act.
There is a reason the government's case is so thin, legal analysts say.
If prosecutors brought the dirty-bomb plot or other alleged illegal actions by Padilla into the Miami case, it would open the door for courtroom scrutiny of the government's use of coercive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects, including Padilla. And that would have taken jurors deep into the shadowy underside of America's war on terror – a journey in Padilla's case that wends its way from his cell on an isolated wing of the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., through covert CIA interrogation sites overseas to an alleged torture chamber in Morocco.
This is a part of the war on terror the Bush administration would rather keep quiet. But details are emerging.
What they reveal is the aggressive – and at times, ruthless – pursuit of intelligence information, and the selective public release of some of that intelligence when it serves the administration's goals.




Plot hit airwaves in 2002
The Padilla story burst into the national consciousness in June 2002 when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft interrupted a trip to Moscow to make a dramatic televised announcement.
"We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive 'dirty bomb,' " he said. Padilla was a "known terrorist" who had trained with Al Qaeda, studied how to wire explosives, and researched radiological dispersion devices, he told the world.
What he didn't say was that Padilla had been locked in a solitary confinement cell in New York City for the past month and that Padilla was only now being taken into military custody on the eve of a scheduled court hearing that would have required the government to legally justify Padilla's continued detention.
Instead, President Bush declared Padilla an "enemy combatant" who posed a "continuing, present, and grave danger" to US national security. The president said Padilla possessed intelligence information that could help prevent Al Qaeda attacks on the US.
Some officials offered a less dramatic take on the dirty-bomb plot than Mr. Ashcroft's. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the CBS "Early Show" that Padilla was "in the very early stages of his planning." He added, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."
Nonetheless, the dirty-bomb announcement sent shock waves across the country and immediately helped justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques against Padilla, analysts say. And it gave news reporters an irresistible tag line to link to Padilla's name – "dirty bomber."
The dirty-bomb stigma would later help the government battle constitutional challenges to Padilla's military detention, according to many legal scholars. And it helped rally public support for an array of tough counter-terror policies by feeding national anxiety about possible terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps most important, these analysts say, the Padilla case presented US officials with a situation that resembled the often discussed "ticking time bomb" scenario. Under this hypothetical plot, a terrorist has been captured after planting a ticking time bomb in a busy public location. Officials face the moral dilemma of either using traditional noncoercive interrogation methods that can take hours, days, or weeks and risk the deaths of thousands of innocent people or resort to brutal tactics to quickly obtain information to discover and defuse the bomb. Under the scenario, saving thousands of lives is viewed as the greater good that justifies using torture against the terrorist.
Mr. Bush has repeatedly stated that his administration does not use torture. But he has also acknowledged that in certain instances harsh interrogation methods have been authorized and used to help protect the nation.
Although civil libertarians protested Padilla's detention without charge, there was no significant public outcry.
Terror war innovation: long detention
The dirty-bomb allegation emerged from information obtained through a Bush administration innovation in the war on terror. That innovation called for the open-ended detention of terror suspects to facilitate aggressive, prolonged interrogations. The questioning was often accompanied by specially authorized harsh interrogation techniques, including isolation, sensory deprivation, and stress positions, among others, according to former interrogators.
No judge in an American courtroom could permit the introduction of information gathered under such coercive techniques, in part because they carry a high risk of producing unreliable results. If the technique is coercive enough, a subject will say whatever it takes to make it stop, former interrogators say. In addition, the rules of procedure and long-established constitutional protections forbid the use of coerced statements as evidence in a trial.
But the rules of the courtroom are not necessarily the rules of the interrogation room. Senior Bush administration officials made clear that once an individual is classified as an enemy combatant, he is no longer entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution.




Because Padilla was held in solitary confinement under secret conditions, no one was aware of what was happening to him. The initial constitutional debate revolved around whether Padilla had a right to consult a lawyer or whether the government could hold him in isolation indefinitely.
In February 2004, then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales told a meeting of the American Bar Association that citizens who take up arms against America don't deserve legal counsel. Any individual rights, he said, "must give way to the national security needs of this country to gather intelligence from captured enemy combatants."
Mr. Gonzales added, "The stream of intelligence would quickly dry up if the enemy combatants were allowed contact with outsiders during the course of an ongoing debriefing. The result would be the failure to uncover information that could prevent attacks," he said. "This is an intolerable cost, and we do not believe it is one required by the Constitution."
Two months later, lawyers were arguing Padilla's case before the US Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to know if there was any check on the powers being claimed by the executive branch to collect intelligence through coercive interrogations. "Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture, we think, will help get this information'?" she asked. "Some systems do that to get information."
"Well, our executive doesn't," said then-Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement.
A few minutes later, Justice Antonin Scalia, an anchor on the court's conservative wing, said he found nothing in his research to support Bush's assertion of unchecked authority to wage the war on terror. "It doesn't say you can do whatever it takes to win the war," he said.
His comment raised a huge red flag for the administration. That evening, coincidentally, the CBS program "Sixty Minutes II" broadcast the first images of detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
A month later, at the height of the Abu Ghraib scandal and with Padilla's case pending at the Supreme Court, the Justice Department held a highly unusual press conference. Officials announced that after two years of interrogation, Padilla had confessed to involvement in the dirty-bomb plot and other activities with Al Qaeda.
"We now know much of what Jose Padilla knows. And what we have learned confirms that the president of the United States made the right call," said James Comey, then deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.
Padilla's Supreme Court case was dismissed by a 5-to-4 vote on a technicality. The justices said Padilla's lawyers should have filed their suit in South Carolina rather than New York. Scalia provided the key fifth vote in a decision that effectively allowed the administration to continue to hold and question Padilla in the brig.
Padilla's lawyers filed a new suit in South Carolina and, by 2005, were again at the steps of the Supreme Court. But rather than allow an airing of the issue at a high court that many analysts believe to be sympathetic to Padilla, the administration transferred him from military custody into the criminal-justice system.
With jury deliberations about to begin in Miami, legal scholars expect more major twists and turns in the Padilla saga. Among moves to watch:
•If Padilla is acquitted, will the government try to return him to the brig?
•If Padilla's lawyers file a civil suit to try to get his military detention case before the Supreme Court again, will the government argue that such a suit must be immediately dismissed to avoid revealing state secrets?
When Federal Bureau of Investigation agents first took Padilla into custody, administration officials thought they had nabbed an intelligence prize. Five years later, legal and intelligence analysts say, these claims look increasingly hollow as the administration maneuvers to keep Padilla from having a meaningful day in court. Its tactics are also keeping the public from knowing the truth about Padilla and the dirty-bomb plot, they say.
"You don't go on the Internet and spend a day reading and become an expert on how to put together a dirty bomb," says Mr. Johnson, the counterterrorism expert. "I'm not knocking folks who work at Taco Bell, but that's not a place you'd go to ramp up your skills" as a nuclear jihadist.




Do presidents have the right to hold citizens indefinitely?
When Jose Padilla's case came before the US Supreme Court in 2004, the issue was whether the president had constitutional authority to hold without charge an American citizen arrested on US soil. The case was tossed out on a technicality. But on the same day that the Padilla outcome was announced, the court released its decision in a similar case of a US citizen captured on an Afghanistan battlefield.
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a four-justice plurality ruled that the president could hold American citizens as enemy combatants in the US provided they were given a fair hearing to challenge the government's actions.
Justice Antonin Scalia believed this approach was deeply flawed. Although he voted with the majority to dismiss Mr. Padilla's case, Justice Scalia wrote a 27-page dissent in the Hamdi case.
If a citizen takes up arms against the US in a time of war, he or she should be tried for treason, the justice wrote. If fast-developing events prevent such a prosecution, Congress has the power to suspend habeas corpus and other protections of the Constitution temporarily. But the commander in chief's authority alone is not enough to accomplish this, Scalia wrote.
The Founding Fathers distrusted military power permanently at the president's disposal, Scalia said. The Founders wrote a series of safeguards into the Constitution, dividing the power over the military between the executive and legislative branches.
"A view of the Constitution that gives the executive authority to use military force rather than the force of law against citizens on American soil flies in the face of the mistrust that engendered these provisions," Scalia wrote.
Although Scalia's view has not carried the day at the high court, it has sparked intense speculation about what might happen should the justices once again consider Padilla's case. Many high court analysts believe five or more justices would be sympathetic to arguments raised by Padilla's lawyers. But no similar case has arrived at the court.
Should the court address the issue in a definitive way, the answer would produce a constitutional landmark.
The evidence for Padilla's dirty bomb plot
The underlying information about Jose Padilla's alleged dirty-bomb plot came primarily from three individuals, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit on file in Mr. Padilla's Miami case. All three were subject to harsh interrogation techniques, and all three have subsequently charged that they were tortured at secret Central Intelligence Agency interrogation sites overseas. They include two of the highest-profile terror suspects in US custody at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.
• Mr. Mohammed made a public statement at Guantánamo earlier this year claiming to be in charge of "dirty-bomb operations on American soil."
• Mr. Zubaydah reportedly talked about the plot early on in his interrogation.
• The third individual, an Ethiopian refugee to Britain named Binyam Mohammed, does not deny making statements about Padilla and a dirty-bomb plot, according to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. But Mr. Mohammed says the statements were made to get interrogators in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan to leave him alone. In Morocco, he claims interrogators used a scalpel to make 20 to 30 small cuts on his genitals every three to four weeks for months, Mr. Smith says. "Binyam says he never met Padilla and doesn't know who he is."
• Padilla's statements in the brig are another source of evidence. He admitted making the statements about proposing the plot, but US intelligence reports say he insisted that he never intended to carry out an attack.
• Padilla also provided information about an alleged plot to blow up apartment building by leaving gas stoves on. Unlike the dirty-bomb plot, this kind of crude attack could be within Padilla's capabilities, analysts say. In addition, Padilla is said to have admitted to having contact with senior Al Qaeda leaders, suggesting that even if he wasn't a member of the terror group he was perhaps a trusted associate.
Analysts say that given the interrogation methods used against Padilla and the others, even if US intelligence officials believe the information is reliable, it is unlikely to ever be admissible in an American court.

By Warren Richey
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

08/13/07 "CSM" --- - Jose Padilla had no history of mental illness when President Bush ordered him detained in 2002 as a suspected Al Qaeda operative. But he does now.

The Muslim convert was subjected to prison conditions and interrogation techniques that took him past the breaking point, mental health experts say.

Two psychiatrists and a psychologist who conducted detailed personal examinations of Mr. Padilla on behalf of his defense lawyers say his extended detention and interrogation at the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., left him with severe mental disabilities. All three say he may never recover.

Padilla's psychological condition is important because his situation marks the first time an enemy combatant in the war on terror is in a position to present a verifiable claim of abuse at the hands of US interrogators. Padilla's mental health itself is a form of evidence, mental-health experts say, and it strongly suggests that – at least in Padilla's case – the government's harsh interrogation and confinement tactics went too far.

Padilla is currently on trial in Miami on terror conspiracy charges. Prosecutors say he was a willing Al Qaeda recruit who attended a training camp in Afghanistan. He denies the allegations. Closing arguments in the three-month trial are slated to begin Monday.

Beyond the outcome of his Miami trial, larger issues loom. Chief among them, legal scholars say, is whether Mr. Bush acted within his constitutional authority when he ordered Padilla, a United States citizen, held without charge as an enemy combatant at the brig for three years and seven months.

Padilla's treatment in the brig raises another issue, these scholars say: whether the Constitution ever permits the government to force a man to confess to involvement in terrorist plots and, in doing so, risk destruction of a portion of his mind.

Defense Department officials reject charges that Padilla was mistreated. "The government in the strongest terms denies Padilla's allegations of torture – allegations made without support and without citing a shred of record evidence," writes Navy Commander J.D. Gordon, a spokesman for the secretary of Defense, in an e-mail. "Any credible allegations of illegal conduct by US military personnel are taken seriously and looked into in painstaking detail."

He adds, "There has never been a substantiated case of detainee abuse at Charleston Navy brig."

The Padilla mental-health issue arises as the Bush administration faces increasing pressure to balance the requirements of the criminal justice system against the demands of its intelligence-collection system. Information about Padilla's detention and interrogation at the brig is classified. But his mental health status can't be kept secret.

Rare window into detention

His psychological reports are on file in his Miami court case. The three reports total 34 pages and offer a rare window into the psychological effects of Padilla's experience in the brig. The mental-health experts were retained by Padilla's lawyers for testimony during pretrial motions. The reports reflect their professional judgments offered to a reasonable degree of medical certainty.

In Padilla's case, these experts say, the pattern of signs and symptoms clearly suggest their origin is the brig . Unlike many allegations of harm from interrogation methods, Padilla's mental condition – and the probable cause of his mental disabilities – can be critically assessed and verified by an independent panel of mental-health professionals, provided Padilla cooperates, these and other psychology experts say.

The judge in Padilla's criminal case has already ruled that Padilla is suffering from a mental disability, but she refused to allow defense lawyers to explore the issue of whether the disability was caused by Padilla's treatment in the brig.

US intelligence officials had good reason to want to learn what Padilla knew. He was detained on suspicion that he was plotting with Al Qaeda to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in the US. He was arrested eight months after the 9/11 attacks as he stepped off a plane in Chicago from the Middle East. Officials were worried about the possibility of a second wave of terror attacks and the presence of sleeper cells in the US.

Padilla's interrogation was designed to overcome his will to keep silent, and then to wring from him every detail of what officials thought he might know of Al Qaeda's plans and operations.

Bush and other administration officials have repeatedly said that America does not use torture. They stress that all terror suspects are treated humanely.

"There have been 12 major reviews conducted of detention operations over the past several years, none of which found there was any policy that ever condoned abuse," says Commander Gordon, the Pentagon spokesman. "The reviews have resulted in numerous recommendations which have been implemented and have improved our detention operations."

The mental-health experts say their focus is on Padilla, not on policies.

"He is not the same man who was taken into custody in 2002," says Angela Hegarty, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who spent 22 hours examining Padilla. "Whatever happened to him in there has radically changed him."

Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, says Padilla's experience in the brig has left members of his family stunned and frightened. "People who have known him and loved him before his military detention don't feel they can even bear to see him because he is so clearly mentally ill."

Tricky issue: US citizenship

The administration has faced criticism for using harsh interrogation tactics on foreign enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay and other locations overseas. But Padilla's situation is unique.

Padilla is a US citizen who was arrested and detained on US soil. Because of this status, his case was closely followed at the highest levels of the US government. The president himself signed the order authorizing Padilla's detention.

In 2002, the Justice Department produced a "torture" memo stating that victims would have to experience pain equivalent to organ failure to prove torture.

"The development of a mental disorder such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression, which can last a considerable period of time if untreated, might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement" to prove torture, the memo says.

Drs. Hegarty and Grassian say Padilla's psychological condition exceeds even the high standard for mental damage set by the 2002 torture memo. "This whole issue of torture turns on the question of what are the types of effects that one would expect from putting a person in this situation in the brig," says Grassian. "If you would expect a person to become so deranged as to become psychotically terrified, to me that constitutes torture."

The issue is not new. Lawyers representing Padilla in his criminal case in Miami filed motions last year charging that their client had been tortured while in military custody. They said the abuse rendered Padilla mentally incompetent to assist in his own defense at trial.

But in a February hearing, US District Judge Marcia Cooke sidestepped the torture accusations. She ruled that even though mental-health experts had identified mental disabilities, Padilla was competent enough to face prosecution.

"The mere fact that the defendant is suffering from a mental disease or defect does not render the defendant incompetent to stand trial," Judge Cooke declared.

Mental-health experts say that a legal determination of competence to stand trial doesn't undercut the severity of Padilla's existing mental disabilities.

Throughout his three-month trial in Miami, Padilla has sat quietly at the defense table. He looks more the part of a legal assistant in his charcoal gray suit with neatly cropped hair and eyeglasses than the radical jihadist he is alleged to have become. He turns and smiles to his mother when she attends the trial. But unlike his two codefendants he rarely interacts with his lawyers.

'I saw this individual happy ... joking'

A Bureau of Prisons psychologist who examined Padilla prior to the court competency hearing, found that Padilla was suffering from mental disabilities. But Dr. Rodolfo Buigas disagreed with the other mental-health experts on the severity of Padilla's conditions, painting a somewhat rosy picture of the onetime military detainee. "I saw this individual happy. I saw this individual joking in the context of the evaluation. I saw the full, broad range of emotions," Dr. Buigas testified.

The psychologist also testified that Padilla declined to answer most of his questions, including his date of birth, and refused to participate in any psychological testing during the six hours the two men spent together.

Others with more significant interaction with Padilla say his brig experience has left him in a state of mental disorganization.

Some psychological tests place him on par with individuals who have suffered brain damage, according to the reports prepared by Hegarty, Grassian, and Patricia Zapf, a New York psychologist and psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Padilla's treatment in the brig is classified as a state secret.

Ironically, no one knows this better than Padilla himself. When Hegarty, the psychiatrist, asked him about his interrogation in the brig, Padilla responded: "I can't talk about what happened to me because it is classified."

Although Padilla has been meeting with his Miami lawyers for more than a year and a half, he refuses to discuss his treatment in the brig in any detail.

The torture allegations made last year in the Miami court case were raised as a result of repeated sessions asking Padilla "yes or no" whether he'd endured the kinds of harsh interrogation tactics reported in the press. He reluctantly answered yes to some, and no to others. But his lawyers could pry no details or narrative from him.

They asked Hegarty for help.

He changed the subject and twitched

She spent days attempting to establish a rapport, days trying to get him to open up. "The first two hours were utterly useless each day. I got no data at all," Hegarty says. Eventually he would relax and talk about relatively minor subjects. When Hegarty tried to steer him toward the brig or the evidence in his criminal case "he would just stop, change the subject, and twitch," she said.

During her week-long effort, Hegarty would arrive each morning to discover Padilla once again unwilling to talk. She says the experience was like the movie "Groundhog Day," in which the same events repeat over and over. "The 22 hours I spent with him, it was like it never happened," Hegarty says. "It was chilling."

Grassian relates in his report that Padilla's mother found it emotionally difficult to visit her son in Miami because it involved observing his diminished mental condition. Padilla tried to reassure her that he was fine, that the government was treating him very well. At one point, Grassian says, Padilla suggested that his mother write directly to Bush to help her speed through red tape to arrange her next visit. The president was sure to help her out, Padilla assured his mother.

"It was utterly irrational," Grassian writes in his report. "After all, it was President Bush who had ordered him detained as an enemy combatant."

Padilla's mother became increasingly anxious. Finally she confronted her son: "Did they torture you?" she asked.

"He turned towards her, his face grimacing, his eyes blinking, and in panic and rage he demanded: 'Don't you ever, ever, ask that question again,' " the Grassian report says.

What makes Padilla's case especially challenging from a psychological perspective is that he denies having any symptoms of psychological distress. Experts say it is an attempt by Padilla to avoid being viewed in any way as mentally disturbed.

"He was told not to talk about what happened in the brig and that if he ever spoke about what happened, people would think he was crazy," Hegarty says. "This admonition has power over him," she says. "He becomes visibly terrified as he is saying it."

Critical focus on the brig

Hegarty, Grassian, and Zapf all agree that Padilla exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and that he has become psychotically disorganized. They say that Padilla's ordeal in the brig was so psychologically unsettling that it has left him terrorized. Any reminder of the ordeal through questions by his lawyers or others, triggers a recurrence of the disorganizing terror Padilla experienced in the brig, they say.

"As soon as you try to approach a subject related to the brig he starts grimacing and you can just see he becomes mentally disorganized. Anyone who watched this with a reasonably unbiased eye would find it so creepy," Grassian says. "You can see the terror come out of him."

Padilla has been on trial in Miami since May on charges that he became a willing Al Qaeda recruit. The government never presented any part of the alleged "dirty-bomb" plot in the case, and some analysts say the government's cobbled-together case against Padilla is weak.

It is unclear what Padilla thinks about the possibility of an acquittal in Miami. But Hegarty says that if Padilla's lawyers win the case it could mark the worst possible outcome for him. That's because the president might try to move Padilla back to his old cell in the brig.

"There is no question in my mind that his first and most important priority is to not go back to the brig," Hegarty says. "This is what leaves me chilled, if one were to offer him a long prison term or return to the brig, he would take prison, in a heartbeat."

She adds, "He told me more than once that if he went back to the brig he knew what he had to do." Her notes reflect Padilla's hints of suicide.

Worst outcome: a return to the brig

Although it is still unknown exactly what happened to Padilla during his three years and seven months in the Charleston brig, Hegarty says this much is certain – for Padilla returning to the brig would be a fate worse than death.

Legally, Padilla isn't at a dead end. Last year, three justices of the Supreme Court issued a highly unusual warning. If the government attempts to take Padilla back to the brig, they said, Padilla could, if necessary, appeal directly to the highest court in the land.

Some longtime court-watchers suggest Padilla already has the support of at least five of the nine justices, and maybe more.

When Padilla's case originally reached the high court in 2004, it was dismissed on technical grounds by a 5-to-4 vote. The vote allowed the continued harsh treatment of Padilla.

Justice John Paul Stevens, a US Navy intelligence officer during World War II, filed a dissent. He quoted a 1949 opinion by then Justice Felix Frankfurter.

It said: "There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men."

When did Padilla's mental problems begin?

If Jose Padilla's mental disabilities are evidence that US coercive interrogation tactics are too harsh, a key issue is when the disabilities began.

It's possible they began before he was detained by the US military.

In a pretrial hearing in Mr. Padilla's terror conspiracy case in Miami, a prosecutor said that perhaps they stemmed from his time in Pakistan or his alleged time in Afghanistan. Padilla was in the region during US operations in Afghanistan in 2001 and early 2002, a time of massive US bombing raids and other military action. But the prosecutor offered no evidence.

Conversely, several pieces of evidence suggest that the problems began at the Navy brig in South Carolina.

In May 2002, a month before he entered the brig, Padilla was taken into custody, held in New York City, and given access to a court-appointed lawyer, Donna Newman. Two years later, when the Bush administration first allowed Padilla to see his lawyers again, Ms. Newman and another attorney visited.

"There is no question he had changed," Newman says. "Prior to his being held in South Carolina there was no reason to suspect that he had any kind of [mental] problem."

She adds, "After his being held in the brig ... his focus seemed less direct, his eye contact was similarly diminished, and he was more taciturn."

"Mr. Padilla had no evidence of any mental illness prior to his arrest and incarceration in 2002," writes Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist, in his report for Padilla's defense team. He examined medical documents and interviewed Padilla's family, including his mother, siblings, and ex-wife.

Patricia Zapf, a New York psychologist, also retained by the defense, quotes Padilla's mother in her report as saying that her son had "never suffered from any mental illness or received treatment for any psychological or psychiatric problems." His mother said she had visited him eight or nine times but that it was becoming too hard emotionally to "see Jose that way." She added that he did not have facial ticks prior to being incarcerated.

"Mr. Padilla shows extreme anxiety," Ms. Zapf said at a pretrial hearing. "He said he will go back there. He will die there. He is fearful of his time in the brig. Everything that he talks about is with respect to the time at the brig, no other time point."

Jose Padilla timeline

1970 Born in Brooklyn, N.Y.

1974 His father dies; the family later moves to Chicago.

1980s * Several run-ins with the law, including gang involvement and convictions for battery and armed robbery. A robbery turns deadly after a friend stabs a victim. He enters a juvenile detention center and remains until age 18.

1989 * Moves to Florida with mother.

1991 * Serves 10 months in Broward County jail for firing a shot after a road-rage altercation. He becomes interested in Islam.

Mid-1990s * Employed with his girlfriend, Cherie Maria Stultz, at a Taco Bell managed by the cofounder of an Islamic school. Eventually, they both convert. He changes his name to Ibrahim. They marry.

1998 * Travels alone to Egypt to study Islam and Arabic with funds collected at his mosque. Eventually, he and Stultz file for divorce. He marries an Egyptian.

2000 * Visits Saudi Arabia for the hajj, then Yemen and Pakistan. The US Justice Department claims he meets with Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and attends a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

2002 * Reportedly talks with Al Qaeda leaders about a "dirty bomb" plot. On his return to US to see family, FBI agents arrest him in Chicago. President declares him an "enemy combatant" and he begins 43 months of detention and interrogation in a naval brig.

2003-2006 * Courts wrestle over whether the president has authority to order the military detention of a US citizen arrested on US soil. The administration indicts him in criminal court. The US Supreme Court dismisses a case challenging the legality of his military detention.

2007 Is tried in criminal court on terror conspiracy charges in Miami.

– Compiled by Leigh Montgomery

Thanks for the posts Homer.

Could you add a link? Thanks.

Convicting Padilla: Bad News for All Americans

By Dave Lindorff

08/18/07 "ICH" -- - With habeas corpus a thing of the past, with arrest and detention without charge permitted, with torture and spying without court oversight all the rage, with prosecutors free to tape conversations between lawyers and their clients, and with the judicial branch now infested by rightwing judges who would have been at home in courtrooms of the Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany, for all they seem to care about common law tradition, the only real thing holding the line against absolute tyranny in the U.S. has been the jury.

Now, with Jose Padilla--a US citizen who was originally picked up and held incommunicado on a military base for three and a half years, publicly accused (though never charged) with planning to construct and detonate a so-called "dirty" nuclear device (this a guy without a high school education!), all based upon hearsay, evidence elicited by torture, and a few overheard wiretapped conversations where prosecutors claimed words like "zucchini" were code for explosive devices-convicted on a charge of "planning to murder," we see that juries in this era of a bogus "war on terror" are ready to believe anything.

That last line of defense-the common sense or ordinary citizens in a jury box-is gone too.

The jury in this case apparently accepted the government's contention that Padilla was a member of Al Qaeda, and had returned from a trip to Pakistan full of plans to wreak mayhem on his own country. They cared not a whit for the fact that the government had used methods against Padilla (three years of isolation and total sensory deprivation that had driven him insane) which would have made medieval torturers green with envy. They cared not a whit that there was no real evidence against Padilla.

This was, in the end, a case that most closely resembled the famous Saturday Night Live skit in which witches were dunked underwater to "prove" whether they were in fact witches, and where if they drowned, they were found to be innocent. In the end, Padilla's jury simply bought the government's wild and wild-eyed story. They decided he hadn't drowned, so he must be guilty.

Padilla can now expect to spend what's left of his life in prison. Since the government has already driven him insane, he will have the added burden of being mentally unbalanced from the outset of his incarceration. His survival prospects are not good.

The president promptly thanked the jury for their "good judgment."

We can no doubt expect many more Padillas now that the way has been paved for this kind of totalitarian approach to law enforcement.

Beginning today, we can expect the government to begin arresting people on an array of trumped-up charges, locking them away in black sites, on military bases, or maybe even overseas, subjecting them to all manner of torture, and then finally bringing them to trial on trumped-up charges. We can also expect juries, made fearful by breathless warnings that "evil ones" mean us and our nation harm, to buy the government's stories.

Who is at risk? That's hard to say, but it's clear that it won't just be hardened terrorist types. A presidential executive order signed by Bush on July 17 declares that anything that "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction (sic) and political reform (sic) in Iraq" could be deemed a crime making the perpetrator subject to arrest. Would writing essays critical of the president, the war in Iraq, or the "reconstruction" effort in Iraq meet that standard? Who knows? Would being interviewed for commentary as part of a news story on English-language Al Jezeera TV (which Bush and Cheney have declared to be supportive of the Iraqi insurgency, and which Bush reportedly at one point considered bombing!)?

And how about anti-war protesters? We already have Washington, DC, under pressure from Homeland Security, threatening the organization World Can't Wait with multiple $10,000 fines for posting flyers around the city announcing an anti-war march and rally on September 15. If they go ahead with the protest, will they be joining Padilla?

I have little doubt that this administration would love to lock up journalistic critics and protesters in military brigs, so the question is: how would juries respond to charges that American journalists and protesters against the war were treacherously undermining the Bush war effort?

I used to be confident that most juries would laugh such cases out of court. After the Padilla decision, I'm not so sure.

You want to think that your fellow citizens have at least some measure of common sense, but this case suggests otherwise--that they are easily frightened, gullible, and willing to believe the most fantastic claims of the government.

The future does not look good for freedom in America.

Dave Lindorff's newest book is "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

This sets a precedent. A US citizen is detained without being charged, nor having other Constitutional privaleges. Not good, IMO.

Quote:

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Padilla attorney Jonathan Freiman said Yoo was sued because "he gave the green light" to how to deal with Padilla, which ultimately led to his detention without criminal charge for 3 1/2 years at a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.

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Quote:

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https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gifupdated 6:38 p.m. PT, Fri., Jan. 4, 2008

MIAMI - Convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla sued a key architect of the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies Friday, claiming the official's legal arguments led to Padilla's alleged mistreatment and illegal detention at a Navy brig.


The lawsuit claims that John Yoo, a former senior Justice Department official, wrote several legal memos that led President Bush to designate Padilla as an enemy combatant shortly after the U.S. citizen was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on suspicion of involvement in an al-Qaida plot.


Yoo at the time was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, which provided many of the main legal justifications for Bush administration policy on treatment of terror detainees.

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Entire: Ex-official sued over terrorism memos - Security - MSNBC.com

Why Jose Padilla's 17-Year Prison Sentence Should Shock and Disgust all Americans

By Andy Worthington

23/01/08 "Huffington Post" -- - The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.

The former gang member and convert to Islam - whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a "known terrorist," who was "exploring a plan" to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city - was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil. Almost six years later, as he received his sentence, he was not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

While this is shocking enough in and of itself, Padilla's sentence - in what at least one perceptive commentator called "the most important case of our lifetimes" - is particularly shocking because it sends a clear message to the president of the United States that he can, if he wishes (and as he did with Padilla), designate a US citizen as an "enemy combatant," hold him without charge or trial in a naval brig for 43 months, and torture him - through the use of prolonged sensory deprivation and solitary confinement - to such an extent that, as the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty explained after spending 22 hours with Padilla, "What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being's mind."

Padilla's warders had another take on his condition, describing him as "so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for 'a piece of furniture,'" but the most detailed analysis of the effects of his torture was, again, provided by Angela Hegarty in an interview last August with Democracy Now:

Juan Gonzalez: And have you dealt with someone who had been in isolation for such a long period of time before?

Dr. Angela Hegarty: No. This was the first time I ever met anybody who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period of time. I mean, the sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within days. And here we had a man who had been in this situation, utterly dependent on his interrogators, who didn't treat him all that nicely, for years. And apart from - the only people I ever met who had such a protracted experience were people who were in detention camps overseas, that would come close, but even then they weren't subjected to the sensory deprivation. So, yes, he was somewhat of a unique case in that regard.


As if this were not worrying enough, it was what happened after Padilla's 43-month ordeal that sealed the president's impunity to torture US citizens at will. When it seemed that his case was within reach of the US Supreme Court, the government transferred him into the US legal system, deposited him in a normal prison environment, dropped all mention of the "dirty bomb" plot, and charged him, based on his association with two alleged terrorist facilitators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, with participating in a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. When the case came to court last summer, the judge, Marcia Cooke, airbrushed Padilla's torture from history, insisting that it could not be discussed at all, and, after a trial regarded as farcical by many observers, Padilla and his co-defendants were duly found guilty.

Today's sentencing, after an unusually protracted two-week debate, has apparently brought the whole sordid saga to an end, with Padilla's torture only mentioned briefly in passing by Judge Cooke, who noted, "I do find that the conditions [for Padilla as an enemy combatant] were so harsh that they warrant consideration." Nevertheless, he received a longer sentence than either of his co-defendants (who were sentenced to 15 years and eight months, and 12 years and eight months, respectively), even though two jurors admitted to the Miami Herald that the jury as a whole "struggled to convict Padilla because the panel initially viewed him as a bit player in the scheme to aid Islamic extremists, unlike his co-defendants."

They certainly had a point. While the conviction of Hassoun and Jayyousi was based on coded conversations in 126 phone calls intercepted by the FBI over a number of years, Padilla was included in only seven of those phone calls. Groomed by his mentor, Hassoun, he had traveled to the Middle East and, in 2000, had applied to attend a military training camp in Afghanistan, using the name Abu Abdallah al-Muhajir. His application form, which, according to a government expert, bore his fingerprints, was apparently discovered during a CIA raid on an alleged al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, but although the prosecution presented an alleged al-Qaeda graduation list with his Muslim name on it during the sentencing, they had been unable to provide any evidence during the trial that he had actually attended the training camp in Afghanistan.

In the end, Padilla's conviction hinged on the jury's determination that he had "joined the terrorism conspiracy in the United States before leaving the country." This was based on a single recorded conversation, in July 1997, in which he stated that he was ready to join a jihad overseas.

17 years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla's three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it's difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the president and his advisors have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government's powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of "enemy combatants" who have not yet been identified.

For more on Jose Padilla and other US "enemy combatants," see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.

A sad case alright, and I would agree that 17 years jail is way over the top for a bloke convicted of nothing worse in actuality than thinking the wrong things, especially after what he's been through.

A URL or 'link' should be provided in Issues with for whatever you quote off the internet Homer. ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sabang

A sad case alright, and I would agree that 17 years jail is way over the top for a bloke convicted of nothing worse in actuality than thinking the wrong things, especially after what he's been through.

A URL or 'link' should be provided in Issues with for whatever you quote off the internet Homer. ;)

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Will do

Padilla Trial Highlights Bush Administration's Manipulation Of Justice
By Paul Craig Roberts
27/01/08 "Jurist" -- - "The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on US civil liberty that Bush and the DOJ justified in the name of "the war on terror." The government gave assurances that the draconian measures only apply to “terrorists.” “Terrorist,” however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a “terrorist” without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.

The Bush administration’s policy comprises an end-run around any notion of procedural due process of law. Administration assurances that harsh treatment is reserved only for “terrorists” is meaningless when the threshold process for determining who is and who is not a “terrorist” depends on executive discretion that is not subject to review. Substantive rights are useless without the procedural rights to enforce them.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was accused of intending to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city. He was denied due process and the protection of habeas corpus. He was held for years under harsh conditions that brought about “essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind,” according to Dr. Angela Hegarty, a psychiatrist who spent 22 hours examining Padilla.

Eventually, the courts intervened. In December 2003 an appellate court ruled that Padilla could not be denied habeas corpus protection. To forestall another Supreme Court ruling against the Bush administration, the administration withdrew Padilla’s status as “enemy combatant” and filed criminal charges that bore no relationship to the administration’s original allegations that Padilla intended to explode a “dirty bomb.”

The only case the DOJ was able to manufacture against Padilla was that he was a “terrorist-wannabe.” Padilla was thus indicted on the Benthamite grounds that he might commit a terrorist act in the future.

By the time Padilla went to trial, he had been demonized for years in the media as the “dirty bomb” terrorist. In the Washington Post, August 17, 2007, Peter Whoriskey described the Padilla jury as a patriotic jury that appeared in court with one row of jurors dressed in red, one in white, and one in blue. As Lawrence Stratton and I write in the new edition of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: “It was a jury primed to be psychologically and emotionally manipulated by federal prosecutors. No member of this jury was going to return home to accusations of letting off the “dirty bomber.”

The main “evidence” introduced against Padilla was an unrelated 10-year old video of Osama bin Laden, which served to arouse in jurors fear, anger, and disturbing memories of September 11.

The prosecutors also claimed to have a form that Padilla is alleged to have completed in 2000, prior to September 11, 2001, to attend an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. At that time Al Qaeda and the Taliban were fighting against a remnant of the Northern Alliance containing elements of the old Soviet regime to unify Afghanistan as an Islamic state. Although it is far fetched that al Qaeda sent out applications to attend its training camps, any such application by Padilla predated the 9/11 attack and was related only to domestic affairs in Afghanistan. Any such application has no relevance to any act of terrorism.

Padilla was convicted on all counts. In handing down a 17-year sentence, US District Judge Marcia Cooke denied the prosecutors’ request for a life sentence and observed: “There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere.”

Under Blackstonian law, the basis of the US Constitution, the Padilla case has no crime and no intent to commit a crime. Judge Cooke vaguely recognized this, but US law has been pushed off its Blackstonian basis and is being reconstructed on a Benthamite basis.

Benthamite law is the great ally of tyranny. It permits people to be arrested on the suspicion that they might commit a crime in the future, to be tortured, and to be held indefinitely. In other words, suspicion leads to imprisonment without the check of warrant, judge, trial or jury.

This is the law that the Padilla case has given us. Padilla, an American citizen, was denied habeas corpus, tortured, and convicted of the Benthamite crime of being suspected of possibly committing a real crime in the future. The fact that judge and jury went along with the Benthamite proceeding shows that Benthamite justice can operate within the old Blackstonian process.

The Justice Department that manufactured the case against Padilla is the same DOJ that wrote memos justifying torture and findings that the President of the US need not obey federal statutes such as FISA or abide by the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution. It is the same DOJ whose attorney general told Congress that the Constitution does not provide habeas corpus protection to every US citizen.

This same DOJ is the product of an administration the highest officers of which have been documented to have lied about Iraq 935 times in the two years following 9/11.

If the Bush administration will lie about matters of war and death and fabricate evidence to justify war, why won’t the administration lie and fabricate evidence in order to convict accused “terrorists” like Padilla and whomever else they please?

Harvey Silverglate has noted that the legal changes we have experienced since 9/11/2001 have destroyed the common law basis of US law. In terrorist cases, prosecutors do not need to fabricate evidence, because they can make crimes out of innocuous and even constitutionally protected activity. A case in point is the federal indictment of a Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho who operated some Websites, a constitutionally-protected activity, where some participants in discussion groups advocated jihad. Applying a provision of the US PATRIOT Act, federal prosecutors indicted Omar Al-Hussayen for providing “expert advice or assistance” to terrorist organizations (see Silverglate, The Boston Globe, June 28, 2004). What prosecutors are doing goes beyond fabricating evidence. They are using amorphous terrorism statutes to criminalize ordinary aspects of everyday life. Another way of putting it is that prosecutors take ordinary events and stretch them to fit an expansive interpretation of a terrorism statute. A large amount of effort is committed to prosecuting activities that do not fit any common sense meaning of crime."

Paul Craig Roberts [former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; co-author (with Lawrence Stratton) of The Tyranny of Good Intentions]