The sad case of Jose Padilla

**barbaro** · 05-01-2008, 10:35 AM

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

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.

....

updated 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.

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

**Homer** · 24-01-2008, 07:35 AM

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.

**sabang** · 24-01-2008, 07:50 AM

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.

**Homer** · 29-01-2008, 07:34 AM

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.

Will do

**Homer** · 29-01-2008, 07:36 AM

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]

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