It would be difficult to imagine a more
nightmarish farce of a legal proceeding.
1/11/07: Four and a half years ago John Ashcroft, the first Attorney
General for the Bush administration, interrupted a trip to Moscow
to make an announcement about the arrest of a Brooklyn
born man named Jose Padilla. Ashcroft said “I am
pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism.
We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and
explode a radiological dispersion device, or “dirty bomb”,” in the United States.”
As at so many crucial moments of
the Bush Regime, Ashcroft, who was soon echoed and lauded by Bush, utilized a
lie to justify and ram through a dramatic leap in the level of repressive
powers of government authorities. And in so doing the Bush administration has
created a precedent which has not only destroyed the life of Jose Padilla, but
could be used against virtually anyone the president and his entourage declare
an enemy.
Immediately after his arrest, Padilla was declared an “enemy
combatant” by Bush and Ashcroft – meaning that he could be held indefinitely,
without charges. Padilla was placed in a brig in South Carolina. Recent articles in the New York Times and other publications
have hinted at the horrors government officials subjected Padilla to during the
21 month period he was held in South
Carolina, and since.
According to a petition for habeas corpus filed by Padilla’s
attorneys, he was not allowed to meet with nor communicate with his attorney
from June 9, 2002 to March 2004. During this period, Padilla was kept in a cell
with blackened windows. He was not allowed a clock or calendar. He was denied
his Koran. An article in the law journal of the University of Pittsburgh
describes how “”Padilla claims that he was subjected to multiple means of
torture and abuse including sleep deprivation, threats of execution, exposure
to noxious fumes, and extreme heat and cold, and was forced to wear a hood and
stand in one position for extended periods of time. Lawyers for Padilla also
claim that he was given ‘truth serum’ in the form of LSD or PCP.”
To put it in plain English, Jose Padilla was systematically
tortured by the U.S.
government. They utilized sophisticated methods of “no touch torture” which
have been described by Alfred McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin
and author of the book A Question of
Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror as the
“first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three
centuries”.
The
legal precedents established in the arrest and persecution of Jose Padilla resulted
in what were described as “three and a half years of the most gross deprivation
of human rights that we”ve seen in this country for a long time”, said Deborah
Pearlstein, a lawyer with the group Human Rights First. And for Padilla himself the result of the
torture he endured for years is that he lacks “the capacity to participate in
his own defense”. Padilla was recently examined for 22 hours by Dr. Angela
Hegarty, the director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor
Psychiatric Center
in New York,
and she examined Padilla for a total of 22 hours last spring. She concluded
that “It is my opinion that as the result of his
experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not
appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is
unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the
result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated
by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation.”
Legal challenges were mounted to the Bush Regime’s legal
justifications for the confinement without trial of Jose Padilla. It is
important to understand the far reaching nature of these justifications, and
what the Bush administration did in response to its challengers. For hundreds
of years, a foundation of what Bush often refers to as the “rule of law” is the
right of Habeas Corpus – which includes, in short, the right to “have your day
in court”. This has always been supposed to provide protection against
arbitrary arrest and incarceration. Bush has declared, and his attorneys
general (first Ashcroft and now Alberto Gonzalez) have provided legal arguments
for, the absolute right of the president to designate anyone an “enemy
combatant”, and therefore outside the protection of the legal system and
subject to the kind of treatment Jose Padilla has received. And they have
maneuvered over the past several years to ensure not only that Jose Padilla
will remain imprisoned, but that their ability to use the overarching and
extremely repressive measures they have initiated against him will remain
intact for use against others.
In the face of mounting legal challenges to their right of
preemptory arrest and incarceration, the Bush administration simply changed the
basis on which it was holding him. No longer was Padilla held in military
detention; he was sent to a federal prison and charged with criminal charges.
The criminal trial of Jose Padilla
is scheduled to begin in Florida
in late January. The charges against him include conspiracy to murder U.S. Nationals
overseas, conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing
material support to terrorists. These charges are based on 230 tapped phone
conversations in which Padilla himself was recorded once, and, again according
to the New York Times, “Mr. Padilla
does not discuss violent plots”. Jose
Padilla is not charged with the allegation once made so dramatically by John
Ashcroft. As the New York Times wrote, the case against Padilla “will feature none
of the initial claims about violent plotting with Al Qaeda that the government
cited as justification for detaining Mr. Padilla without formal charges for
three and a half years”.
Further, and in what in probably
the most outrageous and chilling aspect of this entire exercise in mind numbing
repression that knows no limits, “the government has reserved the option,
should the prosecution fail, to return Mr. Padilla to the military brig”.
It would be difficult to imagine a
more nightmarish farce of a legal proceeding. Yet, it is exactly this kind of proceeding
that Bush is not only fighting to continue and extend, but actually promoting
to the world as a key part of what differentiates the U.S. from the
forces he seeks to vanquish. Shortly after Saddam Hussein’s execution, Bush
issued a statement which began “Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after
receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his
brutal regime.”
Neither of these alternatives is
anything but poison for the people. Everything about the arrest, incarceration,
and “legal proceedings” against Jose Padilla is odious and must by emphatically
rejected and opposed by anyone with a sense of morality that leads them to
conclude that human beings should not be tortured at all, much less for years,
and a belief that the law should be applied objectively and not tailored to
suit the repressive agenda of the regime in power.