Our Constitution, R.I.P.You know, if the Bush administration says it can pick up an American citizen off the street, hold him incommunicado, refuse him the right to a trial and refuse to explain what the nature of his crime is, I think this pretty much makes the United States Constitution inoperative. Sure, not many of us are likely to face the problems that Mr. Padilla faces, and for all I know he is a bad guy. But our Constitutional protections are supposed to apply to bad guys as much as good guys. Whats more these dishonest incompetent ideological extremists are almost always hiding something significant whenever they claim to be operating in our national security interests, and youd have to be an idiot (or a White House reporter or a Fox News anchor) even to be able to pretend to believe them this time. Im sure when this is over we will find out they are just covering up their own incompetence and dishonesty. But the lack of outcry over this naked police state tactic is one more example of how increasingly hollow are our claims to be an example to anyone of anything, save hypocrisy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/The above opinion was written in response to this article:In Legal Shift, U.S. Charges Detainee in Terrorism Case By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - The Bush administration brought terrorism charges on Tuesday against Jose Padilla in a criminal court after holding him for three and a half years in a military brig as an enemy combatant once accused in a "dirty bomb" plot.
The decision to remove Mr. Padilla from military custody and charge him in the civilian system averts what had threatened to be a constitutional showdown over the president's authority to detain him and other American citizens as enemy combatants without formal charges.
The administration had faced a deadline next Monday to file its legal arguments with the Supreme Court in the Padilla case, which the Justice Department said it now considers "moot."
The administration had long resisted charging Mr. Padilla in a criminal court, as it created a new system for detaining enemy combatants and other terror suspects in military facilities.
But in Mr. Padilla's case and in a number of other prominent ones, the administration has changed course after coming under pressure from lawmakers and the courts to re-examine the way it jails and interrogates terror suspects.
In an indictment unsealed in Miami on Tuesday, Mr. Padilla (pronounced puh-DILL-uh), a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam, was charged with being part of a "North American support cell" that worked to support violent jihad campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas from 1993 to 2001. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Using coded conversations, the group sent money and offered support to promote terrorist attacks overseas against Americans and others, and Mr. Padilla himself filled out a "mujahideen data form" in 2000 for entry to a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, the indictment charges.
The indictment is narrower in scope than the previous accusations that the Bush administration has made publicly against Mr. Padilla, and it makes no direct mention of Al Qaeda or the more far-ranging plots on American soil that the administration had linked to him.
After Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, interrupted a trip to Moscow to announce on television that the authorities had foiled an effort by Mr. Padilla and other Qaeda operatives to detonate a radioactive or "dirty" bomb on American streets.
In June 2004, senior Justice Department officials went further, using newly declassified documents - and statements they said Mr. Padilla had made in the military brig to his interrogators - to assert that he had plotted to blow up apartment buildings and hotels, perhaps in New York.
But Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, announcing the criminal charges at a news conference on Tuesday, said Mr. Padilla's status as an enemy combatant and the previous accusations made against him by the administration were "legally irrelevant to the charges we're bringing today."
"President Bush has directed his administration to utilize all available tools to protect America from acts of terrorism," Mr. Gonzales said. "This case, which began as an intelligence investigation, is a classic example of why the criminal justice system is one of those important tools."
Mr. Bush, in an order dated Sunday and released on Tuesday, said, "I hereby determine that it is in the best interest of the United States that Jose Padilla be released from detention by the secretary of defense and transferred to the control of the attorney general for the purpose of criminal proceedings against him."
Senior Justice Department officials said that although they could not discuss in detail the earlier accusations made against Mr. Padilla regarding the "dirty bomb" plan and other plots, they were not disavowing the accuracy of those accusations or retreating from them. But they acknowledged that in considering criminal charges, they were hamstrung by the difficulty of using in court any intelligence obtained from Mr. Padilla and other terror suspects when they were in military custody without lawyers.
Mr. Padilla was held incommunicado in the Navy brig in South Carolina for nearly two years after his arrest, until the Defense Department relented in March 2004 and allowed defense lawyers to meet with him. Administration officials acknowledge that Mr. Padilla's detention has posed a growing conundrum, with even some conservatives questioning the rationale for detaining an American citizen captured on American soil without charging him.
Mr. Padilla, who officials said was likely to be moved out of military custody and into Justice Department custody on Wednesday, was informed of the turn of events on Tuesday morning in a phone call from one of his lawyers. "He was happy to hear it," said Donna Newman, a member of the defense team.
"In one respect, I'm thrilled by this decision because, from Day 1, I've been saying, 'Indict my client,' " Ms. Newman said in an interview.
"But on the other hand, the timing is somewhat suspect, and I think it's egregious when Attorney General Gonzales says that Padilla's being held for three and a half years in solitary confinement is irrelevant," Ms. Newman said. "I think it's very relevant to how we are viewed around the world, and to what authority the president has to detain any citizen, almost on a whim, without charging him."
Administration officials said the decision to move Mr. Padilla into the criminal courts would have no bearing on future decisions about whether to declare American citizens or anyone else enemy combatants.
But some legal analysts, human rights advocates and administration critics said they believed the decision undercut the White House's legal and political standing in the treatment of terror suspects and reflected what they considered a lack of hard evidence against Mr. Padilla. Several analysts said the decision appeared driven by a desire to avoid what could be a losing battle before the Supreme Court.
The sudden turn of events in the long-running case drew parallels to the government's treatment of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen who was captured in Afghanistan and held for nearly three years as an enemy combatant. He was released to Saudi Arabia last year, after a ruling from the Supreme Court found that he had to be given the chance to challenge his detention.
In the Padilla case, the Bush administration had won a major affirmation of its policies in September before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which ruled that the president had the right to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen who fought United States forces on foreign soil. But the government's prospects appeared less certain before the Supreme Court, which ruled last year in the Hamdi case that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president."
"Tactically, the decision to move him into the criminal courts is very advantageous for the government because it eliminates the uncertainty that the Fourth Circuit could be reversed," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has written about the Padilla case and others involving terror suspects.
But some lawyers said they were troubled by the legal maneuvering in the Padilla case. Eugene Fidell, president of the private National Institute for Military Justice, called the developments "a remarkable game of musical courtrooms." Many of them pushed for the development of more uniform policies by the administration or Congress.
"The Justice Department cannot continue changing course each time action from the courts is imminent," said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat who serves on the Judiciary Committee. "If Congress refuses to act, our judicial policies will continue to be cobbled together in a piecemeal fashion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/national/nationalspecial3/23terror.html*FW Note:We all want to see the bad guys get put out of business in whatever is the most effective and expedient manner available.
But what does it say when about the government's case when they cannot accomplish their task without ignoring or undermining the law which gives them their authority to perform such actions in the first place?
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