Hope
I'm not so optimistic. Besides, Bush will just declare the Supremos
have no jurisdiction.
-
June 9 - Justice Department lawyers, fearing a crushing defeat before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few weeks, are scrambling to develop a conventional criminal case against “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla that would charge him with providing “material support” to Al Qaeda, NEWSWEEK has learned.
The prospective case against Padilla would rely in part on material seized by the FBI in Afghanistan—principally an Al Qaeda “new applicant form” that, authorities said, the former Chicago gang member filled out in July 2000 to enter a terrorist training camp run by Osama bin Laden's organization.
But officials acknowledge that the charges could well be difficult to bring and that none of Padilla’s admissions to interrogators—including an apparent confession that he met with top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah and agreed to undertake a terror mission—would ever be admissible in court.
Even more significant, administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention—that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological “dirty bomb”—has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used against him in court.
...
Padilla, for his part, has told interrogators that he never swore an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda and, after spending time in one of the terror group’s training camps, had second thoughts and wanted to return home. “He says he and his accomplice proposed the dirty-bomb plot only as a way to get out of Pakistan and avoid combat in Afghanistan, yet save face with Abu Zubaydah,” according to the Pentagon report. When he flew back to the United States in May 2002, Padilla has told interrogators he also had “no intention of carrying out the apartment-building operation,” the report states.
I think it's time to recognize the following things.
1) It isn't clear "how bad" Padilla was or would've been.
2) The administration has no real evidence about how bad his ongoing associations were.
3) They had no evidence that he had any specific plans. The confessions he's made since may or may not have any basis in reality.
4) Even if Padilla was "bad," putting him on 24/7 surveillance and using that to track down his connections would have been much more productive from an intelligence standpoint than holding him for 2 years.
5) If they can do it to Padilla, they can do it to you.
.jpg)
