Week after week, this guy Padilla manages to look more and more like the poster child for what Republican authoritarianism is great at producing. There are many more taxpaying victims of small government, anti-New Deal conservatism out there, from Katrina victims to the folks who have been downsized and/or ruined by insurance that refuses to insure, but in Padilla’s case there is a dynamic that cannot be ignored. This of course being the fact that for every GOP Presidential candidate besides Ron Paul, keeping in place the system that murdered this man or even making it more ferocious and gruesome, happens to be a linchpin of their sales pitch. Attracting Republican primary voters, according to Campaigning Crack-whore Calculations LLC, apparently requires a candidate who is proud of his ‘Club Gitmo’ gear.
In right-wing world the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which rendered habeas corpus a thing of the past, is not a sign that our republic has lost its way, but rather a sign of progress. Never mind the fact that its inception was the result of incompetent law-breaking over a period of many years, resulting in the glut of mostly innocent individuals now in our custody, and the need to minimize exposure to shame or embarrassment over the reality of what that illegal behavior has actually accomplished. Habeas corpus wasn’t exiled for the sake of national security. Habeas corpus was a victim of partisan political expedience, for reasons spelled out in the Supreme Court’s decision on ‘Hamden v. Rumsfeld’, it had to be sacrificed for the sake of the (GOP) team.
That same team required also, years of sacrifice from one Jose Padilla, whose initial capture was hailed as a close brush with a potentially deadly and ‘dirty’ chemical oblivion. Imminent doom being the value-pick of our political marketplace at the time, our government’s hand was forced, and Jose’s threshold for pain had to be established, his capacity to swallow fear evaluated, his ‘animal’ skill set in the product testing labs enhanced. During this period in 2002, Padilla was denied access to his lawyer, and the government admitted that their information on him wasn’t enough to prosecute on. He was tortured for the purpose of extracting information that could then justify his next status as a “material witness”, and when nothing panned out, he became an “enemy combatant”.
John Ashcroft: “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.”
Paul Wolfowitz: “There was not an actual plan. We stopped this man in the initial planning stages.”
“(Administration officials)…said that the Justice Department was eager to showcase the Padilla case after weeks in which the FBI had been battered in Congress for missing potential warning signals of the Sept. 11 attacks.” (Sources 1, 2)
A reasonable plan had been established for quite some time regarding the disposal of his body, but of course the judicial activists in charge of our Supreme Court threw a monkey wrench into the works. Padilla was a US citizen, and that superseded his “enemy combatant” status, which required the government to either charge him with a crime or let him go. And a panic seemed to erupt all at once, as the assumption that Padilla’s corpse could be tossed into the incinerator and forgotten was not only contradicted, but in fact, his corpse would have to instead be presented for public inspection in a short amount of time.
First some evidence had to be destroyed (video tapes of his interrogations), and then he had to be tried along with two other men whose criminal culpability far surpasses his own. By linking him with these other two, the government can manage to slip in elements like a Bin Laden video tape that Padilla hasn’t even been accused of having viewed or been inspired by. The thousands of hours of wiretaps featuring the voices of Padilla’s co-defendants, really don’t have anything to do with him. Basically the government shoe-horned Padilla into this trial in hopes that everyone will give them a break and look past practically everything about this case from day one until now, condemn him with a long sentence, and hope that everybody forgets he ever existed.
If it were up to the mainstream press, Padilla would have been a memory already. Luckily we’ve got Lewis Z. Koch blogging for Firedoglake on the Padilla trial. His work thus far has been an incredible resource for me personally, and as the trial continues on, I encourage everyone who is interested in this case to bookmark ‘Padilla Trial Coverage‘ and check it daily. Some of my personal favorites are:
BAIT & SWITCH (5/23/07)
Seeing Jose Padilla for the First Time (5/16/07)
No Comment? (5/25/07)
Elephants in the Room (6/1/07)
Vanessa’s Big Story (6/22/07)
My gut tells me that the judge in charge of this case has been mailing it in since the very beginning, and really doesn’t want to be the one who presided over a series of acquittals involving such high-profile defendants. In general, nobody in the government wants to have the Padilla trial on their resume. Read through the material that’s out there and you’ll see why.