Jose Padilla


Will the USAPATRIOT Act survive the Padilla case?
Like many critics of the Patriot Act, I've been watching the Jose Padilla case.

Thomas Oliphant really lays it out.

The Bush administration dumped the case it once trumpeted rather than face Padilla's diligent attorneys before the Supreme Court on a basic question, which they framed with commendable precision: ''Does the president have the power to seize American citizens in civilian settings on American soil and subject them to indefinite military detention without criminal charge or trial?"

The administration was facing a Monday deadline for making its own legal case to the court for the extreme proposition that any American could be held merely on its say so that the person was ''an enemy combatant" in an undeclared war.

To add outrage to a constitutional question with enormous implications, politics has polluted this matter from the instant Padilla was seized upon arrival at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in the spring of 2002, when terrorism fears were still easily inflamed. In a grotesque misuse of his office, then-attorney general John Ashcroft had taken time out during a Moscow visit to hold one of those theatrical press conferences for which he became infamous, designed to portray the apparent Islamist radical as evil incarnate. Ashcroft and his aides did this via one phrase -- dirty bomb -- that suggested the apprehension of someone intent on exploding a device with nuclear components capable of causing mass death.

I think I would question if it really is an undeclared war, but otherwise I have to agree.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - November 25, 2005 at 05:12 AM  Tag


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