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[Previous entry: "Salam resurfaces, sort of"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Absence of evidence? Well, no"] 07 May 2003: "Another less-than-joyous anniversary"
Tomorrow, it will be a year since Jose "Pucho" Padilla, also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, was arrested at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, IL. Despite allegations that Padilla was a member of al-Qaeda, planning to assemble and detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States, he has, to date, not been charged with any offence. Instead, he was initially classed a "material witness" to the 9/11 attacks, and when that didn't work (some annoying judge insisted he be charged or released), reclassed as an "enemy combatant" and transferred from the DoJ to the DoD.
In 1962 the apartheid regime in South Africa, no respecter of civil liberties, picked up a suspected terrorist leader who had just returned from training in bomb-making and guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia. It marked the start of 27 years in jail, but Nelson Mandela was given access to lawyers and his prosecutors had to follow rules of due process. Last year, the world's foremost democracy, the United States, detained one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla, at Chicago airport as a witness to a grand-jury probe and then categorised the so-called dirty bomber as an “enemy combatant”—which, according to the government, gives it the right to hold him indefinitely, with no access to a lawyer and minimal judicial review.The piece goes on to note that Padilla is unlikely to become another Mandela, and that assessment seems correct; while in the 1980s the cry was "Free Nelson Mandela," the current cry is "Charge Jose Padilla." I know of nobody who discounts the possibility that Padilla is guilty of something, but it would be nice if the executive, in the form of a federal prosecutor, told a judge what that something is supposed to be. The "combatant" thing doesn't fly: Padilla wasn't captured in the mountains of Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov in his hand; he was arrested stepping off a plane at O'Hare. (And John Walker Lindh, who was captured in Afghanistan, was charged and tried; so what gives?) The disturbing thing about the Padilla affair is not the possibility that the government might have nabbed the wrong guy (in this instance); it's that, if this precedent is allowed to stand, the next guy they nab might be. And in both cases, the principle that a criminal defendant is "innocent until proven guilty" is severely undermined. Via this column in the St. Petersburg Times, I found out about the arrest on 20-Mar-2003 of Maher "Mike" Hawash, a contract software engineer at Intel in Portland, OR (an article from the Oregonian is reprinted here). Now, the Hawash case is not entirely comparable, because Hawash was charged. But it should be noted that he, too, was initially arrested as a "material witness," and spent 39 days in custody before charges were brought against him. At the very least, I'm seeing a pattern of the administration—the same administration that pontificates about bringing terrorists to justice and upholding the rule of law—performing increasingly tortuous acrobatics to bypass the constitutional safeguards which are designed to prevent injustice and the subversion of the rule of law. And that worries me. And if you're a citizen of the United States, or a resident, or just planning to visit, the idea that the federal government can and will lock you away for a month before it even gets round to charging you with a felony should worry you, too. |
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