Crazy people wear tinfoil hats (shiny side out!) because they deflect the ubiquitous and evil mind control rays emitted by the omnipotent cabal known only as the Illuminati. Or from aliens (Plutonian, not Mexican). Or both.
Nah, this shit is too pathetic to be propaganda.
Even though this is the pit, perhaps some ignorance can be fought here.
My own ignorance, to be specific.
Just why is Padilla being held outside of the ordinary justice system? Also, was he selected at random, or does he have a connection with the wrong people (from the Feds perspective) or something?
It’s hard for me to accept (right now) that the FBI picked up a random American off the street simply to furnish an object lesson. So what happened here?
Monstro, I had been hoping that what keeps the Feds from detaining me or mine incommunicado was an obvious perception of innocence – IOW, Feds could check me out, do a summary background check, and be easily satisfied with my innocence. At the moment, without better info … it’s hard for me to think that Padilla was picked up for nothing (which is not saying he personally doesn’t deserve due process).
I should lay a few cards on the table – I don’t have a personal problem (yet) with federal investigators holding suspected terrorists on lesser evidence than would be required to hold, say, a suspected armed robber or murderer. The reason I feel that way is because I think terrorists can take advantage of our pre-2001 level of liberty to operate freely in our borders. AFAICT, terrorists are very meticulous about leaving evidence, and are skilled in maintaining a level of deniability until the moment comes to strike. The logical counter against such tactics is distasteful, to be sure – but should I have confidence that granting full due process still allows law enforcement sufficient means to hinder terrorism?
Ben Franklin would say I deserve neither safety no liberty. As his platitude goes … so be it. I don’t agree with Franklin, but OK. At the moment, I don’t feel that dialing back liberty = getting rid of liberty.
This is a particularly vexing issue when one focuses attention on it. There are no really good answers that everyone can embrace. I don’t agree with those who throw their hands up and say “Oh well … the world is dangerous. Terrorism is here to stay … get used to it.” I know that terrorism can’t be eliminated, but I do believe that with an acceptable (to me) scaleback in liberty, terrorism can be severely crippled.
Or from Major League Baseball.
No obvious perceptions of innocence need apply when there is no oversight. The problem is not that Padilla is or is not guilty: I accept that he probably is. The problem is that he was taken via a process that has no checks and balances, no appeal, and no oversight. i.e., the PROCESS is such that it could be used to kidnap anyone indefinately. It’s the process that we don’t want as part of our society, given that no convincing case has yet been made that a method that doesn’t so blithely ignore all the protections of our legal system couldn’t have been used instead. I mean, okay, it may be that there are certain times that special methods may be needed, but let’s at least have some sort of judicial oversight, a defense lawyer proceedure to represent his client’s interests in this process even if he can’t confer with the client, special criteria, etc. Not just this willy-nilly impunity.
Because the whole process has been completely clandestine, our trust that the FBI is on the up-and-up is completely faith-based. I don’t have that much faith in the government. Padilla may very well be Satan incarnate, but if this is true, then it should have been easy to compile evidence and charge the guy just like any other bad guy.
You may not think the FBI will ever come after you, and they probably won’t. But this sets a really bad precedent. What’s stopping the government from making anyone they deem dangerous “invisible”. We did it with Padilla, in regards to terrorism. What would stop an administration from going out of the bounds of the law for other crimes? We didn’t “vote” on terrorism being bad enough to justify illegal imprisonment. We have no control over what these people do.
(It kinda scares me, in this day and age of privacy invasion, that I could be “arrested” for visiting a flagged website or checking out a flagged library book. This may sound like “tin foil territory”, but really…how would anyone know I hadn’t done anything to warrant being arrested? Ashcroft could tell the media anything about me, and no one would know any different, while he and his boss would come out looking like mighty warriors against terrorism, successfully convincing the meek that they got another freedom-hater. )
The problem isn’t just that they’ve abducted a citizen–guilty or otherwise–right out of the blue. The OP indicates the biggest, most concerning problem: Why should we trust what Ashcroft says about this guy? Why should we trust him when he says the matter couldn’t have been handled any other way? Why should we trust that they aren’t manufacturing “evidence” to justify this unlawful imprisonment? Why should we trust that they didn’t torture Padilla? And if they did, what does that mean about the information they got out of him?
I don’t know anyone in the FBI. I normally don’t trust people I don’t know.
If they had followed the legal procedures followed for every other US citizen, these questions wouldn’t exist. We would be assured that a system is there to protect Padilla’s rights. Right now, Padilla has no rights. For someone who is still technically “innocent”, that’s frightening.
[…sigh…] I wish the vaunted intellects at Straight Dope would learn the difference between parody and satire.
The problem here is that you are relying on the FBI to determine your guilt, when that is the criminal justice system’s role. The reason why we have due process guarantees is that law enforcement frequently does make mistakes. I thought Americans agreed that living under the rule of law is preferable to a police state.
As bizarre as this might seem, the Departnment of Defense Report says, on page 2:
Bingo.
I apologize for seeminigly abandoning my OP, but I was called away just after I submitted it.
World Eater, pravnik, Shade, monstro, SimonX, Apos all correctly perceived my satire. Why does the administration expect us to give them a pass on the rules of evidence that we would not extend to an OP in the Pit? Monstro and **Apos ** have both concisely expressed the apprehension I feel at the way our government is warping the Bill of Rights in the name of the War on Terrorism™. Why do they have such distain for a suspect’s right to remain silent? For our enumerated rights to mean anything, they must be applied across the board to those accused of a crime. If the government can suspend a citizen’s right to counsel on the basis of the severity of the crime he is accused of, our system of law is surely lost. We cannot create a special standard for those who we deem to be “obviously guilty”. I do not trust anyone, Republican or Democrat to show the wisdom or ethics to avoid abusing that standard.
You civil libertarian types are a bunch of wusses. All we needed was to turn this guy over to agent Jack Bauer for about 15 minutes, and the whole deal would be over by now. Of course, we’d have to suffer thru at least 2 kidnapings of Kim, a mole or 2 in CTU, and some slick bad guy threating to kill millions of Americans if we didn’t agree to his demands.
Serioiusly, though, I think Monstro and Apos got it exactly right. No one is defending Padilla, but it just makes no sense that we couldn’t charge the guy with something and use due process to nail him, if he’s guilty. I don’t trust the FBI to be on my side when the going gets rough. If we don’t use the legal system, then what the hell good is it?
Simply put, this “new” process, in the long run, may in fact be more harmful to the American public, then the terrorists it seeks to protect us from.
Damn! Somebody always gets here to say that before me! 
In other news, my cat’s breath smells like cat food.
FWIW, Fear when I read the words (paraphrased) “I have conclusive proof, but I’m not obligated to present them” my knee started jerking, but I finished the paragraph and got where you were going.
This has driven me nuts for months. I raged about it to a friend IRL, who I’d thought was semi well informed, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I know I posted stuff about it in threads before, making mention of the US citizen arrested on US soil being held w/o charges, w/o access to an attorney etc, and the ‘opposition’ asked for proof. When I provided it, it was ‘ho- hum, so this happened to some bad guy’.
It beats me how this can be so easily brushed aside, when we have proof, all the damn time, that even with all the constitutional protections, the trial system, checks and balances etc, etc, the system can still get it wrong. To summarily decree that some citizens should not be afforded Consitutional protections should be enough to get all Americans up in arms.
yet there they sit. What’s that saying again? First they came for the Communists, and I did not fear for I was not a Communist?
I got it right away. It was so OBVIOUS.
bordeland, I believe the presumption of innocence is a Constitutional right.
Are you saying that we can be denied our rights just because we KNOW someone’s guilty?
Why even bother with our justice system, then, if that’s the case.
I’m sick and tired of J. Edgar Ashcroft using the Constitution as toilet paper.
It’s not at all weird that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s Pentagon would publish such a thing.
It’s about par for the course.
The next step is where we learn that the info actually came from pentagon funded sources that’re widely and previously known to be ‘fabricators.’
Then Rumsfeld says, “Golly. They were lying to us? Did we know that? No responsible offical in th ePentagon knew that they were lying to us.”
Yeah, well, if it ever comes up for a vote, I’d rather have increased liberty with an increased chance of being blown up
Does the name Mohammad Salameh mean anything to you?
Uh-huh. So if the government proposed setting up a massive DNA database, to which all citizens were required to register, you wouldn’t have a problem because you have nothing to hide?
I trust the government to work within my best interests about as much as I trust Joe Isuzu to tell me if these pants make me look fat.
For God’s sake, bordelond, PLEASE develop one, as quickly as you possibly can.
Forget terrorists. I insist upon being able to take advantage of the so-called “pre-2001 level of liberty” in my day to day life. You are free to volunteer yourself to accept something less, if you wish, but NOT IN MY COUNTRY. Go somewhere else, if you wish it, but you may not volunteer the liberty of me and mine for “dialing back.”
This last is naive, pernicious, and utterly wrong.
Bush said after 9/11 something to the effect of ‘they hate our freedom’. Seems to me that he has used 9/11, since then, as an excuse to curtail the freedom of American citizens in numerous ways with the Patriot Acts, Homeland security, etc. How many civil rights will be taken away before the American people demand their ‘freedoms’ back??