Because they didn’t have enough evidence to keep him in Federal custody (all those pesky constitutional rights and stuff). So the Justice Department transferred him to military custody.
Yea, like the lawyer in Oregon, picked up on a “material witness warrant” because his fingerprint was simlar to the smudged fax that the FBI got from Spain. He’s lucky the Spanish authorities identified the real terrorist, or else he might have been “confessing” himself after a few years at Gitmo.
Becuase there’s insufficient evidence to keep him in the regular system.
He’s held on what it is alleged he may have done, (but didn’t).
The Feds say he does. Of course, they also said that Mayfield was connected with the train bomb in Spain.
[QUOTE=bordelond]
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?
Don’t forget a relative dearth of cupidity on the part of the relevant law enforcement offcials.
Yes.
You are right that there is a trade off involved. The question is which is worth more, Life or Liberty? I say that the American ideal is that lives should be traded for Liberty. Our country was founded on this ideal. We have mad the trade repeatedly in the past.
While you may trust politicians in power at the moment, what about those who’ll be in power who haven’t even been born yet? Do you trust them as well?
While you may believe that all of our politicians and their appointees are honest and acting with the best interests of the American people now and to come. I am concerned about the propriety of granting the executive branch, by way of the DOJ, the ability to deny an American his Constitutional rights without due process.
I worry that one day a person who is dishonest could slip past the voters or accidentally be appointed to a position of power. If such a person had the power to confiscate and abrogate an American’s fundamental rights he might abuse the power.
There is no clear recourse for the redress of such a grievance.
While I’m sure that even though the investigative arm of the DOJ, the FBI, hasn’t discovered any evidence that supports the allegations made against Jose Padilla, he is a dirty, evil, guilty son of a bitch who should have his Constitutional rights stripped from him as well as his skin. His guilt has been established by the fact that some of our public servants arrested him. They wouldn’t have done that if he was an honest law-abiding citizen like themselves and us. They wouldn’t in this day and age anyway.
Even so, I think that he should be afforded the rights guaranteed to all of us as Americans by the highest laws of our land.
Maybe it’s unpatriotic, I’m not sure.
I worry that less enlightened times may one day befall our great nation.
It may take one hundred years or maybe ten thousand years, but it could happen one day that a politicain who puts his own interests and the interests of those who ply him with funds, monies and remunerations above the common good of Americans, could find his way into a position of public trust.
If that day were to come, what defenses would Americans have against a corrupt politician or political appointee who could, without outside oversight, incarcerate without trial or charges?
I know that this is a very unlikely possibility in our lifetimes, but what about the lifetimes of unborn Americans?
Who can say what sorts of times those who come after us will have to live in?
cribbed from here
As long as it’s not your liberty, i guess it doesn’t matter, right?
Bullcrap.
By Apos:
Please elaborate. Padilla hasn’t been charged with anything, after almost two years of being locked up. If the DOJ has real evidence of a crime, sufficient for charging Padilla and presenting to a grand jury, I haven’t heard about it.
Bush and Ashcroft, between them (and with plenty of help from the rest of the current administration) have, over the past three years, brought me to the point of seriously using words like “tyranny” to refer to the actions of my own government. Can’t wait for these fuckers to stop screwing with my country.
From http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040601_1789.html
Bolding mine.
Now if the information can’t be used to charge him in the usual, legal way, what business do they have releasing it to the public? What’s going to happen to this guy? IANAL, but it seems to me that they are blowing their own case but continuing to hold Padilla without cause. That is, if they plan to ever give this guy due process.
I wonder what they did to get Padilla to “cooperate”? And will we ever find out?
That’s if Padilla even really “cooperated.” For all we know, the whole thing could be a forgery, and Mr. Padilla will be “shot while trying to escape.”
I reiterate: I trust this administration about as far as I trust a rabid skunk.
You’re asserting that that the WH just decided for kicks and giggles to negate the Constitutional rights of an American, engage in extra-judicial incarceration, not to charge him with a crime, not to have a trial, not to allow him to have access to an attorney and raise a major Constitutional case just for kicks and giggles?
Orignially, they arrested him as a ‘material witness’.
Select money quotes:
“The affidavit provided by the FBI alleged that Padilla was part of a plot, but that some of the informants were unreliable. No further evidence was immediately forthcoming from the authorities.”
“The investigation into Jose Padilla, who is accused of planning to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, has found no evidence that he was preparing such an attack and little to suggest that he had any support from al-Qaeda to do so, **FBI officials ** say.”
“In the month since his arrest, the FBI apparently has had difficulty grounding in evidence the charges that Padilla belonged to a hostile organization, to the extent that it needed to use the trick of moving him to a military tribunal, as “an enemy combatant.” Not even spies condemned to death, like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were given such treatment”
In case anybody was wondering, the first sentence here is true. The other sentences are totally false.
Padilla’s case has recently been argued before the courts of the Southern District of New York, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. Padilla was represented by counsel every step of the way.
In fact, the Southern District of NY and the 2nd Circuit both ruled against the Bush Admin on many points. Which shows pretty clearly that the legal system has not been bypassed, and is working pretty dang well.
And, as has been pointed out many, many times in GD, the legal precedent for this dates back to at least World War II. See Ex Parte Quirin, in which 3 alleged agents of the German army were arrested on US soil and deprived of a civil trial before being executed by the army, and the US Supreme Court said that was fine despite the fact that one of the people executed was allegedly an American citizen.
The thing that would stop Ashcroft and the rest of the FBI from doing this “to you or someone you love” (gag) is that the FBI is not a shadowy, evil organization hell-bent on locking up innocent civilians. And just in case you are an innocent civilian who gets locked up for a while, the cases cited herein seem like evidence that the innocent do go free, and not that the innocent are locked up forevermore without redress or hope of justice. And furthermore, even if the FBI is intent on locking up innocent civilians (which they aren’t), Padilla looks like a prime case showing that the judiciary offers a pretty good forum for redress.
The reason this is all Constitutional (other than the fact that the Supreme Court has already said it is in Quirin) is that the Constitution vests in the Executive the power to control national security issues. Agents of foreign powers that are at war with the US government and its citizens should be treated as agents of an enemy army on American soil. That means that the Executive Branch gets to lock them up and treat them like members of an enemy army in the field of battle. No one seems to think that the Executive has to try members of an enemy army before shooting them. And if the Executive can shoot them, then it can certainly hold them until the hostilities have ended.
Because it’s happened every time I’ve posted this (which is many times), I eagerly await the pile-on telling me that I’m un-American and a shill for the Bushistas, followed by some post next week talking about how Padilla has been deprived of counsel and the Administration is pissing on the Constitution, etc., and we’ll start all over again.
All of which has been fought every step of the way by the administration, which makes your point moot. Of course the system is fighting to have it’s say. What we are discussing is the policy which the Bush admin is trying to argue.
How can that be “allegedly?” Was he an American citizen or not?
There are numerous cases in this instance of people rotting in jail for years before getting any redress, hearing, or release. The point of the system is that it puts a burden on the state to actually actively try to prove its case rather than sitting on its laurels at its own discretion and timetable. And regardless of the beign loving hand of the current FBI, you never know what the future might bring or what crazy tact someone might go after next. For instance, quietly deciding that the Geneva convention is outdated and deciding to hedge on it without informing any of the fellow signatories that you will be doing so. That’s why it makes sense to have the correct processes in place rather than impunity, as the administration is fighting to get.
For people wondering why this is so scary, remember Nixon. His followers in the FBI abused their powers for the benefit of the president. Imagine if those powers included being able to arrest anyone soley with an accusation. What if the next president is so unscrupulous? Or the next one?
You say “it’ll never happen here.” That’s what everyone says. Fight. Now.
Could you expand upon that, possibly with cites? The first one I found was as follows:
I don’t think rulings count if the government ignores them. Please, convince me otherwise! I’d be so pleased to think we DO have evidence that Padilla is guilty, or that he did have legal representation throughout his interrogation (not just while before).
Please be good enough to define the term “foreign power.”
No, it doesn’t make my point moot. My point is that this is currently being fought in Court, and that Padilla is being represented by counsel, so any insinuation otherwise is false.
I don’t know. He alleged that he was an American citizen. But it doesn’t matter. The Supreme Court in Quirin said that it was irrelevant whether the individual was an American citizen or not. The Executive may treat the individual the same whether they’re an American or not.
From Quirin:
Which is both tragic and true of the civilian courts, too.
Even assuming all these policies are true (which is not a given), it’s irrelevant to deciding what’s permitted under the Constitution. If we should try in civil court citizens who are fighting against the US on behalf of a foreign enemy, then we should amend the Constitution. Merely because there’s a chance a power could be abused doesn’t make it unconstitutional.
I would argue that the war powers of the Executive are too vital to diminish just because they could be abused. It’s enough that the people retain the right and ability to resort to the democratic processes, and thus govern the conduct of their Executive in times of war. In other words, if you don’t like what the President is doing, vote him out of office.
And before I’m shouted down, I understand that many people will disagree with me. But I’ve got faith that we, as a people, do a pretty fair job of electing decent people to office, and not caracatures of evil. And if we screw up and elect Dr. Evil, then I think there’s a good chance that we’ll boot that guy out in four years.
The cite you found is pretty good. Here is a link containing all the SDNY and 2nd Circuit briefs and decisions. Here is a link to Dahlia Lithwick’s summary of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court. [Incidentally, Lithwick disagrees with me, but I adore her so much I’d probably marry her anyway.] It should only take an easy google search to find the Supreme Court briefs.
The fact that the government hasn’t acceded to the judiciary’s rulings doesn’t mean that they won’t comply with them when it comes time to do so. But as long as the decision is still under appeal, the government is typically given leave to continue its actions because those rulings are not yet final. That’s a perfectly legal way for the government to proceed.
I don’t think he had legal counsel during his interrogations. But the mere fact that evidence of his guilt hasn’t been presented to us doesn’t mean that no such evidence exists. It seems more likey that such evidence exists, but that the Executive hasn’t shared it for fear of weakening the powers of the Presidency both for themselves and for future Presidents.
Represented by counsel who weren’t even allowed to speak to their client until very recently. Represented by counsel who were there arguing not whether Padilla was guilty or innocent, but trying to obtain for him the bare minimum level of due procedure guaranteed by the Constitution for American citizens, in the face of the staunchest possible opposition by the FBI and the DoJ.
And yet Padilla’s situation has barely changed, and he’s still being held without charge.
This excerpt from James Comey’s news conference shows just how ridiculous the situation is:
There’s more, but i’m about to barf so i’ll leave it up to you to wade through it.
So, he can be held without charges because we know in our hearts that he’s a bad guy, and we’ll only give him access to a lawyer after he’s been subjected to months and months of interrogation by the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. And we know that these confessions won’t stand up in a proper court, so we’ll just hang on to him as long as “hostilities” last which, in a war on an abstract noun like “terror,” could be forever.
Of course, when asked about whether the Geneva Conventions were followed in Padilla’s case, Comey referred the questioner to the DoD, while reassuring us that “I have great confidence that those folks did it [the interrogation] the right way.”
Jusy want to reiterate Apos’s question: what the fuck does this mean? Was one of them an American, or wasn’t he?
Of course, you completely miss the point here, which is that American citizens are not meant to be deprived of their right to due process just because the authorities decide they are guilty. In case you missed the memo, guilt should be determined during a trial, not before it. Sure, the authorities might feel that they have the right person whenever they prosecute a case, but the fact that they feel this way is not sufficient evidence for a guilty verdict.
You claim that the Padilla case demonstrates that “the judiciary offers a pretty good forum for redress.” What a fucking joke! Is it your argument that a press conference outlining Padilla’s alleged confession, coming after two years of being held without charges, constitutes a reasonable level of redress?
Very convenient. Bush has already said that there is no end in the fight against “terror,” so hostilities, and the incarceration period for anyone in Padilla’s position, are indefinite.
Your assertions also beg the question. Who decided that Padilla is an “agent of an enemy army”? That’s right, the same administration that locked him up. Again, very convenient.
All your arguments about the FBI being a bunch of good guys who aren’t interested in hurting innocent Americans (ever heard of COINTELPRO?) are beside the point. The fact remains that, if the trajectory of the Padilla case were followed, any American could be locked up simply on the say-so of the President and his administration, and we’d have no way of knowing whether or not that person deserved to be designated an enemy agent because there is no transparency in the whole procedure. The person could be locked up, subjected to months of interrogation, then only be allowed access to counsel after the confessions have been beaten (or whatever they do) out of him. And, to top it all off, in case they do ever decide to charge him, the administration could then call a press conference and permanently taint the jury pool by outlining chapter and verse of the suspect’s alleged confessions, all without the possibility of rebuttal.
From dictionary.com:
Again, cart before the horse. Who decides that a person is fighting against the US on behalf of a foreign enemy? The same people who want to hold and interrogate a suspect. Very convenient.
And intelligent, reasonable people would argue that the powers of the Executive are too vital to allow them to be abused.
I’ve already touched on many of these, so I’ll just hit the highlights.
Yes. But of course the Bush Admin has (in my opinion, and the opinion of the Supreme Court in Quirin), not deprived anyone of their Constitutional rights. Please be good enough to read my prior posts.
As opposed to, say, World War 2, which we knew would end very quickly? Or the Vietnam War, which I believe has never officially ended? Nobody knows during a time or war when that war will end, so every detention in a time of war is “indefinite.”
Just want to reiterate that maybe you should read the fucking decision – or at least my prior posts – before cursing at me in repetitive questions.
Nor is a right to due process implicated, or a trial or “guilty verdict” required in this case. So yeah, I guess I missed the “memo.” Maybe you can provide a link to it?
Again, nobody knows when any war will end before it actually ends. So every detention in a time of war is “indefinite.” If you have evidence that we knew going in when any war would end, I’d be very curious to see it.
Which makes it unconstitutional how exactly?
There is no separation of powers when it comes to allowing the President to exercise his or her war powers. The Constitution was specifically designed to allow the President great freedom in the manner in which he conducts a war. Not every decision is subject to review by the judiciary. If it was, we’d lose an awful lot of wars.
So I’m neither intelligent nor reasonable? And yet you’re the one that seems unable to read my prior posts or the decisions that I’ve linked. Hmmmm.
Once again, if the powers of the Executive are too vital to be abused, then 1) we shouldn’t elect people that will abuse them; and 2) if we do elect someone that abuses them, there are political processes by which we can get rid of that person. Not every potential abuse of power is unconstitutional.