The Bush administration's May, 2002 lawless detention of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla -- on U.S. soil -- was, as I recounted in my book, the first incident which really prompted me to begin concluding that things were going terribly awry in our country. The administration declared Padilla an "enemy combatant," put him in a military prison, and refused to charge him with any crime or even allow him access to a lawyer or anyone else. He stayed in a black hole, kept by his own government, for the next three-a-half-years with no charges of any kind ever asserted against him and with the administration insisting on the right to detain him (and any other American citizen) indefinitely without ever charging him with a crime -- all based solely on the secret, unchallengeable say-so of the President that he was an "enemy combtant."
To this day, I have trouble believing that we have a Government that claims this power against American citizens and has exercised that power and aggressively defended it -- and even more trouble believing that there are so many blindly loyal followers of that government who defend that conduct. The outrage that it provokes when thinking about it has not diminished even a small amount and does not diminish no matter how many times one reads, writes or speaks about it. It is as profound a betrayal of the most core American political principles as one can fathom.
The Bush administration finally charged Padilla with a crime (after 3 1/2 years of detention) only because the U.S. Supreme Court was set to rule on the legality of their treatment of Padilla, and indicting Padilla enabled the administration to argue that his case was now "moot." The Government's indictment made no mention of the flamboyant allegation they originally trumpted to justify his lawless incarceration -- that he was a "Dirty Bomber" attempting to detonate a radiological bomb in an American city (because the "evidence" for that accusation was itself procured by torture and was therefore unreliable and unusable) . Instead, the indictment contained only the vaguest and most generic terrorism allegations. Since then, the federal judge presiding over Padilla's case (in the Southern District of Florida) has repeatedly expressed skepticism over the Government's case against him and has, on several occasioned, admonished them to provide more specific infomation setting forth exactly what Padilla is alleged to have done.
Last week, Padilla's lawyers filed a Motion to Dismiss the Indicment against him on the grounds that the Government has engaged in outrageous conduct -- specifically, that they tortured him for the 3 1/2 years he remained in captivity, particularly for the 1 1/2 years that they denied him access even to a lawyer. Via David Markus, a South Florida attorney who has been reporting on the Padilla proceedings on his local blog, Padilla's Motion to Dismiss is here (.pdf). Markus excerpts a substantial part of the description of Padilla's captivity, which is the first detailed account I have read of the treatment to which Padilla was subjected while in detention.
I'm excerpting parts of it below (read the full excerpt at Markus' blog or in Padilla's brief). It is worthwhile to note that all of the treatment described by Padilla has been described by numerous other detainees, and from what I can tell, all of the treatment he describes are part of the "interrogation and detention techniques" which the President now has the legal authority to invoke pursuant to the so-called Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- encated by our Congress just ten days ago. Thus, everything Padilla describes is now perfectly legal in the United States -- even when applied against individuals charged with no crimes of any kind.
As Markus notes, this is how the Argument section of Padilla's brief begins:
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http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/
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