Tomorrow Is Here
Jose Padilla was imprisoned in 2002, and for about a month you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about dirty bombs, a specimen of which Padilla, according to the government, was planning to plant in some major American city. The media, an organism which ingests bullshit then spews hyperbole, sketched out scenarios of an America choked with radioactivity, where mutant babies with three arms and six asses (each of which requires a separate diaper) stump through city streets consuming live kittens and transforming good and upright citizens into socialists.
Three years later, Padilla is finally being charged. But not for wanting to plant dirty bombs. He’s now accused of conspiring to send money and men overseas to “murder, kidnap and maim” others. In his press conference, Torturer General Alberto Gonzales demurred when asked about the dirty bomb charge. Can’t talk about it, he said. Not allowed to. It’s the rules, you know.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone, I suppose. In fact, you could make an argument that it’s small potatoes compared to news of the burgeoning torture apparatus growing up under our noses. But I think that would be a bad argument. The real story here is the lengths the Bushies have gone to in order to deny this man his day in court.
You’re not allowed to hold American citizens without charging them of a crime, but that’s what the administration did to Padilla. He was imprisoned without formal charges for a month, until it looked like a judge was about to rule that practice unkosher; at which point they quickly classified him as an “enemy combatant.” Enemy combatants don’t have rights like normal people, we’re told, because they’re bad evil meanies, and that’s that.
The courts didn’t quite know what to make of this nuanced legal argument, and they batted the matter back and forth for three years: is it really ok for our government to erase someone’s basic civil rights by calling them names? The case was about to go up the Supreme Court, where it would get the national attention it deserves when — lo and behold — Padilla is charged with crimes completely unrelated to the ones he was initially arrested for.
All of which goes goes to the point I’ve been repeating, ad nauseum, for the past year. We are not in danger of finding ourselves ruled by a government that views civil rights as annoyances to be skirted or, better yet, eliminated: we are, in fact, ruled by that government. Tomorrow is here. The 2006 mid-term elections may be some of the most important we’ve held in a long, long time.
Update: It turns out that at least some of the administration’s motives here are tied up in torture: their evidence (and pretty much their entire case) comes from two men, Al Qaeda officials both, who’ve been held in secret detention centers for a couple of years, where they’ve apparently been subjected to various medieval excruciations. The Bushies know that torture-extracted testimony won’t wash in court.
What’s striking about the Times article on the subject is the tone of the typically anonymous “senior administration officials” who are spilling the beans here. They’re not saying that they don’t want the torture stuff to come out in court because they feel bad about it, or even acknowledge that it was wrong; they’re just saying that they don’t think they can get away with it.
Again: not especially surprising.
2 Comments