August 17, 2007
A Miami, Florida jury found US prisoner Jose Padilla guilty
Thursday on three terrorism-related counts. Padilla, a 36-year-old
American citizen from Chicago, faces a possible life sentence.
The verdict is a travesty of justice and a testament to the
growth of police state measures and the advanced state of decay
of democratic rights in the United States.
Padilla was convicted along with two co-defendants—Adham
Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi—on two counts of material
support for terrorism and one count of conspiracy to murder, kidnap
and maim people overseas. The verdict was reached after only a
day and a half of deliberations.
The government immediately declared victory, with Gordon Johndroe,
a spokesman for the National Security Council, saying, "We
commend the jury for its work in this trial and thank it for upholding
a core American principle of impartial justice for all. Jose Padilla
received a fair trial and a just verdict."
Not only is the outcome of the trial the very opposite of a
"just verdict" and example of "impartial justice,"
it was not the result the government originally intended. The
response of the Bush administration contains a substantial element
of relief that it was able to secure a guilty verdict. If the
administration had had its way, Padilla would never have been
presented before a court of law at all.
Padilla was arrested in May 2002 in Chicago’s O’Hare
International airport. The government first held Padilla as a
"material witness" to the September 11 attacks, but
in June of that year, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held
a press conference to announce that Padilla had plotted to explode
a radioactive "dirty bomb" somewhere in the United States.
He was declared an "enemy combatant" and shifted to
a military brig in South Carolina, where he was held in an isolation
cell without being charged and without access to a lawyer for
three-and-a-half years.
It quickly became clear that the allegations against Padilla
were not only sensationalized, but of highly dubious substance.
While Padilla evidently had some ties to Islamic fundamentalists,
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged at the time
that there was "not an actual plan" to carry out a dirty
bomb attack.
The portrayal of Padilla as a major terrorist threat who was,
in the words of Ashcroft, prepared to inflict "mass death
and injury," served two essential purposes. It came at a
convenient time for the Bush administration—amidst revelations
that US intelligence agencies and Bush himself had ignored or
suppressed warnings of the September 11 terrorist attacks—and
enabled the administration to divert attention from the many unanswered
questions about its failure to avert the attacks, while promoting
the Padilla case as a victory in the "war on terror."
More fundamentally, the Bush administration wanted to use Padilla
to assert its claim that the president could order the indefinite
military detention of a US citizen, detained on US soil. On the
grounds that he was an "enemy combatant," Padilla was
denied communication with the outside world, stripped of his habeas
corpus rights, and subjected to systematic physical and psychological
torture.
Throughout his period in military confinement, Padilla suffered
under the most horrendous conditions, according to a brief filed
by his lawyers. He was imprisoned in severe isolation—the
only prisoner in a high security prison bloc. He was caged in
a nine-foot by seven-foot cell, with no access to sunlight. He
was deprived of sleep, subjected at various times to intense light
or complete darkness, tortured with extreme noise, and often shackled
in contorted positions. He was given psychoactive drugs and "truth
serums," including LSD and PCP.
This treatment is in flagrant violation of the US Constitution
and both American and international law, not to mention the most
basic standards of human decency. However, for the Bush administration,
Padilla was outside the law. Because he was denied access to the
courts, he had no recourse to challenge his detention or seek
remedy for his treatment.
In a 2003 brief, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency, said that Padilla’s treatment
was designed to create a sense of "dependency and trust"
necessary for interrogation. In an interview with Democracy
Now! yesterday, Dr. Angela Hegarty, who interviewed Padilla
for the defense in order to evaluate his mental state, gave an
indication of what this "dependency and trust" meant.
According to his family and friends, Hegarty said, "There
was something wrong" with Padilla after the prolonged detention.
"There was something 'weird’...Something not right.
He was a different man."
Hegarty said that during her interview with him, Padilla was
in a state of "absolute terror, terror alternating with numbness...He
was like...a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be
sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would...subsequently
pay a price if he revealed what happened."
Hegarty noted, "[T]his was the first time I ever met anybody
who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period
of time...Sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that
without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms,
hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within
days." But Padilla "had been in this situation, utterly
dependent on his interrogators, who didn’t treat him all
that nicely, for years." Hegarty said that what happened
to Padilla was "essentially the destruction of a human being’s
mind."
In November 2005, fearing an unfavorable decision by the Supreme
Court on its indefinite military incarceration of Padilla and
its denial of all due process rights, the government abruptly
shifted its position. Padilla was transferred to a civilian prison
in Florida and charged with other crimes—crimes that had
absolutely nothing to do with the allegation of "dirty bomb"
plots and subsequent claims that Padilla was plotting to blow
up apartment buildings and hotels in American cities. As a result
of this shift, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case
challenging Padilla’s detention, which had the effect of
upholding an appellate court decision siding with the government.
The new charges alleged that Padilla, along with his two co-defendants,
conspired to commit murder overseas and provide material support
for terrorism. In particular, Padilla was said to have participated
in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998, where he
learned how to kill and commit terrorist acts. The main pieces
of evidence provided by the government consisted of hundreds of
hours of taped phone conversations, obtained through wiretaps,
over a period of several years, and a document that was supposedly
an application form signed by Padilla to participate in the Al
Qaeda camp.
The criminal trial was stacked against Padilla from the beginning.
US District Judge Marcia Cooke denied several motions by the defense
to throw out the case because of the illegal and inhuman treatment
to which the defendant was subjected. Padilla’s lawyers argued
that by torturing him, the government had forfeited the right
to prosecute him. They also argued that Padilla had become so
mentally impaired as a result of his treatment that he was incompetent
to stand trial.
The government decided very deliberately not to base its case
on any statements made by Padilla during confinement. In this
way they sought, successfully, to prevent any discussion of his
treatment before the jury.
The actual physical evidence presented by the prosecution was
extremely weak. Of the over 300,000 intercepted phone conversations
that the government collected, only seven involved Padilla. None
of these included any of the "code words" that the prosecution
claimed referred to plans to carry out terrorist attacks.
The application presented by the government as evidence that
Padilla traveled to Afghanistan is highly dubious. Padilla’s
fingerprints were only on the outside pages, suggesting that he
handled the document (perhaps in custody), but did not fill it
out himself. Besides this form, the government provided no direct
evidence that Padilla was ever in Afghanistan.
Relying on this weak evidence, the defense made the decision
not to call any witnesses on Padilla’s behalf. The assumption
was that the burden of proving the charges "beyond a reasonable
doubt" lay with the prosecution, and that this burden had
not been met.
The defense will likely appeal several of the decisions made
by the judge in the course of the judicial process.
The jury’s decision to convict must be seen within the
context of relentless fear-mongering and efforts to whip up hysteria
in relation to Padilla’s case and the "war on terror"
in general by the government, with the assistance of the media.
Top government officials declared Padilla guilty of plotting to
commit mass murder before the entire country. The media was filled
for weeks in 2002 with details of "dirty bombs" and
the destruction they could inflict.
In the trial itself, the prosecution sought to connect Padilla
to Osama bin Laden, although it presented no evidence to substantiate
such a link, hoping thereby to create a connection in the jury’s
minds to the attacks of September 11. During one of the most significant
moments in the trial, Judge Cooke allowed the prosecution to show
a videotape of a 1997 interview with bin Laden, even though it
had no direct relevance to the case.
The Kafkaesque treatment that Padilla has suffered is a warning
to all Americans. Such are the conditions that can be meted out
to anyone—whether a US citizen or not. According to the legal
theory developed by the administration, constitutional rights
must be sacrificed in the name of "security" in the
"war on terror."
Padilla’s conviction occurs within the context of a vast
expansion of executive powers to spy on the population, deny basic
democratic rights, and employ torture on prisoners held throughout
the world.
As with every aspect of the administration’s assault on
democratic rights, the treatment of Jose Padilla has provoked
no serious criticism from the Democratic Party. To the extent
that there have been mild complaints within the media and political
establishment, it has been from the standpoint that the government
has "overreached" in the "war on terror" and
thereby damaged US imperialist interests around the world.
The conviction of Padilla comes less than two weeks after the
Democrats helped pass a bill gutting the Fourth Amendment of the
US Constitution and expanding the ability of the president to
spy on the American people. (See "Congress
authorizes vast expansion of domestic spying").
Jose Padilla’s personal tragedy is a manifestation of
the deep and irreversible decay of American democracy.
See Also:
Jurors begin deliberations in Jose Padilla
trial
[16 August 2007]
Padilla "terrorism support
trial" unravels
[30 June 2007]
US: Opening statements delivered
in Jose Padilla trial
[15 May 2007]
Trial of "enemy combatant"
Jose Padilla begins
[17 April 2007]
Citing torture, lawyers
for Jose Padilla argue case should be dismissed
[18 October 2006]