... about the Padilla indictment. We covered this case a lot when I was at channel six down here in South Florida, and it always struck me as fairly week in terms of substance.
Here you have a 31 year old former Chicago gang banger who moves to South Florida and winds up in trouble, goes to jail in Broward County and converts to Islam, then gets out in 1993 and gets a job at a local Burger King. ... There, he meets his new mentor, who takes him to a mosque, where he supposedly meets other terrorist wannabes. From there, he's supposed to have filled out some sort of job application to become an al-Qaida terrorist or trained to be a terrorist, and with others, inlcuding a Guyanese man named Adnan Shurkrijumah, plotted to set off a "dirty bomb" inside the United States -- something the feds acknowledge he never even began to do. All they had on him was that he supposedly cased some Florida Power & Light buildings with others. No matter -- he was scooped up by John Ashcroft's publicity wagon the summer before the 2002 midterm elections and spirited off to a military prison, where he has languished for three odd years, mainly because the government didn't have anything solid to charge him with.
With a federal appeals court ruling in December 2003 that the president doesn't have the power to seize a U.S. citizen and hold him out of the reach of the courts on U.S. soil, and ordered, more than a year later by a federal judge to either charge Padilla or release him, and facing a supreme test of the president's unilateral ability to hold an American citizen in indefinite limbo simply on a hunch that he might be thinking about doing bad things, the government decides to abort the legal fight and charge him. But they don't charge him with plotting to set off a dirty bomb, or with planning any sort of terror attacks inside the United States. Nope. They charge him with "being part of a "North American support cell" that worked to support violent jihad campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas from 1993 to 2001," and for that, they could jail him for life. It's too bad this didn't go to the Supreme Court. We need to work out at the federal level just how much power we are willing to invest in a president, and whether in a democracy it's wise to give one man (or one woman) the power to imprison a U.S. citizen without charges, and essentially circumvent the legal process to effectively declare them guilty of terrorism simply because the president or his justice department say so. Recall that part of the Ashcroft grand vision was to house people like Padilla and Yasser Hamdi (remember him? He was also a U.S. citizen, though he's since been deported ...) in internment camps... That sounds more like Cuba than America to me. But I guess we'll have to wait for the next "home grown terrorist" disappeared by the Bush administration to have that fight.
The High Court has ruled on some of this stuff, particularly in the Hamdi case, where the 6 in the majority split the difference by saying the president has the right to hold U.S. citizens under the extensive powers granted by Congress under the Patriot Act, but that those held had a right to challenge their detention in court... But Padilla's situation has remained impervious to court rulings, and even the new, Ashcroft-free Justice Department won't give up the ghost. Maybe they're smarting from the fact that not a soul has been indicted for the 9/11 plot, with the exception of clearly mad Mr. Moussaoui, who was in prison when the attacks took place, and whom the government can't even charge with taking part in the plot, but rather with failing to alert FBI investigators to the plot, and so failing to help the government save 3,000 lives. Maybe they're just hanging on to all the presidential prerogatives they can wrestle out of Congress' slippery hands. Or maybe they're just hoping a nice, juicy terror indictment will distract from all the legal spotlights pointed at the GOP...
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
