After three-and-a-half years in a military brig somewhere in South Carolina (U.S. Guv is reticent about disclosing Gulagian addresses in or out of the country), then another year as a guest of the Federal District Court in Miami, Jose Padilla, 36, was convicted of "terrorism," and is expected to be sentenced to life imprisonment. For being an "enemy combatant." He'd gone to Egypt a while back to study the Koran as a Muslim convert, and apparently applied to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000. Made it to Cairo, but not up to those scary mountain fastnesses, where Al-Zwahiri & Bin Laden, the deadly soft-shoe act, do their devilish thing.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, then a full subscriber to the Cheney / Bush / Rove / Perle / Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz geopolitical weltanschauung, announced Padilla's "capture" at O'Hare airport in Chicago in May 2002, interrupting a trip to Moscow to do it, as further proof that U.S. Guv was acting with dispatch to catch up on the horrific attacks Qaeda was undertaking, "an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the U.S. [again] by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb." This one, Ashcroft said, was capable of being even more deadly than the 9/11 atrocities -- causing "mass death and injuries" to Chicago's unsuspecting White Sox fans, Playboy bunnies, etc.
Strangely though, the 'dirty bomb' accusations, the result of information extracted in various ways from other terrorism suspects in foreign lands (free of the restraints imposed even in such places as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), were not part of the bill of particulars against Padilla in Miami. Prosecutors didn't even refer to them, standards of proof and perception having risen substantially since the halcyon 9/11 days when the president swore that "those who knocked these buildings down will hear from us soon," and the country's blood was righteously up. Instead, the guilty verdict that Padilla received after a single day of deliberation by the Miami jury, was cobbled together expediently by attaching his case to that of two other terrorist suspects, Adham Hassoun and Kifah Jayyousi, two Middle-Easterners operating in South Florida as alleged support group cell members dedicated to providing money, recruits and supplies to Islamic extremists around the world. U. S. Guv's proof that Padilla, an unstable Hispanic gang member from Chicago's tough South Side, was really a Qaeda homie? He'd met Hassoun at a mosque in Broward County! Jose had wanted to go to Afghanistan and learn to fire recoil-less rifles . . .
Dr. Angela Hogarty of Columbia, a forensic psychiatrist whom the Federal District Court allowed to examine Padilla for 27 hours prior to his Miami trial, has indicated that her patient may have suffered from 'borderline personality' before his interest in Islam, and said that Jose's 40-odd months of total isolation, sleep deprivation, psychological battering by "trained" interviewers "determined to break his personality down, to reduce him to a point where he'd renounce himself and accept the government's view of what he'd been doing," constituted "mental torture," and obviated the proceedings: "He clearly suffered from cognitive dysfunction, loss of memory, severe depression and panic attacks" -- exactly the kinds of things that veterans returning from the Iraq War endure, many without adequate help. In its rush to justify its Iraq invasion, the Bush administration was looking for "evidence" to support its claim that Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas and other extremist groups, were somehow part of a cogent World War III of Terror. That could somehow be confronted in conventional, more or less rational, terms. Instead of the messy, fragmented lives people like Padilla -- a minor criminal looking for a rationale for his dysfunctional life -- really represented.
Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said: "Jose Padilla received a fair trial and a just verdict." A female member of the jury, though prevented from commenting at the courthouse, having been shunted out a side entrance and discouraged from speaking to the press, admitted in a phone conversation that she'd all but made up her mind before deliberations began: "[But] we had to be sure," she said later in Spanish. "We wanted to make sure we went through all the evidence. But the evidence was strong, and we all agreed on that."
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