The not-so-dirty bomber
A Times EditorialPublished November 30, 2005
Jose Padilla, who the Bush administration initially claimed had plotted to explode a so-called "dirty bomb" in the United States, will finally get his day in court. It's about time.
More than three years ago then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of Padilla with great fanfare, saying that "the safety of all Americans and the national security interests of the United States" required that Padilla, an American citizen who was picked up at an airport in Chicago, be transferred to military custody and held indefinitely as an enemy combatant.
Just as the U.S. Supreme Court was set to consider whether to grant Padilla's appeal and evaluate the constitutionality of his predicament, the Bush administration has changed course. Padilla has now been charged with assisting terrorists overseas. The charges, while serious, have little in common with Ashcroft's dire pronouncements. There is no mention of a bomb attack on American soil in the indictment. Padilla is charged with sending money and offering other support to promote a violent jihad campaign in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.
Had Padilla's case been sent through the normal criminal legal process, the truth could have been discovered much earlier and our constitutional system - once the model of the world - would not have been tarnished.
Padilla's designation as an enemy combatant has become a symbol of the administration's willingness to ignore the due process guarantees of the Constitution when it finds them inconvenient. The administration repeatedly has taken the position that the president, through his warmaking powers, could detain any person, citizen or noncitizen, and hold him incommunicado, without access to a lawyer and for as long as the war on terrorism persisted. It claimed that no proof had to be presented that the terror suspect was guilty and that no court could second-guess the president's action.
But the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that view in a series of decisions last year, saying that enemy combatants are at least entitled to access to the courts. However, the high court has yet to define the precise parameters of what due process rights enemy combatants enjoy. And it appears by moving Padilla to the custody of the Justice Department and the civilian courts, the administration is trying to keep his case from being the one where the justices spell out the rules governing enemy combatants.
America's diminished moral authority around the world can be blamed in large part on the administration's contempt for the rule of law at home and abroad. There are plenty of countries that throw allegedly dangerous subversives, revolutionaries and terrorists into detention camps for years without trial. What's new is that, under Bush, our country is now one of them.