Jose Padilla is a U.S. citizen who has been imprisoned in a military jail for more than three years. He didn’t have the right to face his accusers because he hadn’t been accused of anything. Until yesterday.
Americans should feel relieved, but only partly so, that Padilla finally will now go before a federal court.
Since the Bush administration’s underlying policy hasn’t changed, it’s still disturbingly possible for the government to lock up U.S. citizens without charge. The tactic of imprisoning citizens just on the president’s say-so is worse than Kafkaesque. It’s an attack on the rule of law.
Padilla, of Chicago, has been held since May 2002 on suspicion of plotting to plant a dirty bomb in this country. Tuesday’s indictment accuses him instead of conspiracy to carry out attacks in other nations.
The administration insisted that by labeling Padilla an enemy combatant, it could deny him his right to a trial. Such thinking skates alarmingly close to the human rights cliff that Latin America dove off during the 1970s and ’80s, when repressive regimes in places like Argentina – also acting in the name of fighting terrorism – made thousands of citizens “disappear.” At first a few radicals were hauled away, then others whose views were inconvenient to the government. The risk in Padilla’s case wasn’t that one U.S. citizen could be locked away without trial but that the same tactic might someday be applied to almost any American.
Padilla’s case was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in another ruling had curbed federal power to lock up citizens without charge. Based on that precedent, a lower court said earlier this year the government must charge Padilla or release him. If the Supreme Court upheld that crucial standard, the administration would suffer an embarrassing reversal. Padilla’s indictment may be less about evidence and due process and more about the Bush administration avoiding its day in court.
