POLICE STATE

Terrorism suspects Adham Amin Hassoun, second left, Jose Padilla, second right, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi listen as attorney Michael Caruso, left, presents his closing arguments in this Aug. 16, 2007 courtroom drawing in

A travesty of justice: Jose Padilla found guilty

Jose 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.

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.

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