Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2007

THOUGHT CRIME ON TRIAL
America's dirty little victory

By TED RALL

NEW YORK — "Just about everyone agrees that the recent conviction of Abdullah al-Muhajir, aka Jose Padilla, is a good thing," wrote rightwing pundit Neil Kressel in The New York Post.

Indeed, just about everyone did. "It is hard to disagree with the jury's guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber," opined the liberal editorial board of The New York Times. (They went on to criticize the way the Bush administration denied Padilla due process.)

Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen born in Brooklyn who converted to Islam, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002. Using the bombastic "1984"-style rhetoric of the post-9/11 era, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Padilla had participated in an "unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb." Padilla, Ashcroft ranted, could have caused "mass death and injury" in an American city.

The problem is there wasn't any evidence. Or there wasn't enough to convict him in court — which, under the system of justice citizens of Western countries have lived under for eight centuries, is the same thing.

Before 9/11 and "preventative detention" and legal torture and scary new laws like the USA-Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act eliminated habeas corpus, Padilla would have sat in jail a day or two. He might have gotten roughed up, but he would have walked.

Bush's neofascist security state, Padilla rotted in solitary confinement — in a military brig — for 3 1/2 years. (Read Henry Charriere's classic prison memoir "Papillon" if you doubt that solitary confinement is a form of torture.) No family visits. No lawyer. They subjected him to sensory deprivation, covering his eyes and ears to make him lose his mind.

And still no trial — because the government knew Padilla was innocent.

By 2006 Bush was unpopular and federal judges had begun to find new courage, ruling that the administration had to charge Padilla or release him. So the Bushies came up with a clever dodge whose narrow legalism was worthy of depends-on-the-meaning: They transferred Padilla to the civilian justice system and charged him with something else. Or, to be specific, something less.

They added Padilla to a case against two Middle Eastern men on trial for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people in a foreign country" and "material support" for Islamic terrorism. Padilla had met the two in Florida and, prosecutors say, traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to join al-Qaida. The key evidence presented was Padilla's supposed al-Qaida application form, which fingerprints proved he had handled.

Padilla's public defenders claimed their client was forced to pick up the "al-Qaida form" in the brig. Who knows what happened while he was "disappeared" during those 3 1/2 years?

"There is no need to show any particular violent crime [in a conspiracy trial]," said law professor Robert Chesney, of Wake Forest University. "You don't have to specify the particular means used to carry out the crime." Nevertheless, Padilla faces the possibility of life in prison.

In 2000, the U.S. was not at war with Afghanistan. Before 9/11 the Clinton and Bush administrations both sent millions of dollars to the Taliban. The vast majority of Muslims who trained at al-Qaida camps never plotted against the U.S. They planned to fight in places like Chechnya, Kosovo and Xinjiang. Padilla's membership in al-Qaida, even if proven, doesn't prove anti-Americanism.

Post-9/11 conspiracy prosecutions are de facto attempts to make anti-Americanism — the mere thought, not any action — illegal.

"It is a pretty big leap between a mere indication of desire to attend a camp and a crystallized desire to kill, maim and kidnap," said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University. The conspiracy count against Padilla, Margulies said, "is highly amorphous, and it basically allows someone to be found guilty for something that is one step away from a thought crime."

Although the charge was laughable and the standard of proof rock-bottom, the masters of Padilla's show trial didn't miss a chance to cheese up the proceedings. Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier never presented evidence that Padilla actually joined or was accepted by al-Qaida. Nevertheless, reported the Associated Press, he "mentioned al-Qaida 91 times in his opening statement and more than 100 times in his closing, according to court transcripts."

Padilla had nothing to do with 9/11. To link him to the attacks in jurors' minds, Frazier had them watch a seven-minute video clip of Osama bin Laden. (There's no evidence that Padilla ever watched the 1997 CNN interview.)

Padilla's lawyers asked the judge in the case to dismiss the case because he had been denied a speedy trial. Marcia Cooke said no — and ordered them not to talk to the jury about the 3 1/2 years the defendant had spent being tortured and deprived of his rights.

Reporters' eyes rolled as Frazier said that government wiretappers heard Padilla and his two codefendents use code words like "football" to mean jihad and "eggplant" and "zucchini" for weapons. "They wanted to recruit, fund and train fighters," he told the jury. "Playing this kind of football was more important than anything else to these men. What they were doing was no game." But, reported the AP, Padilla's "voice was only picked up on seven of the FBI intercepts, [and] he never talked in code." He shouldn't have been convicted — even on those lame conspiracy charges.

Osama bin Laden is an ends-justifies-the-means kind of guy. So, apparently, is Uncle Sam. Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University, said after the verdict: "It's kind of a dirty victory because of the way the case came about, but it's still a victory." Yeah. But for whom?
Ted Rall is the author most recently of "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

Copyright 2007 Ted Rall

Article published Aug 29, 2007
The disappearing 'dirty bomber'


August 29, 2007

Jacob Sullum - People who knew Jose Padilla before he was sent to a Navy brig in 2002 say he emerged a different man after 3½ years of isolation and interrogation.

Those who observed him only from a distance also noticed a change: The "dirty bomber," whose capture then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had announced on live TV, morphed into yet another junior jihadist who went to Afghanistan for arms training but never came close to carrying out an attack.

Padilla's recent conviction on terrorism-related charges highlights the contrast between the murderous mastermind portrayed by the Bush administration and the less impressive reality. It casts further doubt on President Bush's decision to put Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil, in military custody, a move supposedly justified by his intelligence value and the impossibility of successfully prosecuting him in a civilian court.

"We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive 'dirty bomb,' " Mr. Ashcroft declared when he revealed Padilla's arrest. He explained that a dirty bomb "not only kills victims in the immediate vicinity but also ------s radioactive material that is highly toxic to humans and can cause mass death and injury." CNN reported, "U.S. officials said Washington was the probable target."

Although Padilla had been arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport more than a month before, Mr. Ashcroft dramatically interrupted a visit to Moscow for a news conference via satellite. The next day, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confessed, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk. It's not as though this was a plan that was on the verge of being executed. He was still in the early stages."

How early? The New York Times reported in 2006 that al Qaeda personnel director Abu Zubaydah, the government's main source about the bomb plot, "dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material."

The Defense Department says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, another al Qaeda leader who was later captured, also "was very skeptical." Padilla reportedly told U.S. interrogators the dirty-bomb talk was a ruse to avoid being sent to fight American forces in Afghanistan.

Because they were obtained coercively, such statements were not admissible at Padilla's trial, but it hardly would have mattered if they were. Based on his training in Afghanistan and his connection to two co-defendants accused of sending money to terrorist groups, a federal jury convicted Padilla of two conspiracy charges, plus of providing "material support" to terrorists.

The evidence on which the prosecution based its case, including secretly recorded telephone conversations and a "mujahideen data form" with Padilla's fingerprints on it, was available at the time of his arrest. Because of how prosecutors framed the charges, Padilla could be imprisoned for life. Defendants in other cases who admitted undergoing terrorist training have received sentences of from seven to 15 years.

It seems clear the government could have tried and convicted Padilla in 2002, which leaves intelligence gathering as the remaining excuse for his 43 months of legal limbo. Maybe Padilla provided valuable information, although his junior position in al Qaeda (assuming he even could be considered a member) and the disdain of al Qaeda's leaders suggest otherwise.

Does the possibility of gleaning information about terrorism justify stripping a U.S. citizen of his constitutional rights and locking him up indefinitely without charge, based on nothing more than one man's order? It was hardly a coincidence that Mr. Bush transferred Padilla back to civilian custody for his long-delayed trial just as the Supreme Court was poised to consider that question.

Jacob Sullum is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Aug. 29, 2007

Columnist issues stiff warning to readers

They put Jose Padilla away for having filled out an application form to attend an al-Qaida training camp, a milestone in criminal-conspiracy law that makes me wonder about you readers and what you might do that some ambitious prosecutor could trace back to something I wrote sixteen months ago.

I'm serious. Here we are, consorting on the page, in the old conspiracy between Author and Unnamed Others, my hand on your shoulder, whispering stuff, speaking freely -- including things I may not have thought through a-l-l-o-f-t-h-e-l-e-g-a-l-i-m-p-l-i-c-a-t-i-o-n-s-o-f -- so let me just say this: I accept no liability for whatever you may or may not do after reading my column. It has nothing to do with me. Zero. Zilch.

You readers know me and I don't know you. This now makes me nervous. We are invisibly linked through words I have written, and yet the meaning of those words, as determined by a jury of twelve men and women good and true, could be far, far from what I intended, and as I sit there at the defense table in the Miami courtroom, smelling the musky cologne of your idiot attorney, looking past him at you, you wretched cretin, as the linguistics expert for the State, a tall bunheaded woman with a Ph.D. in literary deconstruction, testifies that the subtext of my column in question was a command that you plant an explosive device in the heel of your cowboy boot and try to run through airport security hollering "I'm a-comin', Mama!" I am going to think back on my life and wish I had become a gardener. Nobody was ever indicted for watering plants.

I know people who went to prison for protesting the war in Vietnam and it is nothing to be taken lightly. It can mess with a person's mind and not every mind survives the message. You'd like to imagine that you'd be heroic like Nelson Mandela or Voltaire but I am not looking for opportunities to be heroic. I am 65 years old, thank you very much, and very, very uninterested in spending time in prison. My plan is to moulder gently in my own home and read the books I wrote term papers about as an English major and dandle my grandkids and at some point write a heart-warming memoir about my years in broadcasting.

So whatever weirdness you are plotting, stop it right now. Put those liquids or gels away. Stop going to the airport and asking strangers to carry packages aboard the aircraft. Stop offering to pack their bags for them. Whatever suspicious things you are doing, stop it right now. Don't look away as if I were talking to somebody else. I am talking to YOU. Yes. You.

I don't know you. I never knew you. I never asked you to read this column. Isn't that right?

If so, sign here: ......................... DATE: .....................

Anybody who does not sign is hereby assumed not to be a reader of this column and therefore no responsibility of mine. Tell your lawyer to go bark up some other tree.

Back when I was a child, thanks to my rigorous upbringing that included stories about Boys From Good Homes Who Fell In With Bad Company, I assumed that I would wind up in a federal penitentiary, and that is why I didn't go into engineering or medicine or law, professions that give you some definite criminal capabilities. Instead I went into the paragraph profession, but now that conspiracy has become such a useful all-purpose tool for prosecutors, I feel rather exposed. What if I had written years ago that the World Trade Center was ugly, which it was, and I wish it didn't exist, and what if that paragraph had been found paper-clipped to the al-Qaida application?

Ever since that dreadful September day, the Current Vice-President has been obsessed with the idea that someone somewhere must be prevented from doing the horrible thing they may or may not be about to do and if the Constitution and common law and common sense must be crunched underfoot in order to prevent that, then so be it.

Where there is smoke, there is fire. This, however, is rough on smokers, if the fire department is called out whenever someone exhales. And that's what happened to Mr. Padilla. He lit up a stogie and was nailed for contemplating arson. God forgive us our zealous cruelty.

(Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.)

(C) 2007 BY GARRISON KEILLOR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Jose Padillas’s Fate – And Ours
Friday, 14 September 2007, 83 pm
Column: Ernest Partridge
Jose Padillas’s Fate – And Ours

Ernest Partridge, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers

The opening sentence of an August 17, New York Times editorial reads: “It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla.” There follows not a single word in support of this dogmatic editorial pronouncement – not a word presenting the charges against Padilla or the evidence in support thereof.

But take a close look at those charges and that evidence and I submit that you might find abundant reason to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict

Despite this initial sentence, the remainder of the Times’ editorial consists of a commendable criticism of “the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system.” I will have much to say about this “abuse” shortly.

But first, let’s take that close look at the charges and the evidence against Padilla.

The Charges and the Evidence.

Padilla and his two co-defendant were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim overseas, and of providing material support for terrorists. These offenses could result in sentences of life in prison. Sentencing is set for December 5.

The prosecution failed to specifically identify any of the allegedly intended victims of murder, kidnapping and maiming. Furthermore, the defense claimed that the so-called “material support” was, in fact, contributions to Islamic charities.

The crime for which Padilla was initially accused and arrested in June, 2002, plotting to set off a radiological “dirty bomb,” played no part in the trial. From Moscow, the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, announced Padilla’s arrest in Chicago. That announcement and arrest took place, coincidentally or not, just two weeks after FBI agent Colleen Rowley’s explosive disclosure of the FBI’s failure to follow evidence that might have foiled the 9/11 attacks. Following that arrest, the “dirty bomb” allegation faded away, due to lack of evidence.

Just two categories of evidence were presented against Padilla by the prosecution: a “mujahideen data form” with Padilla’s fingerprints, and wiretapped phone calls.

Concerning the “application form,” it is noteworthy that there is no chain of custody linking that form with it’s alleged “discovery” among a truckload of documents hauled out of Afghanistan. That form could have been handed to Padilla at any time during his three and a half years in custody. Also, strange to say, those fingerprints are found only on two of the five pages. There is no evidence that Padilla ever attended the “training camp” to which he had allegedly applied.

Regarding the wiretaps, Lewis Z. Koch reports,

The prosecution has in its possession 300,000 wire taped conversations involving Padilla’s two alleged co-conspirators Adham Hassoun and Kifak Jayyousi, of which 230 were the core of its case. Only 21 of these 300,000 make reference to Padilla. Of these the government produced 7, count ‘em 7, phone calls with Padilla’s voice and not one making a reference to the charges he was indicted on “murder, or kidnaping or maiming.”

In the final paragraph of the aforementioned New York Times editorial, we are assured that “a would-be terrorist will be going to jail.” “Would-be?”

At best, the prosecution proved that Padilla “intended” to receive al Qaeda training, and “intended” to “murder, kidnap and maim.” There was not a scrap of evidence that he acted on any of these intentions. And so, simply stated, Padilla was convicted of “thought-crime” and “pre-crime” (as depicted in the 2002 movie, “Minority Report”).

(For still more condemnation of the Padilla trial and verdict, see Paul Craig Roberts’ “Padilla Jury Opens Pandora’s Box," Lewis Z. Koch’s running commentaries on the trial, and the comments that followed the Common Dreams of the New York Times editorial).

Was Padilla guilty as charged? Frankly, I don’t know. I did not attend the trial and did not hear the evidence and arguments. But of this much, I am confident: that evidence and those arguments did not rise to the level of “beyond reasonable doubt.” And in our legal system – at least, that system pre-Bush – failure to achieve that degree of certitude calls for a verdict of not guilty.

Furthermore, Padilla’s treatment prior to his trial, was of itself grounds for a directed acquittal from the bench. Nonetheless, not only did the defense’s motion for acquittal fail, the circumstances of Padilla’s three and a half year incarceration in a Naval Brig were ruled inadmissible at the trial. The jury heard nothing about it.

Incarceration and the “Goddam piece of paper.”

The treatment of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, following his initial arrest in June, 2002, was totally alien to the American legal system. It was more in tune with **** and Soviet practice – with the treatment of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, and of Rubashov in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.

Fred Grimm of The Miami Herald, thus described Padilla’s confinement:

[He} was held in extreme isolation for 1,307 days. Held in a nine-by-seven-foot cell. The only window blacked out. He was the lone prisoner on the two-tier cellblock. He was given food through a slot in the door. He slept on a steel mattress. No reading material. No calendar. No clock. Nothing to connect him to the outside world...


Psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty, who interviewed Padilla for twenty-two hours, adds to this description:

In this very small cell, he was monitored twenty-four hours a day, and the doors were managed electronically….He had no way of knowing the time. The light was always artificial. The windows were blackened.. He really didn’t see people, especially in the beginning. He only had contact with his interrogators.

In addition, no radio, no television, no telephone, no visitors, and for almost two years, no lawyer.

All this, mind you, was done to a prisoner who was not formally charged with a crime and thus, according to our system of jurisprudence, presumed to be innocent.

Consequently, Dr. Hegarty reports, when his family was at long last allowed to see Padilla,

[they] said he was changed. There was something wrong. There was something very "weird" -- was the word one of his siblings used -- something weird about him. There was something not right. He was a different man. And the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us. He was like -- perhaps like a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would, as I said earlier, he would subsequently pay a price if he revealed what happened..

Also ... he had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know, done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I've seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were "unfair to the commander-in-chief," quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was "good," quote/unquote.


Dr. Hegarty’s account vividly brings to mind the closing lines of Orwell’s 1984, as the broken and condemned Winston Smith reflects:

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Dr. Hegarty concludes: “... as a clinician, I have worked with torture victims and, of course, abuse victims for a few decades now, actually. I think, from a clinical point of view, he was tortured... What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being's mind. That's what happened at the brig. His personality was deconstructed and reformed.”

Before me is a copy of the Constitution of the United States, a document that George Bush took an oath to “protect and defend,” and about which the same George Bush reportedly described as “a Goddam piece of paper.”

In that Constitution, the supreme law of the United States of America, I find the following guarantees to all citizens, including Jose Padilla (and to all “persons,” for that matter):

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. (Article One, Section Nine).

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury. (Bill of Rights, Article Five)

...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. (Bill of Rights, Article Five).

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defence. (Bill of Rights, Article Six)

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved. (Bill of Rights, Article Seven).

Excessive bail shall not lie required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. (Bill of Rights, Article Eight).

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (Fourteenth Amendment).

All these unequivocal guarantees to all citizens, stipulated by the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States, were violated in the case of Jose Padilla vs. the United States.

In ordinary criminal cases, massive prosecutorial bungling of a defendant’s Constitutional rights is grounds for directed dismissal of charges.

But not in the case of Jose Padilla vs. the United States. This was a case that the Bush administration simply could not afford to lose. From the time of his arrest in June, 2002, Padilla was the trophy prisoner, the “designated villain.” As that arrest was a political act, so too must be his incarceration and eventual conviction. It was simply not allowable that the Constitution, that “Goddam piece of paper,” interfere with this political theater.

But the Busheviks are not yet home free. The Padilla case now goes to the appellate courts. Even so, if the conviction is overturned on appeal, there follows the Supreme Court. Given the recent rulings of that Court, in particular Bush v. Gore in December, 2000, the outcome there is uncertain, and portentous. For if the Supremes forsake the Constitution in the Padilla case, what protections remain for the rest of us?


Jose Padilla and you.

Step by step, through acts of Congress and unchallenged executive orders, we Americans have been transformed from free citizens of a democratic republic to subjects of an arbitrary dictatorship. Whereas we were once protected by our Constitution and the rule of law, we now remain “at liberty” at the whim of the government.

A majority of Americans might say, with some justification, “I am not a terrorist, I have not openly complained against the government, so I have nothing to fear.”

Unfortunately for those of us who protest, who publish, speak and demonstrate against the Bushevik regime, the imprisonment and subsequent trial of Jose Padilla gives us abundant reason to be fearful. Nor is the Padilla case exceptional, as indicated by the treatment of US citizens John Walker Lindh, Yassir Hamdi, Muslem Chaplain James Yee, along with hundreds of uncharged and unrepresented “detainees” at Guantánamo and elsewhere. The Bill of Rights explicitly apply, not to “citizens,” but to “persons.”

The peril to all opponents to the Bush regime follows directly from Bush’s pronouncement to Congress on September 20, 2001: “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” From the logical rule of “disjunctive syllogism,” the conclusion follows: “if you are not with “us” (presumably the Bush regime), then you are with the terrorists.” Put more bluntly: dissent is treason. The option of “loyal opposition” – opposition to both official government policy and to terrorist – is rejected by Presidential fiat.

Dave Lindoff asks:

Who is at risk? That's hard to say, but it's clear that it won't just be hardened terrorist types. A presidential executive order signed by Bush on July 17 declares that anything "undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction (sic) and political reform (sic) in Iraq" could be deemed a crime making the perpetrator subject to arrest. Would writing essays critical of the president, the war in Iraq, or the "reconstruction" effort in Iraq meet that standard? Who knows? Would being interviewed for commentary as part of a news story on English-language Al Jezeera TV? ... And how about anti-war protesters?

The Constitution stipulates the right of all citizens to engage in such dissenting activities. But as we have seen, the Bush regime, with the collaboration of Congress, has set aside the Constitution -- “a Goddam piece of paper,” the President calls it. And to date, the Democratic Congress has failed to restore the right of habeas corpus or any other citizen rights cancelled by the Republican administration and Congress.

The Military Commissions Act of September, 2006, gives the President, through his appointed “Combat Status Review Tribunals,” the power to identify almost anyone an “illegal enemy combatant” virtually at his own say-so. To be sure, there are restrictions in the Act, but they are so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless and unenforceable.

In effect, says Keith Olbermann,

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "unlawful enemy combatants" and ship them somewhere - anywhere - but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "unlawful enemy combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere...

And if you somehow think habeas corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" - exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this attorney general is going to help you? (For a concurring opinion, see The New York Times editorial of September 28, 2006).

So it comes to this: those of us who openly oppose the policies of the Bush administration, are free today at the whim of the Bush administration -- simply because the Busheviks choose not to seize all our assets (cf. Executive Order, July 17, 2007) or to round us up and “preventively detain” us.

To be sure, Bush’s newly-acquired dictatorial powers are not total. He dare not “disappear” Congressional dissenters such as Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich, or media critics such as Keith Olbermann. Not yet. Such overt acts could, at last, mobilize Congressional and media opposition sufficiently to put an end to the this incipient dictatorship. But these are practical limitations. As the Padilla case has vividly demonstrated, legal constraints have been effectively abolished.

If such “practical limitations” are all that we have left, then let us use them to fullest advantage. Bush/Cheney, Inc., might be able to silence and incarcerate dozens of insignificant wretches such as Padilla, Lindh, Yee, etc. Perhaps even hundreds or thousands. But not yet members of Congress or media critics, or prominent dissenters such as Al Gore and ex-Presidents Carter and Clinton. Least of all the organized and massed protests of millions of ordinary citizens.

While the door to a restoration of our liberties still remains unlocked, we must push it open and rush through it. Waiting for others to effect our rescue and hoping for the best, will only permit the oppressors to lock that door.

Pastor Martin Niemoller’s warning is as valid today as ever:

In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.

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