Post by POA on Apr 26, 2004 19:06:21 GMT -5
A black and white case of US injustice
Jose Padilla was a devout Muslim, born on the wrong side of the tracks. White, middle-class John Walker Lindh shared his religion but little else. Rupert Cornwell examines their unequal treatment before the law
27 April 2004
The news burst upon America with almost as much impact as the use of the terrifying weapon that was alleged to be involved would have caused. It was mid-morning Washington time on Monday, 10 June 2002, when the cable television networks and radio stations cut into their schedules to show a press conference by the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, that had been called routinely after a working visit to Moscow.
Mr Ashcroft informed his startled and fearful countrymen 5,000 miles away that a month earlier the FBI, of which he is ultimately the head, had arrested a suspected dirty bomber as he entered the US, apparently bent on sowing mayhem and destruction by exploding a radioactive device in a large American city.
Suspicions that the Attorney General - never one to hide his law enforcement light under a bushel - might be overstating matters were soon kindled, however, when Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, said that the suspect apparently had no specific target. There was "no actual plan", Mr Wolfowitz said, although he had indicated "some knowledge of the Washington DC area".
The suspect in question was Jose Padilla, an American citizen who had converted to Islam, moved to the Middle East, and who was identified as being an "al-Qa'ida operative" named Abdullah al-Mujahir. For the government, that was that. Mr Padilla was sent to a military prison where he remains to this day. All efforts to bring him into the judicial mainstream have thus far failed.
But Mr Padilla has become a cause célèbre - the most extreme example, civil liberties groups say, of how the Bush administration has brushed aside the very rudiments of justice and civil rights in its pursuit of the "war on terror".
Tomorrow, belatedly, Mr Padilla has his day in the legal sun. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments resulting from the most serious effort yet to free him.
The docket, No. 03-1027, bears the title "Rumsfeld vs Padilla". It may just be the most important case of its kind in half a century, in setting the limits of presidential power, and determining whether an American citizen can be denied justice in his own country.
"An American citizen" are the three words that are the very heart of the controversy over Mr Padilla. Much has been written about the plight of the 600-plus detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, like him held without lawyers and without charge. But almost without exception they are foreign nationals, captured outside the US.
Mr Padilla was not captured on a foreign battlefield in the service of an enemy power, but as he stepped unsuspectingly off a commercial jet at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, returning to the US to visit his American mother in Florida and his 12-year-old son. He was arrested not by the military, but by civilian law enforcement officers of the FBI.
Some six months earlier, John Walker Lindh, another American citizen had been captured in the war against terrorism, dragged from a fortress in Afghanistan where his fellow Taliban fighters were engaged in a bloody battle with Afghan foes and US special forces. Lindh, like Mr Padilla, had converted to Islam, and gone to live in the Muslim world. He chose Afghanistan, while Mr Padilla settled in Egypt, where he remarried and had two further children.
The treatment they received at the hands of American justice was, however, very different. Throughout, Lindh enjoyed proper representation. Ultimately he was sentenced to 20 years in jail, after a plea bargain by which prosecutors dropped the most serious charge against him, of conspiracy to kill US nationals.
There was even a certain condescending sympathy for him. A "poor, misguided Marin County hot-tubber," was the almost kindly description of Lindh by the former President Bush to the famously liberal district just north of San Francisco where Lindh grew up.
Mr Padilla has been less fortunate, even though he was no less a US citizen. His background is not salubrious: he is from working-class Chicago, where he mingled with street gangs and was placed in juvenile detention at the age of 14, when a robbery attempt in which he was involved turned into murder.
His mother, Estela Ortega Lebron, is furious at the unequal treatment. "That John Walker Lindh, they didn't make him disappear, take away his rights," she told The New York Times, "I guess maybe because his father's a lawyer - he's white, whatever."
At least an equal reason, however, may be the exasperation of the Bush administration at the inconvenient complexities of the civil judicial system. The Lindh case had proved tricky to prosecute. That summer of 2002 was also when the trial of Zacharias Moussaoui, originally supposed to have been the missing "20th hijacker" of 11 September, was tying the US legal system into knots (a situation in which it remains today) with his demand to have captured al-Qa'ida operatives testify in his defence.
[rest in followup]