Jose Padilla and the Zucchini Prosecution

April 27, 2007

By Mike Whitney

The case against Jose Padilla would be funny if a man’s life hadn’t been ruined in the process---but it has. The Bush administration has leapt from one absurd accusation to the next completely undisturbed by the glaring inconsistencies of their case. The prosecution’s objective is the same now as it was 5 years ago when the Chicago gang-banger was first arrested at O’ Hare Airport as an alleged “dirty bomber”, that is, keep Padilla behind bars for the rest of his life.

The government has no case against Padilla and they know it. He’s merely a lab-rat in their experiment to expand presidential powers. The Washington Post even admitted this in an article earlier this week, “Few Specifics Evident as Padilla Trial Nears” 4-23-07. Padilla had no nuclear material, no plan to attack apartment buildings, and no part in any terrorist conspiracy. It’s all baloney. In 5 years, the government hasn’t produced a shred of evidence that Padilla is guilty of anything.

Nothing—zippo! In fact, according to the Washington Post, the government’s case “lacks anything about the defendant being involved in ANY particular plot in the United States OR ANYWHERE ELSE”.

So, why has this travesty been allowed to continue for so long?

Padilla has been in solitary confinement for the last 5 years. During that time he was drugged, humiliated, and tortured—all of the practices which have become commonplace under Bush. For the first 4 years he was deprived of habeas corpus and legal counsel. During that period, he was never charged with a crime. He was simply declared an “enemy combatant” and stripped of his rights. His arrest has been used to establish the precedent that Bush can arbitrarily imprison American citizens without filing charges. It is the very definition of tyranny.

But this is old news. What’s new is that the media’s coverage of Padilla has grown strangely sympathetic. The Washington Post, which has been one of the strongest backers of Bush’s foreign adventurism, has been considerably less supportive of his attack on civil liberties. The Post criticized the weakness of the government’s case and the woeful lack of evidence connecting Padilla to a crime. The prosecution even admits that the charges are “hard to particularize” and that the defendant cannot be “linked to a particular violent act or terrorist group.” This explains the skepticism of U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke who said (with some irony) that the indictment “is very light on facts”.

Nevertheless, the Padilla case is going forward even though there is no evidence of a crime---just the possibility that Padilla might do something illegal in the future. The parallels to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” have not been lost on Padilla’s defense team who characterized the government’s case as “the ethereal nature of an alleged conspiracy.”

By “ethereal” we assume they mean hogwash.

The Post does a good job of exposing the flaws in the prosecution’s case, but stops short of saying the charges are baseless and without merit. They know what Bush and his legal team are up to and what extraordinary steps they will take to reach their goal. They are trying to convict a man (and possibly send him to his death) without producing any witnesses or evidence of a crime. If they succeed, Bush will be able to ignore the law and arrest whomever he chooses. That doesn’t mean the outcome of the trial is certain. Far from it. In fact, it’ll be hard to prove Padilla’s guilt with nothing but conjecture and demagoguery.

Presently, the government is charging Padilla as a material witness in a “conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim”. But they have no proof.

They say that he is part of a “North American support cell that’s part of a vast international movement of foot soldiers, recruiters and financiers who foment violent jihad around the globe.”

Again, there is no of this.

They say that he signed a “mujahideen data form”; an “application form that was recovered from a reputed Al Qaida base.”

Even if Padilla did sign this silly-sounding jihad application, (which is still in doubt) that's guilt by association---it doesn’t prove that he was involved in the commission of a crime.

The prosecution’s case depends on convincing jurors that Padilla was secretly preparing Al Qaida forces for another terrorist attack. They have submitted wiretapped phone conversations which (they believe) implicate him in a conspiracy. But do they? The conversations prove nothing. In fact, they're ridiculous. They are merely recordings of Padilla with some unknown person talking in code about spending “$3500 to buy zucchini”.

“Zucchini”?

Is that it? Is that the government's case? Is it really worth keeping a man behind bars for 5 years and driving him mad because he talks about zucchini on the phone?

What about rhubarb?

Even the Post cannot relay the details of the “The Zucchini Prosecution” without a hint of derision. The Post’s reporter, Peter Whoriskey, mockingly notes that while the government’s case is short on “violent specifics”; it is “rich in atmospherics.”

Indeed. The entire case appears to be built on “atmospherics” rather than facts. The prosecution has no more evidence now than they did when they began this witch-hunt. Federal Prosecutor Brian Frazier admitted as much when he was asked about the vague nature of the charges.

Frazier said they were “hard to particularize” and that they revolve around an “inchoate crime…rather than any completed operation”.

“Inchoate”?

So, Frazier is admitting that the alleged crime was still in its embryonic stages? That it hadn’t yet been committed!?!

Get this: Jose Padilla just spent 5 years in solitary confinement for a crime, which the government now admits, never took place.

The notion that a man can be imprisoned without proof of a crime is “preemptive justice”, which is no justice at all. It denies the “presumption of innocence” and cedes absolute power to the state.

The court needs to put an end to this nonsense and dismiss the case for lack of evidence. This fiasco has gone on long enough. No one should be caged like an animal for half a decade for talking about zucchini on the phone.

Padilla should be released.

John Walker Lindh’s Buyer’s Remorse: ADAM LIPTAK

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
THE NEW YORK TIMES

SIDEBAR

John Walker Lindh’s Buyer’s Remorse

By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: April 23, 2007

Serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison after agreeing to a plea deal, John Walker Lindh has a powerful case of buyer’s remorse.

At the time, a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, it looked like John Walker Lindh had made a pretty good deal.

Mr. Lindh, a 21-year-old from Marin County, Calif., who had served as a Taliban soldier in Afghanistan, faced charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life. In a plea deal, though, the government dropped its most serious accusations, including charges that Mr. Lindh had engaged in terrorism and conspired to kill Americans.

Mr. Lindh instead acknowledged only that he had aided the Taliban and carried weapons. He was sentenced to 20 years, and people congratulated his lawyers for their triumph.

Times change. Passions cool. Other cases offer telling contrasts. And Mr. Lindh now has a powerful and understandable case of buyer’s remorse.

“He was a victim of a hysterical atmosphere post-9/11,” Frank R. Lindh said about his son. “Much like the country has reassessed the premises for the Iraq war, it should re-examine the premises for this sentence.”

To hear Frank Lindh tell it, his son was an earnest and confused student of Islam who took up arms in a civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. “A very substantial number of people in America believe John fought Americans or committed terrorism or supported terrorism,” Frank Lindh said. “That’s just not true.”

But John Walker Lindh is not serving time for terrorism or treason.

--MORE--

Experts: Even if Acquitted, Padilla Could Go to Prison

Posted on Mon, Apr. 16, 2007
Padilla in jail peril, experts say By James Gordon Meek New York Daily News (MCT) WASHINGTON - Accused al-Qaida agent Jose Padilla could be thrown back in a military brig even if he's acquitted or gets a light sentence in his civilian criminal trial beginning this week, experts say. All President Bush would have to do is sign papers again branding him an "enemy combatant," and Padilla would be back behind bars. Bush did that in 2002, when the Brooklyn-born terror suspect was stripped of his constitutional rights and held in a Navy jail for three years without charges. "There is nothing stopping the president from doing it," said Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who teaches law at Georgetown University. "If he were acquitted, he's not necessarily going anywhere." And if Padilla is returned to military custody, he could be held indefinitely until the end of the war on terror, Solis said. "What restrains the government from reclassifying Padilla as an enemy combatant? I don't know of anything," agreed Karen Greenberg, an expert on terrorism law at New York University. Padilla and two others are charged in Miami with allegedly conspiring to form a "terror cell" to send recruits to fight Russian troops in Chechnya in the 1990s. Even though his arrest was trumpeted as the capture of a terrorist intent on wreaking death and destruction in the U.S., he isn't facing justice for plotting a catastrophe here. After Padilla's May 2002 arrest by the FBI in Chicago, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said he was "an al-Qaida operative ... exploring a plan to build and explode a radioactive `dirty' bomb." He also allegedly wanted to blow up apartment buildings in New York City and Washington. "Abu Abdullah the Puerto Rican," as Padilla was allegedly known, was designated an enemy combatant by Bush a month later. In the brig, he was denied access to lawyers or courts and now claims he was tortured. Despite the unrelated charges he faces in the federal trial, officials still believe he worked for Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and top lieutenant Abu Zubaydah. They didn't charge him with the dirty bomb plot because witnesses were "not available," though Mohammed and Zubaydah are in U.S. hands. Returning Padilla to military custody would spark a "brand-new constitutional firestorm," predicted Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's enemy combatants task force. Critics also say the Military Commissions Act of 2006 ensures Bush can designate U.S. citizens - not just foreigners - as enemy combatants who can't challenge their detention.

Orwell at Guantanamo

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, April 3, 2007; A23

Here's what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions and honor of the United States of America: An accused terrorist claims he confessed to heinous crimes so that agents of the U.S. government would stop torturing him, and no one is shocked or even surprised. There's reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true.

There's also reason to doubt that the suspect -- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, held in U.S. custody without charges for more than four years -- is the Zelig-like innocent bystander he claims to be. But we can't be sure, because George W. Bush disgraced himself and his country by ordering extrajudicial kidnappings of suspects in the war on terror, indefinite secret detention and interrogation by "alternative" methods that the civilized world calls torture.

On Friday, the Defense Department released a heavily redacted transcript of a March 14 hearing, held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to determine whether Nashiri should be classified as an "enemy combatant." I apologize for resorting to cliche, but the only way to describe this amazing, infuriating document is to call it Orwellian. Reading it gives you the chills.

None of the members of the military tribunal sitting in judgment is named. The officer serving as Nashiri's "personal representative" likewise is not named. Unclassified evidence is presented in summary -- an unnamed "recorder" reads a document quoting statements by witnesses that attest to Nashiri's involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in which 224 people died, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. The witnesses are not present, so, of course, there is no opportunity to challenge their statements.

Nashiri's representative, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, presents a stunning response: "The Detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him. Also, the Detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop."

The response states that Nashiri confessed under torture not only to the East Africa and USS Cole bombings but also to the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg, some bombings and rocket attacks in Saudi Arabia, a plan to bomb American ships in the Persian Gulf, and "a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship." Oh, and he also told investigators that Osama bin Laden had acquired a nuclear bomb.

"I just said those things to make the people happy," Nashiri tells the tribunal. "They were very happy when I told them those things."

One gets the sense that he would have confessed to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls if that would have made his interrogators happy.

Nashiri denies having anything to do with terrorism, although he acknowledges taking money from bin Laden. He paints himself -- unconvincingly, in my view -- as a simple merchant who makes poor choices in friends and has a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Navy captain serving as president of the tribunal gets around to asking Nashiri about the alleged torture. Who did it? They were Americans, Nashiri says. When did it happen? "From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me."

Only George Orwell could have written what comes next in the transcript. The following is what we are allowed to know of Nashiri's response when asked how he was tortured:

"What else do I want to say? [REDACTED]. Many things happened. There were doing so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. They do so many things. So so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. After that another method of torture began. [REDACTED]. They used to ask me questions and the investigator after that used to laugh. And, I used to answer the answer that I knew. And, if I didn't reply what I heard, he used to [REDACTED]. So many things happened. I don't in summary, that's basically what happened."

I guess that's how the U.S. government extracts information from detainees: [REDACTED].

The Pentagon told reporters that Nashiri's claims were censored because of "national security concerns" about disclosing where detainees were held and how they were treated. But that would be unnecessary if Nashiri were lying, since no harm could come from disclosing a bunch of made-up stories. The censorship makes sense only if some or all of what Nashiri alleges is true.

But we're not permitted to know what he alleges.

Orwell had it figured out: "Ignorance is Strength."

2 Judges, Attorney Convicted of Bribery

Saturday March 31, 2007 11:01 AM

By HOLBROOK MOHR

Associated Press Writer

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - A prominent attorney and two former judges he was accused of lavishing gifts and money on in exchange for favorable rulings were convicted of bribery.

Paul Minor, who amassed a fortune from asbestos, tobacco, medical malpractice and car safety litigation, was found guilty of all 11 counts against him, which ranged from racketeering to bribery. He faces up to 95 years in prison.

The jury found former Circuit Judge John Whitfield and former Chancellor Wes Teel guilty of bribery and mail fraud. Whitfield could get a 50-year jail term and Teel could get 25 years.

All three had pleaded not guilty, and their attorneys vowed to appeal Friday's ruling.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dave Fulcher said during closing arguments that Minor guaranteed $140,000 in loans to Whitfield in 1998, then used cash, a third party and a backdated promissory note to try to conceal the fact that Minor paid off the loan. Whitfield awarded Minor $3.6 million in a lawsuit, Fulcher said. The Mississippi Supreme Court later reduced the award to $1.6 million.

Fulcher said Minor guaranteed a loan to Teel for $24,500 the same year. Teel ``forced through'' a $1.5 million settlement in one of Minor's cases before his court, he said.

Minor acknowledged guaranteeing loans for the judges but claimed he was only helping friends who had fallen on hard times and expected nothing in return.

Besides Fulcher and Teel, Minor was also accused of bribing Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz Jr.

The four were tried in U.S. District Court in Jackson last year. A jury cleared Diaz of all charges and deadlocked on some charges against the other three.

Whitfield and Teel are free on bond pending an appeal. Minor has been jailed since September for violating the terms of his bond for alleged excessive drinking and not adhering to the rules of his house arrest. He was ordered to remain in jail.

Ghost Prisons, Ghost Courtrooms

From CIA secret prisons, 14 "high-level" terror suspects are at Gitmo. Where are all the others? by Nat Hentoff March 25th, 2007 11:21 PM

Women With High Libidos Exist! Savage Love by Dan Savage The New Americanism Give Me Liberty by Nat Hentoff Anderson Cooper Courts Thomas Roberts! La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto DJS Are Not Rock Stars Shake Up Downtown by Tricia Romano A BDSM Court Case Puts Master/Slave Relationships on Trial Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino Shopping with The Secret Frock Star by Lynn Yaeger Bloomberg Floods New York With Global-Warming Happy Talk by Wayne Barrett Women With High Libidos Exist! Savage Love by Dan Savage General Peter Pace Talks Morality Sutton Impact by Ward Sutton To Err Is Human—to Forgive Republicans, Divine! This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow "You need to have a president who understands you can't win this war with legal papers. We've got to use every tool at our disposal." George W. Bush, Nightline, May 13, 2004 "What are we going to do with these people when we're finished . . . with them? Are they going to disappear?" Jack Cloonan, senior FBI agent on the Bin Laden Squad, speaking of the terrorism suspects hidden in CIA secret cells, Nightline, May 13, 2004 "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [resisting interrogation in a CIA secret prison] was strapped down, forcibly pushed under the water, and made to believe he might drown." The New York Times, May 13, 2004 On September 17, 2001, the president told the National Security Council that, at the advice of then CIA director George Tenet (who was later awarded the Medal of Freedom by the president) he was going to issue a classified Memorandum of Notification that would give the CIA permission to use "special authorities to detain Al Qaeda operatives worldwide." Without consulting Congress or any court, Bush had given the CIA the power to ignore American laws and our international treaty obligations to—among other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions—create its own secret prisons around the world. The CIA could also continue to conduct "renditions" to kidnap terrorism suspects to be interrogated in countries known for torturing their prisoners. Those held in CIA secret prisons had no contact with the outside world: no lawyers, no visits from the Red Cross, and no word to their families. As some former CIA agents have revealed, CIA personnel involved in the "disappearances" feared they might eventually have to face American courts for their crimes against a multitude of laws. These concerns intensified as the existence of these CIA prisons began to be revealed—first by The Washington Post's Dana Priest in 2002, followed by many other reporters, including this one, here and abroad—as well as through investigations by human rights organizations. The names of these vanished prisoners, and what was being done to them, were still unknown, except for some details by a few released former CIA secret prisoners. But the existence of these gulags greatly tarred America's image among our allies and the rest of the world. Damage control by the administration consisted of the president, the secretary of state, and other officials denying there were such prisons, in a pious chorus of assurances that "the United States does not torture." (I offer to any cartoonist the children's story of Pinocchio, whose nose kept lengthening with each lie he told.) On September 6, 2006, the president, at last—as condemnations of these ghost prisons multiplied around the world—admitted their existence and said that 14 "high-value" ghost prisoners would be transferred to Guantánamo to eventually be tried by military commissions. From ghost prisons, the dread Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other purported master terrorists were brought into ghost courtrooms. At Guantánamo, the prisoners have no right to have lawyers present, to call their own witnesses, or to know the names of their accusers. (Instead of lawyers, they have "personal representatives" assigned by the military.) The hearing for KSM marked the first time these Combatant Status Review Tribunals were closed to all reporters. The "blackout" resulted in reporters and the public getting only transcripts of the proceedings heavily redacted (censored) by the Pentagon. We are not even allowed to know the names of the five military officers, the tribunal's official reporter, or the translator in that ghost courtroom. Amid the extensive press coverage of KSM's Gitmo "confessions" of multiple horrific crimes—including the planning of 9/11 and the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl—the Pentagon's transcript blacked out what he started to say about his treatment (torture) in the four years he was in the secret CIA prison system. Also redacted was his written statement about the abuses. It had already been widely reported that he was "waterboarded" (made to believe he was drowning) soon after his CIA interrogation began; and it is highly probable that his future confessions in that black site were facilitated by additional "coercive interrogations." There is external evidence that KSM did indeed commit some of the atrocities in the admissions he repeated in the Gitmo ghost courtroom, but the Bush administration remains intent on not disclosing the methods used to get him to talk because they are very likely to be "crimes against humanity" in international law. His CIA interrogators, along with all other CIA agents involved in torturing prisoners and in "renditions" by kidnapping, need not worry any longer about being prosecuted for those crimes. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 retroactively spared them any punishment for such acts. But if the details are revealed, the president would be further prosecuted in world opinion. The president, in finally acknowledging the existence of the CIA secret prisons, emphasized that no prisoners remain in those gulags. Even if you trust what he says in these matters, the Military Commissions Act allows these prisons to stay open for future manacled guests—and for the CIA renditions to continue. The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed, according to the March 16 Washington Post, "An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror." Its Washington policy director, Reverend Rich Cizik, emphasized: "We are the conservatives, let there be no mistake on that . . . who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary." These evangelicals say they want to help Americans "regain our moral clarity." There is no moral clarity in the ghost courtrooms at Guantánamo, the deeply un-American Military Commissions Act, and a host of other covert missions by the most immoral presidency in our history. But as Americans recoiled at the redacted confessions of KSM, Human Rights Watch raised a huge specter of missing moral clarity, of unanswered questions about the CIA secret prisons: their exact locations, the treatment of detainees, and the "complicity of other governments" harboring them in their countries. And most important, what of all the other CIA ghost prisoners? Who are they? Where are they? What was done to them all these years? How have they been disposed of?