Padilla flashback

[dorkulon]

Just reread Matt Taibbi's take on Jose Padilla from July 2002, and he was on the money as ever:

Ask anyone, even the people you're sitting with right now, what associations come to mind when you mention the name Jose Padilla. In 100 cases out of 100, the answer you'll get will run along the following lines: terrorist, suspected Al-Qaeda member, ringleader in a plot to explode a "dirty bomb" in Washington. As for visual images, the only one ever offered for anyone to recall later on was the notorious mugshot, a single grainy picture of a clearly nonwhite person that on June 11th was plastered on the front page of every major daily newspaper in America, as a crude but chilling portrait of the Dark Threat looming over our good society.

All of this is the frightening result of the continuing union between a ruthless, space-age propaganda machine and a pliant consumer population with an attention span of about eight seconds. Because the Padilla story will never be revisited, neither the accusations we associate with his name, nor the emotional effect of the mugshot image, will ever be undone. We all bought the story-- but should we have?

Even the most cursory review of the timeline of the Padilla story reveals that, far from being a simple story of a foiled terrorist plot, this was in fact a masterpiece of orchestrated propaganda, a brilliant manipulation of the biography of a common criminal for a variety of dramatic political objectives. From Willie Horton to Iran-Contra to Watergate, the lessons of almost every major political snow job of the past quarter-century were mined to yield a bag of tricks used flawlessly and compellingly for three short weeks.

--snip--

Padilla, meanwhile, had been declared an "enemy combatant" by Bush on June 9, and moved from New York to a military detention center at the Charleston Naval Weapons center in South Carolina. Soon after his detention became a public matter, the administration issued a series of seemingly insane statements about their intentions regarding their American suspect.

Donald Rumsfeld came right and made a flat announcement: "We're not interested in trying him at this time." Other Bush spokesmen told reporters that Padilla would remain in jail "until we're done with Al-Qaeda." Due process, the right to face one's accuser, all of this was tossed out the window in this series of alarmingly casual statements by Bush officials.

This unprecedented rollback in civil rights scored scarcely a blip in the national media, however. About the strongest statement that the press could muster on the matter was a blase filler line like this one at the end of a June 11 Reuters story:

"Civil rights groups have criticized the way the government was treating ."

The lack of uproar over Padilla's detention was presumably due to the fact that the suspect himself appeared impossible to sympathize with; it was hard to think of Padilla's experience applying to any of us, since none of us were flying around the world, meeting with Al-Qaeda officials, and plotting to explode radioactive bombs.

Then again, maybe Padilla wasn't, either. Just days after his detention was made public, the government quietly leaked word through a number of channels that the Padilla threat was maybe not all it was cracked up to be.

On June 11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz even told CBS: "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk."

A day later, government officials admitted that they had no physical evidence linking Padilla to a bomb plot-- no bomb materials or even documented attempts to obtain bomb materials, no diagrams, not even a chemistry textbook.

--snip--

I have to say, I think a 5-page application to join al Qaeda sounds a little suspect to me too.