"The world must construe according to its wits; the court must construe according to the law."
-- Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
Jose Padilla was arrested in June of 2002 at Chicago's O' Hare Airport and taken into custody. Then Attorney General John Ashcroft made a dramatic appearance on national TV to announce the arrest, claiming that Padilla was a terrorist and was plotting to detonate a "dirty bomb" within the country. The fanfare surrounding the incident was intended to divert attention from the testimony of FBI special agent Colleen Rowley, whose damning account of government negligence in the 9-11 investigation threatened to dominate the news. It was later discovered that Padilla had been imprisoned three weeks earlier, but the announcement was delayed by the Justice Department in a cynical ploy to grab the headlines.
The government has never produced a shred of evidence that Padilla is guilty of any of the crimes for which he has been accused. Instead, the administration has used its unchecked power to indefinitely detain Padilla while refusing to charge him with a crime.
The Padilla case has never been about Jose Padilla, domestic terrorism, or any of the other spurious claims made by the government. It is, in fact, about enhancing presidential power, so the executive is no longer required to comply with the law. Padilla pits the language of right-wing think tanks, "enemy combatant", against habeas corpus, the cornerstone of the American justice system. So far, the made-up language of the Bush team has prevailed.
The moniker "enemy combatant" signifies the end of the rule of law. It means that the president can arbitrarily strip American citizens of their inalienable rights and deprive them of any method for challenging their detention. It sweeps away long-honored provisions of due process, equal justice, and the presumption of innocence.
Enemy combatant is the language of tyranny. It bestows of the president the absolute power of a monarch to ignore the law and lock up American citizens according to his own whims.
