Unintentionally ironic; unintentionally chilling

During this morning (Wed Jan 3)’s Morning Edition on NPR, they ran a story on the detention of Jose Padilla. Quite without intending to, the story bespoke the parlous times and the threat to our Republic.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Padilla is the American citizen detained at O’Hare and accused — with great fanfare by then-Attorney General Ashcroft even though the AG was half a world away in Moscow — of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” over an American city. Padilla was designated an “enemy combatant” (a phrase with no legal meaning) and detained by the military. His treatment was harsh and unrelenting. More importantly, no civilian saw or talked with Padilla for more than two years. He was given no access to counsel; he was charged with no crime. He was in fact simply “disappeared”.

Once his family engaged a lawyer and they fought to the Supreme Court, the Administration bounced Padilla from military to civil custody and started a trial — tellingly, with no mention of a dirty bomb or domestic terrorism. The case itself was appealed and when that approached the Supreme Court, the Administration again shuffled him around to negate the Court’s jurisdiction. Even the very administration-friendly appellate judge expressed outrage at the legal three-card-monte that the Administration was attempting to peddle.

However, that’s not what caught my ear. I was struck by the following, spoken by Ashcroft’s spokesman, Mark Corallo. Paging through the alleged intelligence on Padilla, he said he was terrified:

It was chilling. I mean, we were still very close to 9/11. The war in Afghanistan was raging. You still had that sense of fear that any moment something bad could happen.

And of course, Mr. Corallo was correct. Something bad — something monstrously, almost unthinkably bad — did happen: An American citizen was detained by the American military and stripped of his basic Constitutional rights — the right to habeus corpus, the right to hear the accusations against him, the right to a fair and speedy trial, the right to legal counsel. An American citizen — an American citizen — was rendered an un-person by his own government, paraded before the media, used for intimidation and fear, and then consigned to a Kafka-esque nightmare when he was damaged so much that that same Government now argues he is not mentally fit to stand for the trial they were forced to give him.

Something bad did happen in Chicago that day. This nation lost a piece of its soul.