Why Jose Padilla's 17-Year Prison Sentence Should Shock and Disgust all Americans

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-worthington/why-jose-padillas-17yea_b_82703.html

By Andy Worthington

23/01/08 "Huffington Post" -- - The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.

The former gang member and convert to Islam - whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a "known terrorist," who was "exploring a plan" to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city - was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil. Almost six years later, as he received his sentence, he was not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

While this is shocking enough in and of itself, Padilla's sentence - in what at least one perceptive commentator called "the most important case of our lifetimes" - is particularly shocking because it sends a clear message to the president of the United States that he can, if he wishes (and as he did with Padilla), designate a US citizen as an "enemy combatant," hold him without charge or trial in a naval brig for 43 months, and torture him - through the use of prolonged sensory deprivation and solitary confinement - to such an extent that, as the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty explained after spending 22 hours with Padilla, "What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being's mind."



As if this were not worrying enough, it was what happened after Padilla's 43-month ordeal that sealed the president's impunity to torture US citizens at will. When it seemed that his case was within reach of the US Supreme Court, the government transferred him into the US legal system, deposited him in a normal prison environment, dropped all mention of the "dirty bomb" plot, and charged him, based on his association with two alleged terrorist facilitators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, with participating in a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. When the case came to court last summer, the judge, Marcia Cooke, airbrushed Padilla's torture from history, insisting that it could not be discussed at all, and, after a trial regarded as farcical by many observers, Padilla and his co-defendants were duly found guilty.
17 years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla's three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it's difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the president and his advisors have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government's powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of "enemy combatants" who have not yet been identified.

For more on Jose Padilla and other US "enemy combatants," see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison.

I agree. 17 years and change is still too much to impose on the man, especially considering how flaky the evidence against him was in the first place.

I feel sure Padilla was in on 9/11 and they are keeping him locked up so he doesn't squeak

Most posters "get it," that anything that can be done to Jose Padilla can be done to us.

But there are a few who are into "the bastard got what's comin' to him" mode, apparently believing that the mere accusation of terrorism is enough to nullify a citizen's Constitutional rights. Most seem pretty stupid, with one poster apparently not aware that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.

but don't underestimate the numbers actually out there and willing to vote for anyone who will say Padilla got off lightly and should have been locked up for life, at least. The most depressing thing is that Democrat candidates aren't prepared to challenge such attitudes. Can't lose those "moderate" votes in the "centre"...

He should be in a mental institution, not a prison. He was crazy becore he bacame radicalized, not the other way around. Compared to real terrorists, he's a joke. The continued failure to get bin Laden is one reason little patsies like him get all the press.