Nashwan:
...Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.
The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.....
......Padilla was arrested at O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, after arriving on a flight from Pakistan. Initially, he was taken to New York and held as a "material witness," presumably to testify against others.
The following month, he was transferred to a military prison in South Carolina after Ashcroft announced that the government had determined that he was part of an unfolding terrorist plot to explode a radioactive dispersion device, or so-called dirty bomb.
Padilla's lawyers subsequently filed a writ of habeas corpus saying that he was being illegally held. The Justice Department responded by saying that the detention was a proper exercise of the president's wartime powers. A decision is pending before a federal appeals court in New York.
Padilla is obviously the test case for the President's "wartime powers" in this non-standard "new" war.
It's wrong that it is taking 3 years to go through the system but I think the point is that it is going through the system.
Note that Dinh doesn't think the Justice departement's stance on Padilla will survive the court challenge. If it doesn't, the problem will be solved. If it does survive, it's probably bound for the SC, which is also correct. Nobody said the legal system was perfect or fast.
Secondly, note that Mr. Padilla is NOT a law-abiding US citizen. He's suffering under the Patriot Act because he
admits to plotting with some of al-Qaeda's top leaders to kill hundreds of Americans. Padilla's Plan B was to set off a radioactive device known as a "dirty bomb" in Washington.
I have very little fear that I would suffer the same fate as Mr. Padilla simply because I don't plot with A-Q to kill other Americans.
In any event, Padilla is the test case and I have no doubt that eventually the correct solution will come through the courts.
