Never Mind

More than three years have passed since Jose Padilla stepped off an airplane in Chicago and into limbo. Announcing Padilla's arrest by federal agents, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft declared (in Moscow, of all places) that he had conspired with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" and was being held as an enemy combatant. In the upside-down world of the Bush Administration, that simple designation enabled the government, solely on the President's say-so, to hold Padilla incommunicado, unable to communicate with his family or even a lawyer. Forever. More than two years after Padilla's disappearance, then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey blithely told a press conference that yes, they had evidence that Padilla was a bad person who planned to blow up apartment buildings by stopping up gas pipes and he would go to trial - eventually.

Now, in a move worthy of Saturday Night Live's Emily Litella, the government last week looked into the camera, smiled, and said "Never mind."

Padilla was finally indicted on vague charges of conspiring to "murder, maim and kidnap" Americans overseas, with no mention whatsoever of all those sensational accusations. All that stuff about dirty bombs, apartment buildings, and even al Qaeda was now, in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "irrelevant."

Irrelevant? Padilla was locked up for three and a half years with no charges. The only "trial" he received was a pair of splashy news conferences at which wild allegations were tossed around. Padilla was demonized in the public eye with exactly zero opportunity to defend himself. And now all that is deemed merely "irrelevant?"

The Padilla case has rankled a lot of people for a long time. It's just plain wrong that anyone, particularly an American citizen, can be just plucked off the street and made to disappear into an American prison without charges, without a trial, and without end. Indeed, it cannot be a coincidence that the indictment comes as the Supreme Court was about to take up the case, with the likelihood that the Court would order the government to either try Padilla or release him.

And yet this is only a microcosm of the much larger and more frightening practices of holding unilaterally-declared "enemy combatants" without any trial or charges at all. Add to that the recent revelations of secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe (Poland, Romania and Hungary, to be exact) the winking export of prisoners to torture-friendly countries, and the obscene White House drive to stop a bill banning American torture. Indeed, there are rumblings that the earlier hysterical charges were left out of the Padilla indictment because the information was reportedly tortured out of two al Qaeda operatives.

What is happening in our country? Has America really been perverted from the land of liberty into the land of don't-get-on-our-bad-side-or-else-we'll-make-you-disappear-and-pull-out-your-fingernails-just-for-good-measure? Even if we do eventually manage to destroy al Qaeda and other terrorist groups by using such tactics, we will have effectively sold our national soul to the devil.