 Jose,
Interrupted
Forget
the Pledge of Allegiance. Forget Elizabeth Smart. Where in
the world is Jose Padilla?
Matt Taibbi
In
a sequence of events that should turn every American literally
white with terror before the awesome power of our media apparatus,
a former gang member-turned-would-be terrorist was dug up
out of a pit after being held illegally for a month, offered
to the entire world as public enemy number one for about ten
minutes, and then tossed back into purgatory, apparently to
be officially forgotten for the rest of eternity.
 Ask
anyone, even the people you're sitting with right now, what
associations come to mind when you mention the name Jose Padilla.
In 100 cases out of 100, the answer you'll get will run along
the following lines: terrorist, suspected Al-Qaeda member,
ringleader in a plot to explode a "dirty bomb" in Washington.
As for visual images, the only one ever offered for anyone
to recall later on was the notorious mugshot, a single grainy
picture of a clearly nonwhite person that on June 11th was
plastered on the front page of every major daily newspaper
in America, as a crude but chilling portrait of the Dark Threat
looming over our good society.
All of
this is the frightening result of the continuing union between
a ruthless, space-age propaganda machine and a pliant consumer
population with an attention span of about eight seconds.
Because the Padilla story will never be revisited, neither
the accusations we associate with his name, nor the emotional
effect of the mugshot image, will ever be undone. We all bought
the story-- but should we have?
Even
the most cursory review of the timeline of the Padilla story
reveals that, far from being a simple story of a foiled terrorist
plot, this was in fact a masterpiece of orchestrated propaganda,
a brilliant manipulation of the biography of a common criminal
for a variety of dramatic political objectives. From Willie
Horton to Iran-Contra to Watergate, the lessons of almost
every major political snow job of the past quarter-century
were mined to yield a bag of tricks used flawlessly and compellingly
for three short weeks.
Here
is a timeline of the Jose Padilla story, stretched out to
cover a period slightly longer than fifteen minutes:
May 8:
After returning from Pakistan, Padilla, an American of Puerto
Rican descent who now calls himself Abdullah al Muhajir, is
"detained" by the FBI. No charges are filed, but he is nonetheless
transferred to a jail in New York, where, in clear violation
of the law, he will remain in custody without a charge until
June 9.
No word
of Padilla's arrest is leaked to the media at this time, and
there appears to be no hurry to make the matter public. He
is simply an anonymous person rotting quietly behind bars.
But a few seemingly irrelevant events would soon coincide
to push Padilla to the surface.
The first
development was an earlier May 1 ruling by a New York Federal
Judge named Shira Scheindlin, who on that date released a
Jordanian-born college student named Osama Awadallah. Awadallah
had been held in jail for three months without a charge on
the grounds that he had lied to investigators about knowing
one of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Scheindlin ruled that "Relying
on the material witness statute to detain people who are presumed
innocent under our Constitution in order to prevent potential
crimes is an illegitimate use of the statute."
The judge's
ruling declared Minority Report-style policing illegal. In
order to detain someone, even as a witness, Scheindlin ruled
that the detention had to be in connection with a crime already
committed, not one that the suspect might commit in the future.
This
statute applied directly to Padilla, who, as fate would have
it, was being held within Scheindlin's jurisdiction. Whether
or not his case would be made public, it was fairly clear
that Padilla would eventually have to be moved.
The second
thing that took place was a May 30 announcement by John Ashcroft
that the Justice Department would now follow new rules in
determining how investigations into the lives of individuals
might occur. The new set of rules threw out the old standard
of "reasonable suspicion" of criminal activity, and allowed
agents to conduct fishing expeditions for up to a year into
the private lives of individuals.
The third
thing that happened was the emergence of a whistleblowing
FBI agent named Colleen Rowley, who on May 21 sent an open
letter to FBI Director Gary Mueller outlining a series of
bureaucratic oversights that led to a failure to pursue valid
leads on terrorist activity prior to September 11. Rowley
would eventually testify before Congress on June 6 and 7--
in other words, on the Thursday and Friday before news of
Padilla's arrest was made public.
What
Rowley was alleging was that American field intelligence agents
were working fine as is (among other things, Rowley described
her Minneapolis office's frantic attempts to obtain permission
to arrest would-be shoe-bomber Zacarias Moussaoui as early
as August, 2001) , and that the real security gaps were caused
by bureaucratic incompetence in the agency's upper echelons.
Her testimony, which made front-page headlines all across
America, directly contradicted the earlier assertions by Ashcroft
that what was needed were vastly expanded police powers of
the type he proposed in his May 30 announcement.
BEAST
readers may recall that at the end of that week of June 7,
and throughout that weekend of June 8-9, the Bush administration
briefly came under fire for apparently failing to act in the
face of serious terrorist threats last summer.
All of
that ended when, on June 10, John Ashcroft announced from
Moscow that the United States had Padilla in custody. On the
heels of accusations that it had previously failed to prevent
major acts of terrorism, the Bush administration was suddenly
announcing... that it just had prevented a major act of terrorism.
It was
significant that the foiled plot Ashcroft revealed involved
a weapon far worse than a jetliner crashing into a skyscraper;
the prevention of a radioactive "dirty bomb" explosion suddenly
turned, as Joseph Heller might have called it, the black eye
of Rowley into a big fat feather in the administration's cap.
In the blink of an eye, the Rowley story disappeared from
the newspapers.
It may
seem gratuitous to point out that just thirteen years before,
George W. Bush's father waved the face of a menacing-looking
black inmate named Willie Horton at voters at the very moment
his poll numbers seemingly approached the point of no return.
But I don't think it is. People like John Ashcroft know exactly
what they're doing when hand out a grainy mugshot of a convicted
Puerto Rican murderer to the national press, and announce
that this is the face that was plotting to nuke Washington.
Not the kind of thing that is going to inspire a reasoned
response from most middle-class Americans.
It also
may seem gratuitous to point out that a) Bush's father's administration
once withheld documents from Iran-Contra prosecutors on the
grounds that they would compromise national security b) Dick
Cheney has withheld documents pertaining to the Enron story
on the grounds that they would compromise national security,
and c) that Bush himself withheld what it said was proof of
Osama bin Laden's guilt in the Sept. 11 bombings, on the grounds
that it would compromise national security. But I don't think
so here, either.
On June
14, the Bush administration announced that Padilla-- an American
citizen-- would not be tried in a criminal court, or even
given a military tribunal. The reason? Evidence offered in
public might compromise national security. If it looks like
a duck, and acts like a duck, it's probably a duck-- and the
administration's decision not to try Padilla looked very much
like an excuse to avoid admission that there was not much
in the way of evidence against their suspect.
Padilla,
meanwhile, had been declared an "enemy combatant" by Bush
on June 9, and moved from New York to a military detention
center at the Charleston Naval Weapons center in South Carolina.
Soon after his detention became a public matter, the administration
issued a series of seemingly insane statements about their
intentions regarding their American suspect.
Donald
Rumsfeld came right and made a flat announcement: "We're not
interested in trying him at this time." Other Bush spokesmen
told reporters that Padilla would remain in jail "until we're
done with Al-Qaeda." Due process, the right to face one's
accuser, all of this was tossed out the window in this series
of alarmingly casual statements by Bush officials.
This
unprecedented rollback in civil rights scored scarcely a blip
in the national media, however. About the strongest statement
that the press could muster on the matter was a blase filler
line like this one at the end of a June 11 Reuters story:
"Civil
rights groups have criticized the way the government was treating
[Padilla]."
The lack
of uproar over Padilla's detention was presumably due to the
fact that the suspect himself appeared impossible to sympathize
with; it was hard to think of Padilla's experience applying
to any of us, since none of us were flying around the world,
meeting with Al-Qaeda officials, and plotting to explode radioactive
bombs.
Then
again, maybe Padilla wasn't, either. Just days after his detention
was made public, the government quietly leaked word through
a number of channels that the Padilla threat was maybe not
all it was cracked up to be.
On June
11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz even told CBS:
"I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly
loose talk."
A day
later, government officials admitted that they had no physical
evidence linking Padilla to a bomb plot-- no bomb materials
or even documented attempts to obtain bomb materials, no diagrams,
not even a chemistry textbook.
Soon
after that, it came out that most of the government's case
against Padilla rested on information given to them by Abu
Zubaydah, a former Al-Qaeda operative who had been feeding
U.S. investigators with a steady string of warnings and doomsday
predictions-- none of which ever came to pass-- ever since
his capture in late March. Zubaydah's status as a Guantanomo
songbird had become the stuff of such legend that even before
the news of the Padilla's arrest was made public, observers
began to question the information he was feeding us.
Even
a dumb reactionary glossy like Time magazine was confident
enough to be publicly skeptical of Zubdayah. Here is that
magazine's assessment of him on May 24, two weeks before the
Padilla story broke:
"How
do we know if he's telling us the truth? This is, after all,
Zubaydah's last dance: as long as he keeps tossing out things,
stringing us along, he's useful, privileged, treated with
respect by his interrogators, like a Cold War era captured
agent. Once that's no longer true, his life will turn very,
very nasty. Zubaydah has every reason to lie, to throw his
captors off the trail, to sow fear and doubt, to poke the
U.S. so that his al-Qaeda fellows can observe how we react."
The Bush
administration was now enthusiastically taking the word of
admitted Al-Qaeda operatives to throw Americans in jail.
The flimsiness
of the case against Padilla did not make the papers much.
Not that it would have mattered. They could have given both
sides of that story equal time, and Padilla still would have
lost out. "Case Against Padilla Called 'Circumstantial'" is
no match, effect-wise, for "Suspect in Dirty-Bomb Plot Held."
Once you let a genie like that out of the bottle, you can't
ever get it back in, even if you want to. And the national
press made it clear that nobody wanted to.
The political
benefits provided to the Bush administration by the Padilla
business were both obvious and not so obvious. The immediate
benefit, obviously, was in defusing the Rowley story. But
a more abstract benefit was Padilla's usefulness in providing
another excuse to expand police powers. I would bet the Rigas
family's offshore holdings that before this year is over,
the Bush administration will use the Padilla story to make
an explicit connection between urban American street gangs
(read: poor nonwhite criminals) and terrorism.
The mere
thought of this should send chills up every black or Hispanic
spine in America. After 9/11, the government now has the power,
the mandate, and the obvious inclination to make the drug
war look like a silly frat prank. And as long as every network
and 500 newspapers are lining up to help the cause, they will
be unstoppable.
Where
do you draw the line? How do you define the difference between
a foreign enemy and an American with rights? The answer is
that, after Jose Padilla, there is no line anymore-- and no
one now can really pinpoint when and how it disappeared, since
none of our journalists covered its passing.
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