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The
War at Home
Will a 'Dirty Bomb' Kill Civil Rights?
BY
ELIZABETH (BETITA) MARTEZ
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More than a thousand non-citizens living in the U.S. have been secretly
detained since Sept. 11. Many remain imprisoned with no legal rights,
even though they have not been charged with a crime. Now concern about
the rights of U.S. citizens has leaped onto the agenda with reports of
a so-called “dirty bomb.
Federal agents arrested Jose Padilla, a Brooklyn-born Latino who had converted
to Islam and taken the name Abdullah al-Muhajir, in Chicago last May 8.
The day before he would have been released under laws protecting U.S.
citizens from being held indefinitely, the FBI still could not put together
a case against him. President Bush then approved his being reclassified
as “an enemy combatant.”
Based on that classification, Padilla is now in military custody, incommunicado,
at a South Carolina naval base. He has been denied all legal rights extended
to U.S. citizens, such as the right to see a lawyer and due process. The
government has no plan to try him.
Authorities said he was arrested because an imprisoned al Qaeda leader
had “provided information” that Padilla was planning to set
off a “dirty bomb” in this country. But many questions have
been raised about the whole scary story. No evidence existed that a bombing
was imminent or that Padilla actually had any radioactive materials. TIME
magazine reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft had said “wrongly”
that a dirty bomb can cause mass death.
The timing of that announcement, made with triumphant fanfare more than
a month after the actual arrest, also raised eyebrows. Several officials,
the New York Times reported, said “the Justice Department was eager
to showcase the Padilla case after weeks in which the FBI had been battered
in Congress for missing potential warning signs of the Sept. 11 attack.”
Another Times article headlined “Neutralizing Bush Critics”
said, “Today’s disclosure may well galvanize Americans once
again behind the president and the notion that the country remains at
war.” Bush, who had just announced his Homeland Security plan, could
use that support.
The Padilla case is not the first involving a U.S. citizen. John Walker
Lindh, the 21-year old Californian captured while with a Taliban unit
fighting in Afghanistan, is a U.S. citizen. But he was never designated
an “enemy combatant,” has well-paid lawyers conducting his
defense and will be tried in federal court, not held indefinitely by the
military like Jose Padilla. As some have noted, he is white and from a
well-to-do family compared to Padilla, a Latino street youth who had done
prison time before he converted.
Jose Padilla’s case points in a threatening new direction. As TIME
magazine commented, “...history may judge the administration’s
legal treatment of Padilla—locking him up indefinitely with no plan
to try him—as more alarming than Padilla himself.” Now we
know U.S. citizens can be declared “enemy combatants” on very
shaky evidence and thereby denied constitutional rights. The question
is: who will be next? Why not anti-war protesters?
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Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, who has published six books on
social justice struggles in the Americas, is an associate editor of War
Times.
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