When suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla was whisked from the criminal justice system to military custody in June 2002, it was done for a key purpose – to break his will to remain silent. For a month, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been questioning Padilla in New York City under the rules of the criminal justice system. They wanted to know about his alleged involvement in a plot to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in the US. Padilla had nothing to say. Now, military interrogators were about to turn up the heat.... In essence, experts say, the US government was trying to break Padilla's silence by plunging him into a mental twilight zone... The Soviets used isolation and sensory deprivation to identify and discredit political dissidents. US prisoners of war confessed to nonexistent war crimes in the Korean War after similar treatment.
In other words, the U.S. Government attempted to torture a confession out of a U.S. Citizen when he refused to admit to a crime that didn't occur. An admission which would have been in the political interest of the Administration, as it would justify the fear of a nuclear threat from Al'Queda, and demonstrate that the Justice Department was putting a stop to it. Paradoxically, the threat from this particular sort of weapon is mostly psychological. If the Administration were interested in defusing it as a real threat they would do so by educating people about the actual effects of such an attack rather than making misleading statements.
Recall this statement by a judge who was on the Republican Party's short list for Supreme Court nomination until he committed political suicide by issuing this ruling: The government surely must understand... its actions have left... the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years... by mistake...
Yes, it appears he was held "by mistake." He was held, in my opinion, illegally. And he was destroyed... "It is clear from examining Mr. Padilla that [the point of irreversible psychological damage] was surpassed."
The actual evidence against him seems to consist entirely of this form. Personally, I think a star recruit would have had more to say on this form. A star recruit probably would have indicated more religious knowledge, might have had some military experience, might have listed a skill other than carpentry, might have indicated an affiliation with an Islamic political organization, might have had more to say about their plans for jihad. Clearly, he was recruited by Islamic militants in Afghanistan. Whether that means he planned to wage war against the United States is utterly unproven by anything that I have seen. Certainly, the U.S. ought to have taken an interest in anyone, but particularly someone in the U.S., who had filled out such a form. But what ensued seems exactly the sort of criminal excesses that overzealous cops fueled by paranoid fantasies always indulge in when the checks and balances are lifted. This seems precisely why this sort of detention and treatment are supposed to be illegal. It is now beyond a doubt that they have not only shredded our Constitution in this case, but they have done so for almost nothing. Its also worth noting that defense lawyers think the government might be lying about the form. The data form was not analyzed for fingerprints until last year, and the defense has theorized that Padilla handled it while he was held as an enemy combatant. There is little other hard evidence involving Padilla. Thousands of hours of FBI wiretap intercepts from 1993 to 2001 include numerous conversations of Hassoun and Jayyousi, but Padilla's voice is heard on only seven.
They really did shred the Constitution over a paranoid fantasy... | 
