Padilla’s dirty bomb charge lives on in Gitmo

Remember when Jose Padilla was arrested at O’Hare airport in May 2002? A few weeks later, then Attorney General John Ashcroft made a big show of interrupting a trip to Moscow to hold a press conference: 

I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism. We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or “dirty bomb,” in the United States. 

But the dirty bomb charge didn’t stick. After being held without any charges for three years in military custody, Padilla, an American citizen, was transferred to civilian court in 2005 and formally charged with the much less heinous crime of conspiracy. The Feds just couldn’t back up their contention that Padilla posed a grave threat to national security.

Deborah Sontag’s must-read about the flimsy evidence the government intends to present at Padilla’s criminal trial later this month – even for just the conspiracy charge – is chilling. They’re relying largely on tapped conversations to prove their case, yet not all of them are of Padilla and in none of them does he discuss violent plots.

And the government has still gone ahead with charging a detainee at Guantanamo with conspiring to detonate a dirty bomb with Padilla, the same charge the government couldn’t make stick earlier.

That Mr. Mohamed faced dirty bomb charges and Mr. Padilla does not speaks to the central difference between being a terrorism suspect in Guantánamo and a criminal defendant charged with terrorism offenses in the United States….

David Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University and author of books on terrorism and civil liberties, sees the difference between the two systems more critically: “What this says clearly is that they feel that they can get away with using tainted evidence in the military commission system that they can’t use in the criminal court system.”

We’ll, of course, be watching the case – if it even goes forward. Padilla is undergoing evaluation this week as to whether he is mentally fit to stand trial. His lawyers contend that his long period of detainment and harsh interrogation have left him mentally damaged.