constitutional rights

In federal court cases, it is illegal for the prosecution to go “judge shopping.” Federal prosecutors, however, did just that by maneuvering to have the case of alleged terrorist mastermind Jose Padilla heard before Judge Marcia G. Cooke. Why was the prosecution so confident Judge Cooke would do its bidding?

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(Written with Brad Jacobson. Part 4 of a series.)

“The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance," wrote philosopher John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice. In the case of Jose Padilla, the Justice Department made the veil opaque to the point of impenetrability. more »

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U.S. prisons have become the hothouses for growing hardened criminals and more than one Islamic extremist. Not unlike their counterparts in the Middle East, these young men live in poverty and filth. And like their “brothers” in the Middle East, they are often desperate, hopeless and filled with rage that could be channeled outward in acts condoned and even celebrated by radical Islam. Given the time and effort and large pool from which to choose, it’s surprising, however, how unsuccessful prison imams in the United States appear to have been in recruiting such vulnerable targets.

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Jose Padilla’s sentence was the final act in the government’s five-year sideshow of unconstitutional bait-and-switches and Kafkaesque legal procedures, all beginning with the announcement of Padilla’s arrest on June 10, 2002.

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The case of Jose Padilla, the first United States citizen in the “War on Terror” to have his constitutional rights stripped from him by a stroke of George W. Bush’s pen, is central to the question of whether Bush, CIA chief George Tenet and others lied when they said “the United States does not torture.”

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