How do we handle these Terrorists legally? I brought this up yesterday, and UPI gives an answer today.
DETAIN ACCUSED TERRORISTS INDEFINITELY?
Human rights expert Douglass Cassel says the federal government appears to be relying on a 60-year-old court case to justify holding Jose Padilla on suspicion he planned to explode a "dirty" bomb in the United States.
The 32-year-old Padilla, also known as Abdullah al Muhajir, has been in U.S. custody at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., since his arrest Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8.
He is suspected of engaging in a conspiracy to obtain radioactive material and explode it with the aid of a conventional bomb. Federal authorities have designated him as an "unlawful combatant" and turned him over to the military for detention.
Cassel, director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University, says Padilla's custody transfer from the Justice Department to detention by the military in South Carolina appears to be a "test run" to set him up for indefinite detention.
He cites a 1942 case involving eight German saboteurs, one of whom was a U.S. citizen. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered them tried by a military commission and the U.S. Supreme Court said it did not matter that one was a U.S. citizen because he was working for the German government.
Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was born in the Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Chicago, had been returning to the United States from Pakistan when he was arrested. He is believed a member of the al Qaida militant group.
FBI Director Robert Mueller says the conspiracy was in its very early stages and there is no evidence Padilla had acquired a dirty bomb. Nor is there evidence al Qaida had settled on a target.
-- Should accused terrorists be tried as criminals in court, or as unlawful combatants in a military tribunal?
-- President Bush said U.S. citizens should not be subjected to military jurisdiction, but if Padilla wasn't, he most likely would have been released by now in a criminal court. Should he be detained. |
