Padilla Lawyer: Charge Him or Release Him

[UpInArms]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5152160,00.html

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A lawyer for Jose Padilla, an American accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ``dirty bomb,'' went before a federal appeals court Tuesday and demanded the U.S. government either charge his client with a crime or set him free.

But a Bush administration lawyer told the court that the president must have authority to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists who come to the United States intent on killing civilians.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert suspected of being an al-Qaida operative, was seized in 2002 after flying from Pakistan to Chicago on what authorities said was a scouting mission for a plot to set off a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material. Padilla also is suspected of planning to blow up apartment buildings in several cities by filling them with natural gas.

President Bush declared Padilla an ``enemy combatant,'' a designation that allows the military to hold someone indefinitely without charges. Padilla is in the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., and has been held for the past three years.

<snip>

Patel later told reporters that the government should ``put up or shut up - it's that simple.''

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[fob]

1. Upperdown vote! He deserves an upperdown vote, don't he?

If I were his lawyer that's the tack I would take.

[tubbacheez]

2. Yup. That's essentially the "put up or shut up" argument.

I'm all for putting proven terrorists on ice. But we have a process for proving these things.


I think it's called "due process".

[fob]

4. Due process, isn't that one of our "freedoms" that "they" hate us for?

bush*s answer, destroy the "freedom". :crazy:

[tubbacheez]

5. Shrub actually is more about selectively applying freedom.

What he destroys is any sense of equality. He destroys equal access to freedom. His favored classes get all the freedom they want. His disfavored groups get none.

[fob]

6. Call it by any other name but it sounds like destruction to me

nt

[tubbacheez]

7. I agreed with you. It is clearly a destruction of some kind.

I guess it's a matter of perspective.

To a neutral third party, he's destroying equality and creating inequality in its place.

If I were a person getting the short end of the stick, he's destroying MY freedom.



Either way, it's destruction.

[fob]

8. Agreed. It's all bush* knows beyond greed.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. In the words of Mr. Patel

I may be the first lawyer to stand here and say I'm asking for my client to be indicted by a federal grand jury.