Crimes of the 11th Circuit—Four years of torture isn’t enough

Let’s set a few names down for the historical record, shall we? Joel F. Dubina, Chief Judge, U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and William H. Prior, Judge, U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, two men, two cruel, cowardly, and callous men, whose names should live in quiet infamy. On Sept. 19, these two men issued a ruling in the case of Jose Padilla, a man sentenced to seventeen years in prison for “supporting Islamic terrorism overseas,” a conviction based largely on the fact that Padilla filled an application form to attend to a terrorist camp (Padilla never made the trip). In the security of their chambers, the two judges decided that seventeen years for filling out an application form wasn’t enough, and they upped the sentence.

Padilla’s real crime, of course, was not being guilty of the wild charges originally filed against him by the scalp- and headline- hunting Bush Administration. Padilla was originally accused of planning to detonate a “dirty bomb” that would scatter radioactive matter over an American city, a massive lie on the part of the purportedly Christian Attorney General John Ashcroft, who apparently forgot about the part about not bearing false witness. When evidence to back up Ashcroft’s hysterical lies failed to materialize, Padilla was declared an “enemy combatant.” Ashcroft’s gang locked him away in solitary confinement, denied him his constitutional rights, tortured and harassed him mercilessly, and then converted him into a “normal” prisoner when their disgusting abuse was about to be brought before the Supreme Court. Padilla was brought before a district court and convicted of filling out an application and talking on the telephone. For this he was given seventeen years, but for Dubina and Prior, it wasn’t enough.

“History will judge us harshly,” said John Ashcroft, in one of his more lucid moments, and so it will. And I hope, when the crimes against justice of what appear to be the “9/11 decades” are written, the names of Joel Dubina and William Prior will be remembered as men who corrupted their country, their offices, and themselves, in the pursuit of a petty and vulgar revenge against a poor man who committed a few minor crimes but was the victim of many major ones.

Afterwords
Glenn Greenwald discusses the Padilla atrocity here. A CNN story on Padilla’s conviction is here. According to the story, Padilla’s conviction turned on testimony by a fingerprint “expert” claiming that an application form obtained by the CIA* in Afghanistan had Padilla’s fingerprints on it. “The al Qaeda application virtually sealed his fate,” according to Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law. “It was like putting a duffle bag with severed heads on the table.” Remind me never to attend the George Washington University School of Law.