Well, it’s Monday morning and let me get right down to work. The question of the day is whether or not the FBI possibly dropped the ball in not following up a request from the Russian government to check out why Tamerlan Tsarnaev wanted to spend six months in Russia.
For those of you who have just emerged from spending last week at a Buddhist retreat—in which case you definitely had a better week than the rest of us—Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers who put a bang into the Boston Marathon, wasn’t working, wasn’t going to school, and had a wife and infant. So the FBI looked into the matter, and went to the house to ask, presumably, “hey, you’re not a terrorist, are you, Buddy?” And he said, “Nah, who, me?”
(Sorry, been a while since I’ve written any dialogue—wanted to see if I still could….)
Well, that was absolutely the right answer, so the FBI went home, turned on the TV, and forgot the whole thing. Now, some of our good senators—that loveable bunch of nearly all white guys who squelched background checks last week—are raising the question. Did the FBI blow it?
Gentlemen, skip the investigation, save yourselves the dough (or better, send it to me…). Here is your answer:
Duhhhhhhh….
It’s right up there with the 20 or so Saudi Arabians who were so interested in flight school, in flying the plane but had not interest in getting it down. Or the immigration people, who months after 9/11 authorized one of the terrorists to continue to stay in the US.
OK, let me proceed to the next issue (wow, working at this pace, I’ll have the deficit whittled down by the weekend….). Should we hold the younger brother as an “enemy combatant?”
Well, you know who’s coming down where on this issue. The Republicans say yes; the Democrats say no. Now then, what’s my answer? Well, let’s rephrase the question: is it justified, in this case, to suspend the 800-year old right of habeas corpus?
The New York Times has already quoted an official who says he’s not going to “Mirandize”—and I’m surprised the Times let that get by—Dzhokhar, something that is, apparently, now constitutional. But calling him an enemy combatant puts him in the same status as all those prisoners in Guantanamo, with presumably the same stuff directed at him as at the prisoners in Cuba.
“Hey,” you say, “this kid KILLED four people, maimed over 150, and spread terror over the entire city of Boston. Of course he’s an enemy combatant!”
OK—but be careful, driving down that road; I give you the case of José Padilla, our very own Puerto Rican Taliban.
Or not—just a guy of Puerto Rican descent who grew up in Brooklyn but was arrested in Chicago and charged with some serious stuff—traveling to Afghanistan to work with al-Qaeda, planning to stage attacks in the US, and finally plotting to build and detonate a “dirty bomb,” an explosive containing radioactive material. So for three years, Padilla was held as an enemy combatant, where, in his version, this was done to him:
Padilla alleged that he was subjected to prolonged isolation; deprivation of light; exposure to prolonged periods of light and darkness, including being “periodically subjected to absolute light or darkness for periods in excess of twenty- four hours”; extreme variations in temperature; sleep adjustment; threats of severe physical abuse; death threats; administration of psychotropic drugs; shackling and manacling for hours at a time; use of “stress” positions; noxious fumes that caused pain to eyes and nose; loud noises; withholding of any mattress, pillow, sheet, or blanket; forced grooming; suspensions of showers; removal of religious items; constant surveillance; incommunicado detention, including denial of all contact with family and legal counsel for a 21-month period; interference with religious observance; and denial of medical care for “serious and potentially life-threatening ailments, including chest pain and difficulty breathing, as well as for treatment of the chronic, extreme pain caused by being forced to endure stress positions.”
– United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, May 2012.[1]
Nice, hunh? Well, for three years lawyers wrangled about the whole thing, and finally it was decided: Padilla had to be tried as a civilian. And then the government finally had to charge him, and guess what? Well, let Democracy Now tell you the story:
There is no mention in the indictment of Padilla's alleged plot to use a dirty bomb in the United States. There is also no mention that Padilla ever planned to stage any attacks inside the country. And there is no direct mention of Al-Qaeda. Instead the indictment lays out a case involving five men who helped raise money and recruit volunteers in the 1990s to go overseas to countries including Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and Kosovo. Padilla, in fact, appears to play a minor role in the conspiracy. He is accused of going to a jihad training camp in Afghanistan but his lawyers said the indictment offers no evidence he ever engaged in terrorist activity."[26]
Oh, so I guess they were wrong. So sorry! Here’s what a guy named Andy Worthington had to say:
[Seventeen] years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla's three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it's difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the president and his advisers have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government's powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of 'enemy combatants' who have not yet been identified.
Right—we have or we think we have a video of Tsarnaev putting a backpack with a bomb right in front of an eight-year old boy. That’s pretty hard to defend.
Which may be my point—does anyone think that Tsarnaev is not going to prison? Of course not. My question is should we throw out our constitutional rights to get information through torture, information which most experts say is unreliable?
Answer: no.
Well, quite a morning’s work!
