Jose Padilla was arrested and accused in a very high-profile, public relations stunt in 2002 of planning to build a dirty bomb and detonate it in the United States in an alleged brazen attempt that convinced Americans that terrorists where pounding down the doors of America to come in and destroy this country.
Padilla, a low-level street gang member from Chicago, was cited by President Bush and the then Attorney General John Ashcroft as the lynch-pin in a network of alleged terror plots that the United States was steadily confronting, and it was the Padilla arrest and the arrest of a handful of other “terrorists” that were used to push Americans into believing that the United States should invade Iraq.
This week, we learn the truth about Padilla, just as we have learned the truth about other alleged terrorists. The arrest was a scam.
Padilla has been held illegally and in violation of his constitutional rights for more than five years on the claim that he was planning to build a dirty bomb.
But, the US government, once again, played the Bush shell game as they have been doing ever since the terrorism cases and terrorism charges were abused, distorted and manipulated. They changed the dynamics of the post-Sept. 11 terrorism response, redirecting it from Afghanistan and Pakistan where the terrorist ringleaders remain to this day, to Iraq. They began to arrest anyone rather than admit they are utter and pathetic failures in defending this country from the real terrorist threat.
When the Bush administration was forced to prove its phony claims against Padilla, what did they do in court after five years? They dropped the charges that Padilla was engaged in plans to build a dirty bomb. They dropped the terrorism charges they used to illegally hold him in jail for five years. Dropped.
Instead, the terrorism-hysteria-driven American government did what it has been doing ever since its failure to pursue the real terrorists, and they charged Padilla with something else. That something else is the absurd claim that somehow because Padilla supported the war against Russia in Chechnya and in Afghanistan, he is a terrorist. That sounds plausible if we were talking about terrorism training today. But the basis on which Padilla was charged falls in a sheet of paper the US government alleges they found in Afghanistan which proves Padilla was training and supporting rebel forces there in the early 1990s to liberate Chechnya from Russian oppression.
From the Washington Post: Padilla was arrested in 2002 for allegedly plotting a radiological “dirty bomb” attack, but prosecutors chose not to pursue those allegations in court here. But after a three-month trial, they convinced the jury that Padilla, 36, participated in a South Florida-based Al-Qaeda support cell that in the 1990s began to send money and people to wage holy war in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and Somalia.
The Bush administration did the same thing with Mohammed Salah, a Palestinian arrested and railroaded by Israel as a terrorist, forcing him to sign a confession in Hebrew and then putting him in jail for five years. He was released by the Israelis and returned to the US where he was left alone and was trying to rebuild his broken life, until Sept. 11, 2001. And a year later, Ashcroft, one of the most villainous demagogues the United States has ever seen, arrested and charged Salah with “terrorism.”
But what happened? During the trial, the terrorism charges against Salah were mysteriously dropped. He was accused of racketeering under a statue intended to go after the mafia who may not have committed crimes but were a part of a criminal conspiracy. He beat that phony charge, too. And all that they were left with in the phony terrorism assault was that Salah had allegedly “lied” during an unrelated civil trial involving an American boy killed while allegedly working with settlers in the West Bank, a case Israelis hailed as opening the door to fighting terrorism and that Palestinians have denounced as purely anti-Arab political hate.
Regardless, the point is that Salah may have been a member of Hamas in the early 1990s when he was arrested — may have been. But he wasn’t involved in Hamas since (and there has never been any evidence suggesting otherwise). So his involvement 17 years ago has now been projected into the future. Why? Because Bush and Ashcroft can’t find today’s terrorists.
And let’s forget about the fact that even if Salah was engaged in fighting Israel — which he was not — the fight with Israel is not related to the Al-Qaeda terrorism, although just like in Iraq, which is transforming into an Al-Qaeda training camp thanks to the US-led invasion, some elements of Al-Qaeda are pushing their way (slowly and not very successfully) into the Gaza Strip. Salah beat the terrorism charges because they were phony! He was sentenced to two years in prison for the minor perjury charge.
