Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Jose Padilla, Trial numba 2

Jose Padilla's trial. This is a very important case for the obvious reasons of exposing the conditions of Gitmo, and the status of "enemy combatants." Now I know plenty of like minded folks who are paying attention to this case. So I want to look at this from a little bit different perspective. Lets assume he's guilty. Which is a very real possibility. This is not a nice individual we are talking about here. He's not exactly the innocent victim. As a child of 15 he was convicted of murder, he might really be a terrorist. So again were going to assume he that he's guilty, yup he was planning on detonating a dirty bomb in the middle of Chicago, or some other major city. So we catch this terrorist, chuck his ass into gitmo, torture him or at least put him into some extremely inconsiderate circumstances, total isolation, no lawyers, no visitors, can't even leave his cell without those huge headphones and blacked out goggles. He confesses all the terrible things he was planning, great. Oh except you can't use any of that stuff you found out because you did it in illegal ways. Plus you don't really know that any of his confessions are true so they aren't even useful for the intelligence community. So after a few years you decide to actually give him a trial. But what happens. Most of your evidence get thrown out because it was gathered illegally. You can't put the guy on stand because he'd talk about what you did to him. Oh sure you can probably get him on a lesser charge of something, but if you wanted to take him down you would have been much better off just doing it the legal way in the first place. Unless of course you don't really think he's guilty.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK. Let me get this straight. Jose Padilla is a terrorist. Convicted of murder at 15. He was caught planning on detonating a dirty bomb in the middle of a major U.S. City.

A trial??

Have we learned nothing from 9/11??

Gitmo is too good for him!

Kilgore Trout said...

Yes a trial. In theory at least thats one of the things that makes us a "civilized" country. If you think that torture is too good than is to too much to assume your calling for death without a trial? If we kill people without a trail, then who are we to call them terrorists?

As it stands our repeal of Habeas Corpus puts us back to a court system unseen since 1679, although the premise of Habeas Corpus goes back to 1305. So you can see why I previously used the word civilized in quotations when describing the US.

If we want to defeat terrorism we need to show the people of the world a better way. We need to be the guiding light to all things good and just, we need to be as close to a utopia as we can so that people will want to emulate us. If the majority of people want to live in a country like ours, then they will fight back against terrorism in their own nations, once terrorism is looked down on by their community then it will be defeated. As long as we keep proving the terrorists right when they call us the white devil then their power will continue to expand.