Beyond all of the legal issues surrounding Jose Padilla’s detention since 2002, I’ve also been terribly worried about how he was living and how he was being treated. We got a partial window into his world today through Amy Goodman’s interview of his attorney on Democracy Now!:
AMY GOODMAN: What has Padilla’s detention been like on this brig?
ANDREW PATEL: It is — to talk about solitary confinement, it is — only begins — it’s the tip of the iceberg. He has been detained in a modern facility in a unit that has ten cells, five on each floor, each tier.
The other nine cells in the unit that he is on are empty. He is entirely alone.
He hears no sounds except the ventilation. He doesn’t even have — except when food is brought to him, he has no human contact.
He has primarily been monitored by cameras and electronically. Even when he is allowed out for recreation, he is in, essentially, a concrete box alone. So his contacts with other people of any kind has been limited to about 15 minutes a day.
I have to believe that there’s a lot more to the story than Patel has revealed so far or that, perhaps, Jose Padilla has shared with his attorneys. I trust we find out more as soon as possible.
Jose, even though you can’t see this, please know that millions of people around the world care about what happens to you. Your innocence or guilt isn’t the issue. Your status as a U.S. citizen and as a human being endowed with inalienable rights are what matter, and you deserve all the rights and protections of U.S. law. We hope you get a real Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, and perhaps a phone call to or from your mother and family.
There’s more — including a description of the only contact he has had with attorneys since 2002 — and, below the fold, a brief sniippet on his legal status that includes a reference to James Comey, the former Deputy Attorney General who “hired” Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the CIA Leak case:
AMY GOODMAN: How much have you seen — have you seen Jose Padilla?
ANDREW PATEL: Since we first got access to him, we have been able to see him pretty much as we needed to. Of course, we are in New York; he is in South Carolina, so there have been difficulties, but I have been able to see him in five or six weeks —
AMY GOODMAN: And when did you get access to him?
ANDREW PATEL: The day the government’s reply brief was due in the first cert round.
AMY GOODMAN: How long was that after his detention?
ANDREW PATEL: About two years.
AMY GOODMAN: He didn’t have attorney access for two years?
ANDREW PATEL: That’s correct. When he was first brought to New York as a material witness, classic arrest based on a warrant issued by a judge, Donna Newman was assigned to represent him. When the President signed the order on June 9, sending him to the military custody, we were denied access. In fact, we couldn’t even write to him. In the cert process, where the government asked the court to review the Second Circuit decision saying the President had no such authority, we asked the court to take the due process issue, including whether we could see Mr. Padilla or, more importantly, whether Mr. Padilla could see us.
Their reply was due on a given date at 3:00 in the afternoon, according to the court’s schedule. At 1:00, I received a call from the military saying that we would be getting access. At 2:00, the government had a press conference saying they were giving us access, and at 3:00, they filed a brief saying to the court that the court didn’t need to consider the due process issue, it was moot, and they actually cited to the web link to their press conference of an hour before. ….
About James Comey — and a bit more to give you a flavor of the legal issues discussed in this important interview today:
AMY GOODMAN: Now that he has moved from military detention and now will be tried in a civilian court, has what he said in military interrogation, will that be usable?
ANDREW PATEL: When Mr. Comey, Jim Comey, was the Deputy Attorney General, he acknowledged that any statements Mr. Padilla made while he was in custody were obtained in violation of his rights to counsel and that they could not be used in court.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Andrew Patel, one of Jose Padilla’s attorneys. Bill Goodman is with us also, Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. Can you talk about the broader significance of this? Were you surprised by Alberto Gonzales’s news conference yesterday, the announcement of the transfer from military to civilian courts?
BILL GOODMAN: Well, I was stunned. It was — here’s a situation where, really, an opinion written by Judge Luttig of the Fourth Circuit, who by the way was on the short list for a United States Supreme Court appointment, is really a paradigm. It’s a model for the destruction of the institution of the separation of powers in the United States and to give the President wide broad powers to detain anyone he wants without any process whatsoever. This opinion is what is at stake. This is what is on appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
And I have no doubt that now that they have charged Mr. Padilla with these crimes, this stale conspiracy, really, in my opinion, they’re going to move to dismiss the cert petition on the grounds that it’s moot. In my judgment, that borders on abuse of process by the Justice Department. What they are doing is manipulating the process in order to sustain an opinion that says the President can virtually shred the Constitution and manipulating the legal process in so doing and saying someone who had been held really in violation of constitutional principles, because he was such a danger to the United States, because of these allegations, now they’re irrelevant. It’s shocking. It’s an outrage.
AMY GOODMAN: What does it mean for someone else, how they get categorized as an enemy combatant? And then, does the whole process start again, because the challenging of the detention as enemy combatant will no longer be in court?
BILL GOODMAN: What it means is that someone to whom this happens — someone else to whom this happens will perhaps at some point be allowed access to an attorney, will raise the issue in the same way that Andy Patel has raised this on behalf of his client and will be faced with the precedent of Judge Luttig’s opinion in the Fourth Circuit as a huge obstacle to obtaining any due process whatsoever, and will then be forced to take it to the United States Supreme Court themselves someday, if the court wants to accept the case. I really think the Justice Department was very fearful that in this instance, the court was going to grant cert and undermine the position of the Fourth Circuit opinion.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to play an excerpt from the Supreme Court arguments in the case of Rumsfeld v. Padilla from April 2004. In the proceeding, the Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, questioned U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement over the extent of presidential power during wartime, and how it related to the Padilla case, as well as to the use of torture. ….
Read — or watch or listen to — all of today’s interview: “Why did the Bush Administration Hold Jose Padilla for 3 Years as an Enemy Combatant? No Mention of al Qaeda or Plot to Attack U.S. in Indictment”