Category: The Dish

I’m going to read the legal analyses carefully before commenting substantively further. But I will take this moment to observe a couple of salient facts. The verdict is not on the original charge of plotting a dirty bomb, and it was this charge that had Padilla arrested and detained without charges and allegedly tortured for three years in solitary. The question of Padilla’s innocence or guilt on a much lesser charge is therefore less salient than the way in which he was treated by the government. That remains a travesty; and the government should be relieved its clumsy handling of the case did not lead to his acquittal. It is also important to recall that Jose Padilla was interrogated in a fashion to render his mental capacity to stand trial a question. He claimed torture, and was sequestered without being charged for three years in solitary confinement. The result was a broken man, according to Time magazine:

The government itself cited the affidavit of a psychiatrist for the defense, Dr. Angela Hegarty, who said that Mr. Padilla did not understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him and that he suffered "impairment in reasoning" as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder "complicated by the effects of prolonged isolation." Mr. Padilla’s lawyers said he opposed this request that his competency be evaluated. Dr. Hegarty, one of two mental health professionals who examined him, said Mr. Padilla was "fearful of being thought of as crazy." She described him as "hypervigilant," his eyes darting about, his face twitching into grimaces, his "startle response" on constant high alert.

"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

Another piece of context: a key DVD of interrogation evidence was "lost" by the government:

The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared “enemy combatant” under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.

But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla’s mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency—which had custody of the evidence—was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.

The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government’s highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. “This is the kind of thing you hear when you’re litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi,” said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of Padilla. “It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused.”

Padilla was mixed up with many unsavory characters. He was and is an Islamist. But the manner in which he was detained and prosecuted is a terrifying glimpse of the fragility of the West’s system of justice in a war on terror. I’ll comment further on the verdict and case when I’ve had time to absorb the details. Stay tuned.

Radomir, Bulgaria, 2 pm.

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A religious right? Or a barbarism? There’s an interesting court case involving circumcision in Oregon.

Stay tuned. But the best recent summary of the case can be found in the Christian Science Monitor here. It tells you all you need to know in assessing the coming news. Money quote:

This is a part of the war on terror the Bush administration would rather keep quiet. But details are emerging. What they reveal is the aggressive – and at times, ruthless – pursuit of intelligence information, and the selective public release of some of that intelligence when it serves the administration’s goals.

"I get it. I get that she has been reaching out to all sides on Iraq. I’m a pragmatic man, but you have to be vigilant about pragmatism. I wanted to say, ‘Hillary, let’s have a line in titanium that you will not cross,’" –  Nick Salamone, whose new play, "Hillary Agonistes" is now playing.

Brink Lindsey notices another drastic evolution from 1998 – this time on Iran. 9/11 changed everything. The question we need to ask and answer is: how much should it change? Cheney does not seem to have reflected on that more than once.

"I get older. They stay the same age." Dazed and Confused.

Greg Djerejian has a very helpful analysis of Tony Cordesman’s expert assessment of the situation in Iraq. Here’s Cordesman:

There is a real opportunity that did not exist at the start of the year. What is critical to understand, however, is that while the surge strategy has had value in some areas, much of this progress has not [been] the function of the surge strategy, US planning, or action by the Maliki government. In fact, the "new" strategy President Bush announced in January 2007 has failed in many aspects of its original plan… Without the unplanned uprising by the Sunni tribes, the US simply did not have enough forces to carry out the present level of operations if it had had to rely solely on the real-world capability of the official Iraqi Security forces.

And will the Sunni uprising endure? Only if the Maliki government extends an olive branch. And that’s unlikely:

The almost universal criticism of Maliki’s office during a recent trip to Iraq showed that it is seen as too closely tied to the sectarian cleansing effort in Baghdad and south Baghdad, as involved in freeing JAM and Shiite detainees, as refusing to work with the Sunni tribes out of fear they will gain power and as refusing to bring Sunni fighters into local security forces and the police for the same reason.

So we have one small stroke of luck – which looks like collapsing within a few months, absent a major shift in the Baghdad government, which is teetering on total collapse. Greg concludes:

Look, what this Administration, and its allies, simply can’t wrap their heads around is that the war is, for all intensive purposes, already lost, and we must now focus like a laser on containing the damage via region-wide crisis management and diplomacy. 

I fear he’s right. But read them both.

It was before the 2006 election day. But Bush decided against a November surprise.

"Colonel Sean MacFarland, commander of the First Armored Division’s First Brigade Combat Team (1-1 AD) says that Sinjar "feels like Paris in 1944." Parents and children line the streets when U.S. patrols pass by, while Yezidi clerics pray for the welfare of U.S. forces. More even than Paris, in fact, Sinjar feels like Iraq as Dick Cheney predicted it would be…" – Lawrence Kaplan, TNR, October 2006.

"In scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone, bodies lay in the street covered in blankets amid the shattered ruins of clay-built houses. The buildings, mostly one-storey structures, had been completely razed. "This is a catastrophe that cannot be described in words," said the governor of Nineveh province, Duraid Kashmoula, adding that more than 200 people were killed and 300 wounded.

He said he believed the toll could rise as many were believed buried beneath the rubble that bulldozers were trying to shift. Many people were listed as missing. Kashmoula declared the area a disaster zone and asked for central government help. When he toured the scene he was besieged by people pleading for help in finding loved ones. "The scale of the destruction is unimaginable," said another visitor to the scene, a regional government official…

In the aftermath of the blast, authorities imposed a total curfew in the Sinjar area, which is close to the Syrian border." – Daily Mirror, yesterday.

(Hat tip: Ben Wasserstein.)