08/21/07 – Warren Richey – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio, 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, KAOS959.com.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm joined again on the phone by Warren Ritchie from the Christian Science Monitor.
Welcome to the show, Warren.
Yeah, good to be with you.
It's good to have you back on the show.
The Padilla case, you're one of the few, as far as I can tell, reporters who actually covered the case, who actually went down to Miami and covered the trial.
How much of the trial did you actually get to sit through overall, do you think?
Well, I don't know.
I missed a lot of the middle parts, but I don't know.
I got most of the government case, and the defense was for Padilla.
Of course, he didn't put on any defense, but I think I got the important parts.
Did you think that was strange that they didn't put on any defense?
Well, of course, now he's convicted, so it's easy to second-guess that decision.
I think that they felt confident going in that they had made their case.
Essentially, their case was that the government hadn't proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Padilla was – I mean, if you actually look at the charges, they were quite substantial that he was plotting with members of a terrorist group to kidnap, maim, and murder people overseas.
That's the charge, a broad conspiracy, and there wasn't evidence of specific plans to do that.
The government's theory in the case was quite broad.
Essentially, if you go to the training camp in Afghanistan, you are criminally liable for all of the things that al-Qaeda stands for, all of the terror activities that al-Qaeda stands for.
It's quite a broad theory, and it worked because he's convicted on very, very little evidence.
So it is a substantial victory for the government because it suggests that they can get a conviction by raising questions about terrorism and not necessarily showing specific ties to specific acts of terror.
But it may be enough just to be around terrorists because even the question of whether he was at the al-Faruq camp in Afghanistan was never firmly established.
There is the main piece of evidence with the Mujahideen data form with his fingerprints on it.
Now, the defense attacked the Mujahideen data form by using the government's own experts who noted that, well, it wasn't clear when the fingerprints were placed on the form, and if Padilla had filled out the form, why weren't his fingerprints on the inside pages?
Why were they only on the outside?
But anyway, you know all the evidence.
Well, let me stop you there because I want to go over some of this in a little more detail.
First of all, as far as the defense not presenting one, this is something that lawyers do sometimes, you know, from time to time at trials, right, is they think they did such a great job on cross-examination that they want to act in front of the jury like, oh, we're so confident they didn't prove a thing, there's no way you're going to convict my client, go right ahead.
That's basically the gamble that they're taking, right, in not trying to defend him?
Well, yeah, but it's based on more than just a gamble or a strategy.
You have a right in the United States to be free from the government sort of slapping you in irons and throwing you in jail.
The government has a high burden if it wants to do that, and that high burden is to prove to a jury of your peers beyond a reasonable doubt that you've done the crime that they say you've done.
Now, there's tremendous irony in this case because Mr. Padilla was held in military custody without any charge or any opportunity to know what the government was alleging about him prior to his being shifted into the criminal justice system.
And so there's a whole aspect of the Padilla case that raises an entirely different set of issues, and in fact, even larger issues than came up in the criminal case.
A lot of people say, oh, Padilla just got his day in court in Miami.
Well, in fact, that wasn't his day in court in Miami.
Even if he had been acquitted, it wouldn't have been his day in court in Miami because there is this pending question that may never be resolved.
Can the government do what had happened, what it had done to Padilla earlier?
Can it do that?
And that question remains open.
Well, not really.
I mean, they passed the Military Commissions Act, right?
The Supreme Court said you can't do this unless Congress says it's okay, and then Congress passed a law and said, go ahead.
Well, Congress, the Military Commissions Act relates to people at Guantanamo.
It defines who can be classified as an enemy combatant in the future, right?
It says that people can be classified as an enemy combatant in the future.
Yes, it does.
But it's an open question whether the circumstances in which Padilla was arrested and detained and questioned, in fact, are constitutional.
This goes back to the Hamdi case back in 2004, I believe, when the Supreme Court ruled that Yasser Hamdi could be detained as an enemy combatant as long as he was given some form of due process to challenge his detention.
Right, he got one habeas corpus hearing and then they let him go.
Well, he never got that habeas corpus hearing.
Oh, right, he was supposed to get one.
He never got the hearing, so the government never had to show its proof in a court.
What he got was an agreement from the government that we'll let you go, and in return he agreed not to sue the government for his treatment.
So that case was resolved in that way.
Now, there are people who say that there's a big difference between the Yasser Hamdi case.
Hamdi, if you recall, was captured in Afghanistan with a rifle.
Padilla was detained as he stepped off an airplane at an airport in Chicago.
He was not armed.
But you never know, of course, the assumption was that he was coming to the United States to carry out an attack.
But Padilla, unlike Hamdi, was not in Afghanistan at the time that he was captured.
He was not carrying a weapon.
So he wasn't on a sort of foreign battlefield.
Instead, he's a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.
He was taken into custody.
And then a month after, he was held for a month as a material witness.
And then after that month, at exactly the time that the courts were asking the government to justify its detention of him, that's when he was designated an enemy combatant and whisked out of the criminal justice system with all of its protection into the military detention system that has been created with very few protections.
And, well, you know, I think the quote of the century is FBI agent Russell Fincher saying, well, I didn't want to arrest him.
I wanted to use him as an informant.
I didn't think he was dangerous.
I wanted to use him.
We wanted to set up a sting operation.
He refused.
I guess this is one of the questions I was going to ask you earlier.
Is there any evidence this guy ever went to Afghanistan at all?
Is there actual evidence that this guy was ever even in Afghanistan, Jose Padilla?
Well, it depends on, I mean, I don't want to be cute, but it depends on what you consider to be evidence.
There is plenty of information that came out of his interrogation in the brig as reported by the government and in U.S. reports about what he told his interrogators in the Charleston brig.
And what he told his interrogators in the brig is that he wasn't just in Afghanistan.
He was in close contact with senior members of Al Qaeda.
Is there any evidence that doesn't come from a torture room that says he was in Afghanistan?
Well, that's a different question.
I mean, seriously, because Abu Zubaydah and I forget the name of the Ethiopian guy that they cut his genitals with razor blades until he pointed the finger at Jose Padilla.
You know, I guess they can cite, they can call that evidence if they want.
But I mean evidence as opposed to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saying, please take that screw out of my thumb and I'll tell you whatever you want to know.
It's not entirely clear what the tactics were used, which interrogation tactics were used against each of these individuals.
But there are four primary people who provided information that formed this dirty bomb allegation.
And all four of them were subject to coercive techniques.
I'm not going to say that they were subject to torture, although many, many people would look at what happened to them and say they were.
But I'm just going to try to be conservative here and say they were all subject to coercive interrogation techniques.
Now, that alone would mean that you could not use that information in a criminal court, in an American criminal court.
You could, because we have special procedures at Guantanamo for the military commissions, conceivably you could bring that kind of information into the military commission process and use it against individuals there.
And so if there was, for example, if Binyan Mohammed is brought up on charges related to this dirty bomb, you might see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's comments to his interrogators come into that system.
You know, a transcript of it, even.
But that's all in the future.
We'll see whether that happens or not.
Well, we know in the case of, I believe it was Abu Ali who was abducted and tortured in Saudi Arabia into, quote unquote, admitting that he was plotting to assassinate George Bush.
He actually got a civilian trial, he wasn't turned over to the military.
But the judge allowed torture evidence, his quote unquote confession that was gained under torture in Saudi Arabia, but would not allow the jury to hear his defense lawyers say that he was being tortured in Saudi Arabia when he quote unquote confessed to these things.
So the torture evidence is admissible and the evidence that was gained under torture is not, apparently, in an American courtroom now.
So there's a fundamental difference between the Padilla case, and this is one of the reasons I spent a good amount of time looking at the background to the case rather than the trial in Miami itself.
This is the difference between Padilla and pretty much every other detainee that I'm aware of.
Because Padilla was brought into the criminal justice system, there was a window of opportunity to examine him, to have medical doctors, in this case psychologists and psychiatrists, to look at him closely and spend time with him.
What they found was that he is suffering from severe mental disabilities.
And they're not just any mental disabilities.
These mental health specialists say that these disabilities stem directly from his treatment in the brig, directly from his interrogation and his prolonged isolation in the brig.
And they also say that these severe mental disabilities may well be permanent.
In other words, what they're suggesting is that here's an individual who was taken into military custody and questioned, and a portion of his ability to think has been taken away from him.
Right.
Well, they gave him the MK Ultra treatment, is what they did.
Sensory deprivation, basically, until you go completely crazy.
They had him on a cell block all by himself.
Even his window to his empty cell block was blacked out.
No human contact except for his interrogator.
One of the things I read said that they would put him in terrible pain, I don't know, through stress positions or what, and then they would sit there and tell him, hey, stop hitting yourself.
Stop hitting yourself.
You're the one who's making it hurt.
Why don't you just stop it, Jose?
And drove him absolutely mad.
The difference is, now, many people have supposedly been subjected to similar techniques.
The difference here is that Padilla has been seen by these experts.
The question I raise is whether this is actual evidence, as opposed to Padilla says that this happened to him.
If he has a severe mental disability or permanent mental disability, this is something that could be verified by others, by other professionals.
And so what I'm wondering is whether it will be.
Right.
Well, and they had a debate as to whether he was even fit to stand trial, right?
They did.
He was found fit to stand trial, but as you know from watching other trials, just because you're competent to stand trial doesn't mean that you don't have a severe mental disability at the same time.
Right.
You could be found not guilty by reason of mental defect or what have you, even if you're capable of attending the trial in different circumstances.
Yeah, but it's not that.
And you see this a lot in death penalty cases because individuals who are facing the death penalty sometimes have significant mental problems.
But it doesn't rise to a level that renders them incompetent to stand trial.
In other words, they can understand that they're on trial, and that's all that's necessary.
But that doesn't mean that they don't have a severe mental illness.
Right, right.
And of course, they're saying about Jose Padilla that he has Stockholm Syndrome.
Apparently during the trial, one of his lawyers did a good job cross-examining an FBI agent, and Padilla got all mad and said, how dare you insult the Commander-in-Chief?
And at another point asked his mother, would you please try to contact George Bush for me and tell him I've been real good and maybe he'll help me out?
As though George Bush wasn't the one torturing this man in his naval dungeon.
Yeah, and actually what happened is his mother was having trouble getting through the red tape to visit him.
And she was sort of saying, oh, it's very difficult to come, it's hard, you know, I have to wait here and I have to do this and I have to do that.
There are only a few people who have had access to Jose Padilla since he was taken into military custody.
She's one of them.
So she was complaining about this and he told her, well, maybe what you should do is write to President Bush.
I'm sure he'd help you out here.
You know, he could help, you know, maybe he could help make it easier for you to visit me.
So the psychiatrists were just floored by this, that he would ask his mother to reach out to President Bush who would designate him as an enemy combatant.
Well, my imagination's running wild with me but I can see it now, you know, torturer ties Jose Padilla in a hog-tie position and is going to leave him there for the next 72 hours or so and on the way out the door he says, only George Bush can save you now.
And, you know, after a while George Bush becomes Jesus.
It's just like in 1984 by George Orwell, the torture becomes big brother, you know, the loving protector.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's a difficult area, this area of mental illness.
It's just a very difficult area.
But I do think that it's important to pay attention to it and I do think it's important that it be clear that people who go into U.S. custody come out of U.S. custody in essentially the same condition that they went in.
Yeah, you don't say.
Let's get back to this conspiracy charge.
Now, it sounds to me like you're saying he's been charged under some new statute that's written so much more vaguely than other conspiracy charges.
I mean, if I go murder someone and then they can prove that you were at my house the night before, they have to do a lot better than that to prove that you were in on the plot to do the murder with me.
You know, ultimately the jury gets instructed on the law and then the jury, it's up to the jury to apply the law to the facts and come to a verdict.
So the law isn't written in more of a loose fashion.
It's just this jury's brain.
Well, the way the government presented its case, you know, if the government had the ability to use all of the information that came out of these interrogations, there would be quite extensive evidence.
I just haven't seen a specific, other than the discussion, I haven't seen a specific plot that seemed to be moving forward.
You don't necessarily need that.
The discussion alone is a conspiracy.
If you're plotting to blow up and to do some terrorist act, that is a crime and you can be put away for a long period of time.
In a case like this, with an individual who has gone through what he's gone through, it's such a high profile individual, you would think that the government would have pulled out all the stops and that you would have a very solid case.
And so it's a little surprising when you actually get to the trial and you see that the center of their case, their evidence, is this Mujahideen data form.
Well, it's not a surprise to me.
I was reading the quote just the other day about Abu Zubaydah, one of the guys who pointed his finger at Jose Padilla under torture.
And George Bush had made such a big deal about what a high-level terrorist capture this guy Zubaydah was.
But Ron Susskind writes in the One Percent Doctrine that George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, told him otherwise and that George Bush responded, Hey, I've already talked about this guy on TV.
You're not going to make me lose face on this, are you George?
And of course, they waged a whole war based on a bluff.
So the idea that it turns out at the core of their case is a big fat nothing is not a surprise to me at all.
I'm surprised you're surprised, Warren.
I'm sorry, I'm just being a jerk.
So what you're saying, though, is that this conspiracy statute isn't written overly broadly.
This is basically the same thing as a conspiracy to commit a crime in any other case.
In this case, they were able to get a conviction without any evidence.
Well, they had evidence.
They just didn't have a lot of evidence.
I mean, they had evidence.
And again, you're referring to this data form, I guess, this application form.
Can we talk about that then and figure out exactly how that amounts to evidence and proof of Padilla's guilt in any way?
Well, there are some difficulties with it because first, the government never actually established where it came from.
They brought in a CIA agent who testified that he obtained a large pickup truck full of documents from an Afghan who drove up to the building where he was.
This was in 2001.
And he said that he obtained these documents from what had been a safe house for Al Qaeda.
And that essentially is the evidence that the jury heard.
Now, that's hearsay.
I mean, as long as that Afghan was telling the truth, everything's great.
But we don't know who that Afghan was.
Yeah, it might have been the manager of the Taco Bell there in Kandahar.
I mean, nobody knows.
Nobody knows that, in fact, he brought those documents from the safe house.
There was no evidence tying these documents to that safe house other than the testimony of another guy who says he was at the camp at a later time who said that when he went to this particular safe house, he filled out a similar form at that safe house.
Now, that suggests that these documents came from that safe house, but it's not actual proof.
You could say it's circumstantial evidence, but it's not actual proof because they could have brought, for example, the Afghan into court.
Now, that would be difficult to do.
And of course, the reason they didn't want to do it is because he's an intelligence source, the CIA.
He delivered this information to a CIA officer.
If I remember correctly, the government's witness said, yes, I filled out a form like this, and then they asked me whether I wanted to join the Mujahideen after I was done.
So the government was trying to say, this is the form that you fill out when you join, and their witness said, no, this is the form you fill out before you join.
I mean, there's a difference, right?
If I fill out an application to work under Jose Padilla at Taco Bell, that doesn't mean he hired me.
It just means I filled out an application.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And, yeah, because the bottom line here is really whether you attend the camp, although that can be a substantial indicator of who you are and what your intent is.
The key is, what's your intent when you get out of the camp, and what are you going to do?
There was testimony that some people who went through this camp thought it was absolutely horrendous.
They didn't want to have anything to do with Al-Qaeda, and they went home and tried to forget about it.
Now, you don't know.
This is the difficulty.
You just don't know who that would be.
You don't know whether that person is, in fact, a sleeper agent who has gone back into their home community waiting for the call from Al-Qaeda.
Okay, now's your time.
We need you for this.
We need you for that.
You just don't know.
But there was some evidence that not everyone who went through this training camp came out as a committed terrorist who was willing to go blow people up or blow themselves up.
You really don't know is the problem, which makes it difficult to prove these cases, which means that if the government can use this kind of broad conspiracy law, they can push these kinds of prosecutions successfully in cases where there just isn't a lot of evidence.
I don't mean to justify the government's tactics here, but from the government's perspective, it's very hard to get evidence, evidence that will hold up in a court of law, when you're fighting an actual war.
And that's sort of what happened here.
Was there any proof that Jose Padilla himself had anything to do with that form?
I guess he said there were some fingerprints on it, but they didn't seem to indicate that he had filled it out.
Well, there were personal details that were his.
His birth date was on it.
You know, the fact that he spoke Spanish and English was on it.
So there were identifying features of the document that showed that it was probably his form.
The question is, well, does that prove that he was in the training camp?
And the government would say, well, it does.
He's got these fingerprints and it was found in Afghanistan.
Of course, Padilla denies ever going to Afghanistan.
He does.
He says he never even went to Afghanistan.
That's right.
That's the position that was taken in the trial.
Now, according to the information that's come out of the interrogation, he was in Afghanistan.
He was living there and spent time there and was associated with these guys and was playing a role.
What there isn't is good information about a specific plot that was moving forward.
The dirty bomb plot, for example, which everyone knows about, Abu Zubaydah never thought that that would happen.
And Abu Zubaydah has reportedly told the interrogators that Padilla thought that you could separate nuclear materials by putting it in a bucket and swinging it over your head.
There isn't a match.
That's how you enrich uranium in a centrifuge?
You just spin it around with your arm?
That's right.
Supposedly, they take this plot over to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and he was extremely skeptical of the same thing.
But that doesn't mean that Padilla couldn't be an extraordinarily dangerous person.
And if some of this information is true that has come out of the interrogation, it looks like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was trying to direct him more toward an easier plot, which would be to rent a series of apartments in high-rise apartment buildings, leave the gas on, and have a bomb there.
That's something that he could have done.
That's pretty frightening.
That's pretty threatening.
Well, why wasn't he known as the apartment house bomber?
Why was he known as the dirty bomber?
Well, because a dirty bomb is nuclear.
It's weapons of mass destruction.
That gets everybody's attention really fast.
Yeah, it sounds great on the eve of war.
So when it comes time for trial, you kind of expect the government to back up some of what it said, something that's going to show that he is extraordinarily dangerous.
Now, just because they haven't put that evidence, and this is my caution, just because they haven't put that evidence in the Miami case doesn't mean he's not extraordinarily dangerous.
But having said that, that doesn't justify treating individuals in a way that is going to not be consistent with our constitutional traditions and the safeguards of the criminal justice system.
Well, I agree with you, too.
I mean, if any of what they say about the guy is true, if he pals around with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then sure, he's dangerous.
I'm just in the position, since I'm an American and I was born in America, where I would rather see guilty people go free than innocent people go to jail.
And if at this point it's really that sketchy that he ever even set foot in Afghanistan, it sounds to me just, you know, I try to take as objective a point of view of it as I can.
It really looks to me, Warren, like they arrested this guy.
They wanted to use him to be an undercover guy or something.
He refused to go along.
So they wanted to prosecute him, but they had nothing on him.
And because they had nothing on him, that's why they turned him over to the military to be tortured, not because he was so dangerous, but because they had already made such a big deal about it and they were about to have to turn him free if they were to have to try to come up with a reason to hold him in front of a judge in a black robe.
So instead they turned him over to the guys in camouflage.
And then when the Supreme Court was just about to rule that, hey, you can't do this, you have to give this guy a trial, they went and preempted that case by taking his standing away, by going ahead and indicting him.
And by the looks of the indictment, they just tacked him on to this indictment of two other guys who, as far as I can tell, they only indicted him so they could tack Padilla's case on to the end of theirs.
And the whole thing just seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
I don't know what I'm missing here.
One thing, when Padilla arrived in the United States, the government thought that he was coming to carry out an attack.
And so there is question about this dirty bomb, to what extent the dirty bomb was the core of his dangerousness.
But the fact is, the government believed he was coming here for an attack and they thought that maybe he was going to meet up with someone who was already in the country.
They were thinking along the lines of 9-11 that there were already teams of people and that Padilla might be the trigger.
And so they were, this is just my impression from the research that I've done, they were nervous about this.
They held him as a material witness and they tried to get him to, yeah, I'm sure that they asked him to work with them.
And then they asked him a series of questions and he wasn't opening up, he wasn't providing information.
And then when the criminal justice system sort of kicked in and was going to force the government to prove what it knew about Padilla, then they moved him into military detention.
His move into military detention was to make him talk.
It was to break him.
That's why he went to military detention.
It was to learn what he knew, because they thought that there were others in the country.
Now, apparently that wasn't the case, because if it was, then it's been kept a pretty good secret.
Well, I'll buy that.
I guess that sounds plausible enough that they thought it was some emergency that they had to break him and make him talk.
But the big issue here is, okay, you have this situation where the individuals come into the country, the government fears this individual.
Well, the question then becomes, what can the government do to a United States citizen who has been detained in the United States to make that person talk?
What can the government do?
Does the Constitution permit the military to take an individual into custody and close him into a small room in isolation for months at a time with very, very limited human contact, knowing what is known, knowing all of the research that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense did in the past about Soviet techniques of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation, the psychological effects of that.
Our government knows all that.
It was high-priority research back in the 50s and 60s.
Sure.
So the question is, can you do that?
Well, the answer is simple.
It's Amendment No.
5 and Amendment No.
8.
No, you can't.
Well, maybe.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, they can.
Apparently, they have absolute impunity and they can do whatever they want to anyone they want and the Bill of Rights is dead.
Okay, okay.
Well, I think that that question is still hanging out there.
And so to me, that is such a huge issue that is unresolved.
So now we know that Padilla is guilty of the charges in Miami and that he'll probably be going to prison for a long term.
But what we don't know is, what about the rest of us?
Right, the next guy.
What about the citizen who is detained by the military, who is designated as an enemy combatant?
What kind of treatment do they get?
What kind of protections do they get?
And that question is still out there.
Well, let me ask you this, in your coverage of this trial, do you hear many people talking about the possibility that, well, especially now that he's found guilty, but then again, maybe especially if he had been acquitted, that the government would attempt to go ahead and call him an enemy combatant and re-kidnap him?
Well, that was if he had been acquitted.
Well, I mean, they could do that now, right?
They could say, see, we told you he was an enemy combatant and then take him right back to South Carolina and put him in the brig.
Well, I think their position is yes.
I think that is the government's position, that they retain the right to do that.
But the Supreme Court has warned, if that was to happen, they pretty much instructed the lower courts to rule quickly on any kind of habeas petition that was filed.
And they invited his defense lawyers to apply directly to the Supreme Court to get the issue quickly to the high court.
Now, that won't happen.
I mean, it could, but I really don't think that's going to happen because they do have a conviction and they do have the ability to hold him in the prison system for, we'll see, I think sentencing is December 5, so we'll see what that sentence is.
Now, there are going to be appeals.
This case is going to be appealed.
And a lot of what we've just been talking about will be looked at very closely, first by his lawyers and then later by appeals court judges.
Well, it seems like they have quite a bit of room to appeal here.
I mean, if I was his lawyer, I would say to the three judge panel, yeah, but judge, they got nothing except some fingerprints on application form.
You know, let my client go right now, Dan.
That's what I would say.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's difficult to know, you know, and it's going to be quite a while before we actually see what shape the appeal takes, but it will be well worth watching closely because it'll be important in shaping this area of the law and what the government can do in these kinds of cases.
But I don't know, you know, the Eleventh Circuit is a fairly conservative circuit, and I don't see them saying, oh, well, you didn't have a lot of evidence here, so we're going to overturn a jury verdict.
I just don't see an appeals court doing second-guessing a jury in that way.
There'll have to be something more fundamental than that.
Yeah, new evidence or a major procedural error or something along those lines.
Yes.
And now, I don't mean to come off sounding like, you know, Jose Padilla's biggest champion or something.
I guess I tend to agree with you.
He seems like a pretty dangerous guy to me.
I don't believe I've ever actually said anything positive about the guy, but I've been accused of holding him up as some kind of hero, and of course, all I held him up as was a persecuted American, and I don't really care how guilty he is.
You're not supposed to persecute people.
You're supposed to prosecute them.
Yeah, you know, this is how I think about it.
This man was made a kind of symbol very early on, you know, the Ashcroft press conference, right from the beginning.
He's a known terrorist.
He was plotting a nuclear, you know, dirty bomb attack right from the beginning.
He became a symbol.
And it seems to me if the government is going to make someone a symbol of evil, if they're going to bring him into court, they owe it to the American people to prove that he's evil.
And I don't know whether they did.
They obviously did for the jury there.
But there's an awful lot of allegation that's left by the wayside that this guy has a stigma that was never examined in the court of law, you know, under an adversarial system where somebody could actually look and examine the quality of the evidence that's been used against him in a broader way.
And so you have this kind of court of public opinion that has reached a verdict about him that he's guilty and a terrorist and a dirty bomber.
And then you have this trial in Miami that's a very narrow look at a very narrow series of allegations.
And in that court, he's convicted as well.
And so what I can't know is to what extent the court of public opinion bled over into this other court and influenced the outcome, because that, of course, would be impermissible.
The government can't come out with a big press conference and, you know, sort of smear people and then put them on trial later and then not raise any of the smear.
Right.
And, of course, the jury went in there knowing who he was, having heard his name before, having heard him demonized as guilty and a terrorist.
And why else would the Navy have been holding him all that time if he wasn't an extremely dangerous terrorist?
And Paul Craig Roberts wrote in his article, I guess, trying to cut them a little slack and put himself in their shoes, these jurors weren't going to go home back to their neighborhood and be the guy who let that terrorist go free.
Everybody knows he's a terrorist.
It's all over TV.
Ashcroft announced he was guilty back in 2002.
There's no question about what a dangerous terrorist he is.
You're not going to let him go, are you?
You know, that was apparently the attitude that the jurors took into the jury room.
I noticed, I think it was in one of your reports, that they all came dressed in red, white and blue one day and seemed to act kind of quirky throughout the trial in other ways, too, right?
Yeah, well, it wasn't my report, but yes, they did dress that way.
And sometimes you get that in the jury.
They kind of, you know, the night before they say, okay, everybody on this row wear this color.
Anyway, nobody knew quite what that meant.
I'm not sure that it just means that the jurors are sort of working well together.
Oh, yeah, it sounds to me like it means go prosecution, yay, like they're the pep squad for the state.
Yeah, yeah, well.
Yeah, that might just be me.
It's hard to know.
Yeah.
We're already over time here a little bit, and I'm sure you've got to go.
Is there anything important about this case, this trial, you know, important points that need to be fleshed out that I neglected to give you an opportunity to address here, Warren?
Oh, I don't know.
In my view, it's the bigger issues that remain unresolved that some people will say, well, this trial was Jose Padilla's day in court.
I don't actually think he's really had his day in court until these big constitutional questions have some kind of an opportunity for resolution.
This is a kind of strange chapter in American history that a citizen has taken into military custody and held for this period of time, and at every turn the government has prevented this guy and his lawyers from raising challenges in a neutral forum that would allow a detailed examination of exactly what was going on.
At every turn it has been blocked, and it seems to me that this is a country that's based on openness and examination, adversarial system, search for the truth.
Let's get to the bottom of it.
Let's find out who this fellow is.
Let's find out exactly how dangerous he is.
Is it just a buffoon who went off and became a member of this group and thought this was great and then later decided it wasn't so great?
Let's find that out.
If he wasn't, if he was a dangerous guy who would have gone and planted these bombs in the apartment buildings, let's find that out, and then let's put him away and either try him for treason or put him away for a long period of time.
But let's find out.
You know, we're part of this country as well, we the American people.
It seems to me that we should be able to know how dangerous he is.
Right.
Well, it just seems like such a strange speech to give after the end of a trial.
You're saying, and you sat through at least some of this trial, you're not satisfied that anybody ever got to really have an adversarial process over this evidence.
There's just another notch in the obfuscation and the obstruction and blocking of the administration of letting this guy get that impartial hearing that you're talking about.
Yeah, it hasn't happened yet.
It might, it might, there's still, there's still, it might, but it hasn't happened yet.
All right, well, I sure appreciate your time today.
Everybody, Warren Ritchie, he's a hell of a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.
Thanks very much, Warren.
It's good to be with you.