Sentenced to 17 Years in "War on Terror" Show Trial

Free Jose Padilla!

Correction Appended

On January 22, Jose Padilla was sentenced by a federal court in Miami to 17 years and four months in prison based on frame-up charges of “conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim.” The sentencing comes after nearly six years of hell for Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was effectively stripped of his citizenship rights in the name of the bipartisan “war on terror” unleashed after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In May 2002, Padilla was seized at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Claiming that he was plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” on U.S. soil, the government declared Padilla an “unlawful enemy combatant” and disappeared him into a Navy brig without any charges or due process. He was trapped in a legal netherworld with no way to challenge his imprisonment, tortured and deprived of contact with family and—for almost two years—lawyers. In 2005, to avoid a Supreme Court decision on Padilla’s “unlawful enemy combatant” designation, the Bush administration dropped its “dirty bomb” plot like yesterday’s “weapons of mass destruction.”

Instead, the government simply added Padilla’s name to pre-existing “conspiracy” indictments against Adham Hassoun, a computer programmer of Palestinian descent, and Kifah Jayyousi, a public school administrator. Though charges against them were just as bogus, they were sentenced to over 15 years and over 12 years respectively. Even the Bush-appointed judge admitted that there was “no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone.” But 12 to 17 years based on no evidence wasn’t good enough for the prosecutors, who had demanded life sentences and have announced that they’re considering an appeal. We say: Free Jose Padilla, Adham Hassoun and Kifah Jayyousi!

For nearly four years, the Feds tortured Padilla in the brig through extreme sensory deprivation, drugged and deprived him of sleep. A motion filed by Padilla’s lawyers in fall 2006 demanding that the criminal charges be dismissed described treatment that echoes the horrors of Abu Ghraib: Padilla was “hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long durations of times” and “threatened with imminent execution.” Two psychiatrists and a psychologist who examined Padilla say this repeated sadistic mauling left him with mental disabilities from which he may never recover.

Torture is all over this case: one government “source” used against Padilla, Binyam Muhammad, was captured and tortured in Pakistan and then, under the U.S. government’s policy of “extraordinary rendition,” sent to Morocco to be tortured. On February 5, CIA director Michael Hayden admitted during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that the CIA used waterboarding torture against another central “source” against Padilla, Abu Zubaydah, as well as two others. Bombarded with noise and lights, deprived of sleep and denied pain relief after being shot, Zubaydah was broken to the point of saying anything his captors wanted to hear, even as an FBI expert on Al Qaeda described Zubaydah as “insane, certifiable, split personality.”

CIA torture is no aberration but is just as much a part of the fabric of the capitalist-imperialist system as the carnage in U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and the barbaric death penalty and racist cop terror “at home.” What is different today is that the extralegal repression that used to be kept under wraps is now being made legal, while the lexicon of torture has become a matter of open “civilized debate” among Democratic and Republican bourgeois politicians.

The conviction and sentencing of Jose Padilla and his codefendants was a show trial, and one with the clear intent of enshrining as permanent features of the legal system an array of repressive laws and measures enacted as part of the “war on terror.” In December 2007, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of stripping Guantánamo detainees of the right of habeas corpus. Two months later, the government filed an appeal to the Court, seeking to overturn a lower-court ruling that the government must supply more information to defend its designation of a detainee as an “enemy combatant.” Meanwhile, six detainees held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are about to face military tribunals, accused of being “conspirators” in the September 11 attacks. Now prosecutors have announced that they intend to seek the death penalty.

The outrageousness, depravity and racist character of the government’s detentions in Guantánamo were highlighted in a 5 February New York Times article about one Abdul Razzaq Hekmati, an Afghan who recently died of cancer while in detention. Hekmati was an ally of the U.S., having fought alongside the CIA-armed mujahedin cutthroats against the Soviet forces that intervened into Afghanistan in the 1980s on the side of social progress and in defense of the USSR’s southern border. During the five years of his detention, no one would hear his pleas that they had the wrong man. In addition to this former tool of U.S. imperialism, there are hundreds of other prisoners in Guantánamo’s torture chambers. Free all the detainees! U.S. out of Guantánamo!

In 2002 and 2003, when Padilla was detained as an “enemy combatant,” the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee filed two amici curiae (friends of the court) briefs on his behalf. Our briefs noted that the “war on terror” is “no more a ‘war’ in a military sense than ‘war against cancer,’ ‘war against obesity’ or a ‘war against immorality.’ Like the ‘war against communism’ and the ‘war against drugs,’ this ‘war’ is a pretext to increase the state’s police powers and repressive apparatus.” We warned that the “Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals” amounts to the government “proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.” The brief underlined:

“The case of Jose Padilla tests the very existence of the fundamental rights of due process—liberty of the individual from the arbitrary, discriminatory power of the state—and the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. It poses the evisceration of the rights and privileges of citizenship embodied in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution and secured on the battlefield of the Civil War and in class and social struggle over the past hundred and more years. If the imperial President is upheld, Padilla’s detention threatens to become the Dred Scott case of our time, a declaration that ‘Citizens have no rights that the government is bound to respect’.”

Down With “Conspiracy” Thought-Crime Laws!

Conspiracy laws provide legal cover for repressing the government’s perceived enemies when the state can find no evidence of any criminal activity. In Miami, the Feds are forging ahead with the “Liberty City 7” conspiracy case, in which five black U.S. citizens and two Haitians were rounded up in an FBI/ police SWAT operation in the Miami Liberty City ghetto and charged with a trumped-up “Al Qaeda plot” to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. By the government’s own admission, none of the defendants ever had any contact with any Al Qaeda members, other than a paid government informant pretending to be one, and never acquired any weapons. In December the jury handed a stinging defeat to the government by acquitting one defendant, Haitian immigrant Lyglenson Lemorin. With the jury deadlocked on the other six, the Feds are now retrying them. Meanwhile, they vindictively whisked Lemorin, a permanent legal resident with no criminal record, into deportation proceedings where the “burden of proof” for their charges is considerably lower, while the judge is enforcing a gag order to prevent Lemorin and his lawyers from discussing his “not guilty” verdict! Drop the charges against the Liberty City 7! No deportations!

In the early decades of the 20th century, labor unions were outlawed as “criminal conspiracies.” Conspiracy laws have been used time and again to railroad leftists and radicals, from socialist and trade-union opponents of World Wars I and II to the Communist Party in the 1950s and more recently radical attorney Lynne Stewart. Today the bosses at Smithfield Foods in Tar Heel, North Carolina, have filed a racketeering suit against the United Food and Commercial Workers, using RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act conspiracy laws against the union’s attempts to organize that company’s multiracial workforce.

When Padilla was convicted last August, the bourgeois mouthpiece New York Times editorialized that “it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism” (17 August 2007). The Times’ bottom line was to complain that Padilla “will likely never be brought to trial on the dirty-bomb plot, a much publicized charge that cries out for resolution,” and that the conspiracy case might “be reversed on appeal because of his alleged mistreatment before trial.”

What concerns liberals and Democrats about the “war on terror” are purely tactical questions of how best to mask the bloody visage of U.S. imperialism revealed so grotesquely by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. While more farsighted members of the bourgeoisie would prefer that kidnapping and torture remain U.S. imperialism’s dirty secrets, the demented Bush regime brags openly of its barbarity.

When it comes to the interests of U.S. imperialism, the Democrats—including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—have backed the “war on terror” all the way. Clinton voted for the USA Patriot Act (Obama was not in the Senate when it first came up), and both she and Obama voted to reauthorize it in 2006. And if Democrats posture as “antiwar” and timidly critique the Iraq occupation, it is only to better refurbish the image of rapacious U.S. imperialism and to bolster its strategic interests around the globe. The draconian policies enacted by Bush & Co. under the pretext of the “war on terror” were built upon laws enacted under the Democratic Bill Clinton administration, such as the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Indeed, many of the “anti-terror” prosecutions are based on Clinton-era laws.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, we warned that the laws and measures targeting immigrants from overwhelmingly Muslim countries would also be used to further the subjugation of black people and the exploitation of labor. It is in the direct interest of the labor movement and of all opponents of racist repression and defenders of civil liberties to call for the freedom of Jose Padilla and all the detainees. As opposed to the “Anybody but Bush” swamp of liberals and reformist leftists who seek to pressure the Democrats to “fight” all the way to the White House in 2008, we stand in principled opposition to the capitalist Democratic Party, the other party of racism and war. We underline that the system of capitalist imperialism has been and will continue to be enforced through barbaric measures and repression. Our vigorous defense of Padilla is rooted in the Marxist understanding that the capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. As we wrote in “Torture, Lies and Videotape” (WV No. 905, 4 January):

“The apparatus of the capitalist state has been greatly strengthened by measures enacted in the ‘war on terror.’ However, what the government is actually able to get away with will ultimately be determined by the level of social struggle. We fight to forge a workers party that acts as a tribune of the people, mobilizing the social power of the proletariat on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed. In the course of such struggle, the proletariat must be won to understanding the need to carry out a socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and establishes a dictatorship of the proletariat, a workers government where those who labor rule.”

Correction

In “Free Jose Padilla!” (WV No. 908, 15 February), we incorrectly wrote that the two amici curiae (friends of the court) briefs by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee on Padilla’s behalf were filed in 2002 and 2003. The briefs were filed in 2003 and 2004. (From WV No. 909, 29 February 2008.)