Anti-terror ploys
The bankruptcy of fear-mongering as policy
If there is any doubt that the Bush administration poses a greater threat to liberty as we know it than al-Qaida, Attorney General John Ashcroft dispels that doubt regularly. He defends warrantless searches, imprisonment without due process, secret tribunals and eavesdropping on defense lawyers. He end-runs state laws by federal edict. He scorns federal law by ordering his staff to comply as minimally as possible or not at all with such open-government tools as the Freedom of Information Act. He subordinates the Constitution to religious beliefs. And when challenged, he attacks his critics for brandishing "phantoms of lost liberties." (snip)
The Justice Department's announcement of the declassified Padilla papers were geared at eliciting front-page coverage of Padilla's "dirty bomb" plot and scaring the public into line behind the government's tough tactics subsequent to his arrest. But there was no such plot.
The declassified papers admit that if it was ever entertained, it was dismissed as unfeasible. At most, Padilla allegedly thought of blowing up apartment buildings by igniting gas leaks - a plot as amateurish as it is implausible. So what's left? A scary story sexed up by the Justice Department to seem more than it was, an American citizen still in prison, without charges, and no way to know how the Justice Department got its information on Padilla. Torture, we now know, was a possibility.
The Justice Department's announcement of the declassified Padilla papers were geared at eliciting front-page coverage of Padilla's "dirty bomb" plot and scaring the public into line behind the government's tough tactics subsequent to his arrest. But there was no such plot.
The declassified papers admit that if it was ever entertained, it was dismissed as unfeasible. At most, Padilla allegedly thought of blowing up apartment buildings by igniting gas leaks - a plot as amateurish as it is implausible. So what's left? A scary story sexed up by the Justice Department to seem more than it was, an American citizen still in prison, without charges, and no way to know how the Justice Department got its information on Padilla. Torture, we now know, was a possibility.
- from a News-Journal editorial.
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