This open letter to Jose Padilla reveals much about the mindset of the American Left. It drips with concern for a man who is believed to be a terrorist and who plotted to kill Americans. The writer, a lawyer with the ACLU, commiserates with Padilla because his rights were allegedly abridged by the government, and maybe they were. But can't the ACLU insist that American citizens receive their due process rights without making it sound like those who may have been denied certain rights are ipso facto persecuted innocents regardless of what may be the facts of their case? The writer sounds very much as if he believes that anyone who is believed to be a threat to Americans should receive our sympathies. Here's part of the letter:
I'll bet you're thankful that now you will have lawyers who can invoke American law to investigate and defend you against those charges, instead of having the Justice Department release an affidavit from a mid-level Pentagon official, quoting hearsay from unnamed sources, alleging that you were planning to detonate a "dirty bomb," although the "plot" was "still in the initial planning stages" and "there was no specific time set for the operation to occur" and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that he "didn't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly loose talk and [your] coming in here obviously to plan further deeds" and that the government admitted that the information provided by the unnamed sources "may be part of an effort to mislead or confuse US officials" and that one of the sources had "recanted some of the information that he had provided" and that later press reports indicated that one of the sources identified you after being subjected to "waterboarding," a form of torture in which the suspect is made to think he is drowning.
I'm sure you are thankful for the day in 2003 when the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the government had no authority to hold you, an American citizen, as an "enemy combatant," despite the fact that you still had to remain in that Navy brig as your case was appealed to the US Supreme Court.
And I'll bet you were thankful on April 28, 2004, when on the evening of the same day your case was argued in the Supreme Court, CBS News released the horrible photographs of the torture taking place in Abu Ghraib, alerting people to the dangerous and lawless lengths to which the Bush administration would go in its War on Terrorism.
I know you were thankful when the Justice Department called a press conference at the very time that the High Court was considering your case, to announce that you were not really being held for all that stuff about a "dirty bomb" but rather because they said you were planning to blow up apartment buildings in the United States by using natural gas.
Evidently, if Padilla is only guilty of planning to blow up an apartment building with natural gas instead of a couple of city blocks with a radiological weapon he can't really be such a bad guy. We should feel deeply sorry for him.
No, we shouldn't. We should feel contempt for him even as we agree that he needs to be granted every right that the American Constitution affords him. Even if he didn't actually plot to carry out the crime, but merely talked about doing it, he's still a despicable figure. There'll be time enough for sympathy if he's found to be completely innocent. Give him his legal rights, whatever they may be, but don't expect the rest of us to feel sorry for the man unless it turns out that he had nothing to do with plots to harm Americans nor expressed approval of such plots.