NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Al Muhajir, 31, born Jose Padilla, has been in U.S. custody since his arrest Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8. He is suspected of engaging in a conspiracy to obtain radioactive material and explode it with the aid of a conventional bomb.

Federal authorities have designated him as an "unlawful combatant" and turned him over to the military for detention.

American Civil Liberties Union said the action belied President Bush's earlier assurance U.S. citizens would not be subjected to military jurisdiction.

Cassel, director of Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University, said al Muhajir's custody transfer from the Justice Department to detention by the military in South Carolina appeared to be a "test run" to set him up for indefinite detention.

Al Muhajir, a U.S. citizen born in New York City and raised in Chicago, had been returning to the United States from Pakistan when he was arrested.

According to the FBI, al Muhajir has a criminal record dating back to 1985 when he was just 15. FBI spokesman David Brown said he was convicted in 1991 of obstruction of police and assault and served time in an Illinois prison. He also spent prison time in Florida on a gun charge. He converted to Islam in prison and is believed a member of the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

"The Geneva Conventions provide that captured enemy combatants if they meet certain conditions ... can be treated as prisoners of war," Cassel said. "There is a traditional legal category that predates the Geneva Conventions designed to deal with enemy spies ... a category called unlawful combatants. Those types of people could be tried before a military commission, even if they were U.S. citizens."

FDR Did It

Cassel cited a 1942 case involving eight German saboteurs, one of whom was a U.S. citizen. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered them tried by a military commission. The U.S. Supreme Court said it did not matter that one was a U.S. citizen because he was working for the German government.

"But that's very old law, and lots of things have happened in the last 60 years," Cassel said.

"It might not even be good law. But what the Supreme Court didn't say is that you could just lock them up and throw away the keys. There you had a recognized state as the enemy and sponsor of the saboteurs, whereas here there is no state on the other side. Instead you've got something that looks more like organized crime.

"Why do Mafiosi get treated as criminals and on the other hand Mr. Padilla gets labeled as an unlawful combatant not entitled to a trial?"

ACLU agreed.

"If a non-citizen like Zacarias Moussaoui [the man believed to be the 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks] can be tried in a regular court of law, surely a United States citizen can be afforded the same access to justice," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement issued in New York.

"As we have seen in the prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, our courts are perfectly capable of meting out justice even in the most horrific of circumstances. The government has failed to justify why our traditional system of American justice should not apply in the case of Jose Padilla."

Cassel speculated Attorney General John Ashcroft decided to transfer al Muhajir to military custody and announce the investigation Monday because a federal judge had given the Justice Department 30 days to decide whether to press charges. He said there likely was an "ex parte" proceeding at which al Muhajir had no legal representation.

Had a defense lawyer been involved, he said, the first action would likely have been a motion demanding charges be preferred or al Muhajir released. The matter likely would have worked its way up to the Supreme Court, which, based on precedent, likely would have ordered action to be taken within a specified period of time.

Al Muhajir is being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.

Copyright 2002 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Al-Qaeda

Bush Administration

Homeland/Civil Defense

War on Terrorism

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