From the terrorist lovin’ leftist AlterNet (who never let facts get in their way of creating a story) making the disingenuous claim that Padilla is guilty of nothing more than merely having a “thought”:

The news that US citizen Jose Padilla has received a prison sentence of 17 years and four months should provoke outrage in the United States, although it is unlikely that there will be much more than a whimper of dissent.

The former gang member and convert to Islam — whose arrest in May 2002 was trumpeted by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft as that of a "known terrorist," who was "exploring a plan" to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a US city — was once regarded as one of the most dangerous terrorists ever apprehended on American soil. Almost six years later, as he received his sentence, he was not actually accused of lifting a finger to harm even a single US citizen.

While this is shocking enough in and of itself, Padilla’s sentence – in what at least one perceptive commentator called "the most important case of our lifetimes" – is particularly shocking because it sends a clear message to the President of the United States that he can, if he wishes (and as he did with Padilla), designate a US citizen as an "enemy combatant," hold him without charge or trial in a naval brig for 43 months, and torture him – through the use of prolonged sensory deprivation and solitary confinement – to such an extent that, as the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty explained after spending 22 hours with Padilla, "What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being’s mind."

Padilla’s warders had another take on his condition, describing him as "so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture,’" but the most detailed analysis of the effects of his torture was, again, provided by Angela Hegarty in an interview last August with Democracy Now:

Juan Gonzalez: And have you dealt with someone who had been in isolation for such a long period of time before?

Dr. Angela Hegarty: No. This was the first time I ever met anybody who had been isolated for such an extraordinarily long period of time. I mean, the sensory deprivation studies, for example, tell us that without sleep, especially, people will develop psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, panic attacks, depression, suicidality within days. And here we had a man who had been in this situation, utterly dependent on his interrogators, who didn’t treat him all that nicely, for years. And apart from – the only people I ever met who had such a protracted experience were people who were in detention camps overseas, that would come close, but even then they weren’t subjected to the sensory deprivation. So, yes, he was somewhat of a unique case in that regard.

As if this were not worrying enough, it was what happened after Padilla’s 43-month ordeal that sealed the President’s impunity to torture US citizens at will. When it seemed that his case was within reach of the US Supreme Court, the government transferred him into the US legal system, deposited him in a normal prison environment, dropped all mention of the "dirty bomb" plot, and charged him, based on his association with two alleged terrorist facilitators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, with participating in a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. When the case came to court last summer, the judge, Marcia Cooke, airbrushed Padilla’s torture from history, insisting that it could not be discussed at all, and, after a trial regarded as farcical by many observers, Padilla and his co-defendants were duly found guilty.

Today’s sentencing, after an unusually protracted two-week debate, has apparently brought the whole sordid saga to an end, with Padilla’s torture only mentioned briefly in passing by Judge Cooke, who noted, "I do find that the conditions [for Padilla as an enemy combatant] were so harsh that they warrant consideration." Nevertheless, he received a longer sentence than either of his co-defendants (who were sentenced to 15 years and eight months, and 12 years and eight months, respectively), even though two jurors admitted to the Miami Herald that the jury as a whole "struggled to convict Padilla because the panel initially viewed him as a bit player in the scheme to aid Islamic extremists, unlike his co-defendants."

They certainly had a point. While the conviction of Hassoun and Jayyousi was based on coded conversations in 126 phone calls intercepted by the FBI over a number of years, Padilla was included in only seven of those phone calls. Groomed by his mentor, Hassoun, he had traveled to the Middle East and, in 2000, had applied to attend a military training camp in Afghanistan, using the name Abu Abdallah al-Muhajir. His application form, which, according to a government expert, bore his fingerprints, was apparently discovered during a CIA raid on an alleged al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, but although the prosecution presented an alleged al-Qaeda graduation list with his Muslim name on it during the sentencing, they had been unable to provide any evidence during the trial that he had actually attended the training camp in Afghanistan.

In the end, Padilla’s conviction hinged on the jury’s determination that he had "joined the terrorism conspiracy in the United States before leaving the country." This was based on a single recorded conversation, in July 1997, in which he stated that he was ready to join a jihad overseas.

17 years and four months seems to me to be an extraordinarily long sentence for little more than a thought crime, but when the issue of Padilla’s three and half years of suppressed torture is raised, it’s difficult not to conclude that justice has just been horribly twisted, that the President and his advisors have just got away with torturing an American citizen with impunity, and that no American citizen can be sure that what happened to Padilla will not happen to him or her. Today, it was a Muslim; tomorrow, unless the government’s powers are taken away from them, it could be any number of categories of "enemy combatants" who have not yet been identified.

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Padilla’s life and Times

Written by Debra J. Saunders back in 2004

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ Sunday profile of accused dirty-bomb terrorist Jose Padilla reports that, at age 14, Padilla was involved in a fateful armed robbery. Padilla’s accomplice fatally stabbed a Mexican immigrant and Padilla kicked victim Elio Evangelista in the head "because he felt like it," according to records.

At age 20, Padilla brandished a gun in a fit of road rage. Authorities then charged him with battery against a jail guard. Padilla repented and pleaded guilty. He found Jesus.

Then he found Mohammed. He got out of jail and found work. He married. In 1998, Padilla went to Egypt to get closer to Islam and teach English. He became engaged to 19-year-old Shamia’a. His American wife learned of the betrothal through an Egyptian-American friend.

After her pleading failed, Padilla’s American wife dutifully divorced him. Padilla married Shamia’a, then left his pregnant wife in Egypt while he went to Yemen, he said, to teach English. As she stayed behind and bore another child, Padilla traveled through the Middle East, to Pakistan and then to Switzerland. In 2002, Padilla was arrested in Chicago after senior al Qaeda official Abu Zubaydah fingered him for his involvement in an alleged dirty- bomb plot.

So here’s the paragraph in the story by Times reporter Deborah Sontag that truly baffles me: Padilla’s "journey covered significant territory, geographically, emotionally and spiritually, and family and friends paint a vivid picture of Jose Padilla. If he lived a double life, they were unaware of it. And the American government has said so little beyond its initial, startling allegations about Mr. Padilla that it is difficult to reconcile the two portrayals — the man his relatives thought they knew and the man the government calls an enemy of his homeland."

What’s difficult to reconcile? Where is the good Jose Padilla that is supposed to balance the bad? When he was young, Padilla was a thug. After he found God as an adult, he was a heel. Whether he’s guilty of plotting to set off a dirty bomb, I don’t know, but Padilla’s biography certainly raises questions that beg for answers.

Sontag repeats Shami’a’s protestations that her husband could not have misled her about what he was doing in Yemen. Then Sontag lists information that completely undercuts the protestations. For example, Padilla must have been paid very well for an English teacher to have traveled as extensively as he did. Yet Muhammed Javed, the Florida man who helped convert Padilla to Islam, told the New York Times that when Padilla told him he was going to Egypt to teach English, he said, "I was baffled, thinking, ‘You yourself don’t speak proper English.’ "

While the story suggests that Padilla’s mother, Estela Ortega Lebron, doesn’t believe her son could have been involved in the alleged dirty-bomb plot, Mom’s reported complaints focus on how the FBI treated her and the fact that her son has yet to be tried.

The best part of the package, however, was the front-page photo of Padilla’s wife — Shamia’a — clutching a photo of her husband. The bride is shrouded under so much covering — veils and gloves — that readers see but a human form in black, with a flesh-colored slit punctured with two eyes.

I have to ask: If you wanted to convince Americans that your husband isn’t a radical Islamic terrorist, would you pose for the New York Times so heavily veiled that your own mother wouldn’t recognize you?

The story addresses the legal question of the federal government holding Padilla indefinitely without charging him with a specific crime.

On the one hand, after two years, the government should be able to present a case to the courts and grant Padilla a chance to defend himself.

On the other hand, authorities argue that only the certainty of severe punishment will push Padilla to trade information for a reduction in his sentence. They also don’t want to risk bringing Abu Zubaydah into a courtroom.

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments against holding Padilla, critics like to dismiss his jailers as law-and-order fanatics. They’ve turned U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft into such a caricature — read: right-wing nut — that they can’t imagine Ashcroft actually might want to save innocent people’s lives.

In their world, Ashcroft is dangerous, but Padilla is not.

It’s not just that they’ve forgotten the recent barrage of criticism that the Bush administration was negligent in failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. It’s as if they’ve forgotten what happened on Sept. 11.