Padilla Decision a Defeat for Ashcroft and a Victory for Civil Liberty

Yesterday's 2nd Circuit federal appeals court ruling in Manhattan, rejecting President Bush's detention of American citizen Jose Padilla without charges or counsel as an "enemy combatant," underscores the stunningly radical nature of Bush's post-9/11 assault on civil liberties.

In the ruling – which the government is likely to appeal either to the full circuit court or directly to the U.S. Supreme Court – the opinions of both the two-judge majority, Judges Barrington D. Parker Jr. and Rosemary S. Pooler, and the dissenting judge, Richard C. Wesley, showed clearly the fundamental constitutional matters raised by the White House attempt to claim authority to imprison citizens like Padilla without charges.

Padilla has been held for 18 months incommunicado in a military brig in Charleston, S.C. He was arrested – to great media fanfare – in a plot U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft first triumphantly exposed as a well-developed Al-Qaeda plan to detonate a so-called "dirty" nuclear bomb in the heart of... uh...

Somewhere. It turns out there wasn't all that much evidence, at least much that's known publicly, other than that Padilla is a long-time Chicago area gang member, converted Muslim, and that he traveled extensively in the Middle East. Whether that made him a terrorist, an Al-Qaeda wannabe, a mid-level drug runner, or religious tourist is anyone's guess, since no court has been allowed to decide.