Jose Padilla sentenced to 17 years, 4 months

breaking now on CNN

Judge said she wants him to receive 'vocational training in prison'. Are you kidding, WE broke him.

W's Kangaroo Court will cover all in a warm fuzzy national security blanket.

why isn't Marc Grossman charged with multiple counts of the same charge?

had not the Bush administration lied about what he did.

In other words, the judge says the Bush administration has aided and or abetted this "terrorist," assuring he will be released relatively soon.

Where any person can be accused at any time of "providing support to terrorists".

Inadmissable evidence was permitted (as a result of Mukasey's ruling, not?) because the person who fingered Padilla was illegally tortured.

Of course, the new AG might not want all this history of torture dredged up, given his involvement.
We may need a new President and Justice Department before there is Justice again in America.

National security!! Terrorists!! Nine-eleven!! Don't worry, be happy!! Al-Qaida!! Terrorists!!

Why do you hate America, and how long have you been giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States?

...

disgusting

Was Jose Padilla Tortured?

The Bush administration's torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla

Destroyed CIA tapes spur probes

"The tapes were made in 2002 and were destroyed in 2005. One of the taped subjects was Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda leader who President Bush identified as having been singled out for special harsh interrogation tactics.

The information from Mr. Zubaydah played a foundational role in authorizing further aggressive actions by the US government in the war on terror. For example, Zubaydah was the primary source for the material witness warrant issued for the arrest of Jose Padilla when he stepped off a plane in Chicago in May 2002. A month later, Bush administration officials publicly accused Padilla of plotting to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb," and Mr. Bush ordered him detained indefinitely by the military as an enemy combatant."



The Destroyed CIA Torture Tapes & Psychologists


Torture Tape Timeline

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- Jose Padilla, once accused of plotting with al Qaeda to blow up a radioactive "dirty bomb," was sentenced Tuesday to 17 years and four months on terrorism conspiracy charges that don't mention those initial allegations.


So they arrest him on one charge, then convict him on another? :shrug: :hi:

i thought i asked in another thread if there was a link to the evidence but i've lost it now if i did

as far as i can tell there was never any dirty bomb plot and he is basically convicted of it makes the feds look bad if he isn't convicted of something, anything?

if i'm wrong, let let me know, i don't mind admitting i would appreciate better information on this case

to the casual onlooker, it appears like the feds found some gangbanger, busted him on made-up charges, tortured him for years to get him to confess to...something?

just not seeing the evidence here of terrorist activities

Don't go around associating with brown folks or they might give your name to the guy torturing them.

How the fuck do people still say this is a great country with a straight face anymore? :cry:

(trying to get a sense of where people stand).

Who thinks he's guilty? Of those who think he's guilty, how many want him free? I would assume that if you felt he was innocent that you'd want him free any how, any way.

Thanks guys!

then bogus charges were put forward. Yeah, that's the new Justice Standard in Amerika.

He was accused of the 'dirty bomb BS" but tried on some weak ass charge of providing aid....

if we cannot prosecute correctly, we have no business prosecuting in the first place.

You don't torture guilty people into confessing- you do it to scare the sheep into submission.

This was done to show a precedent- you can be imprisoned, tortured and disappeared without charge. The fact that you are a citizen is irrelevant.

To answer your second question, his mind is a pile of broken glass right now. I doubt he could be released without extensive treatment...assuming we care if he lives for more than a week outside of the walls.

That's all. That's probably enough to get him on probation, but no more. He has never hurt anybody as badly as the US government hurt him.

I've yet to hear any.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/74590/

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." ...

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 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.

what's the point of a jury trial if the jury is a bunch of fuckwits? maybe i'm missing something but does any of this sound like evidence of an actual crime to anyone?

and punishable by these kinds of huge sentences. The jurors were just following their instructions.

:cry: