Just a reminder--our government tortures

Glen Greenwald is still pissed about the Padilla issue, and I agree with him. This is utterly amazing--that we have a government who asserts the right to detain American citizens without legal counsel or habeus review AND that so many Americans look at that and give their assent.

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: The Bush administration's torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla: "To this day, I have trouble believing that we have a Government that claims this power against American citizens and has exercised that power and aggressively defended it -- and even more trouble believing that there are so many blindly loyal followers of that government who defend that conduct. The outrage that it provokes when thinking about it has not diminished even a small amount and does not diminish no matter how many times one reads, writes or speaks about it. It is as profound a betrayal of the most core American political principles as one can fathom.

The Bush administration finally charged Padilla with a crime (after 3 1/2 years of detention) only because the U.S. Supreme Court was set to rule on the legality of their treatment of Padilla, and indicting Padilla enabled the administration to argue that his case was now 'moot.' The Government's indictment made no mention of the central allegation they originally trumpted to justify his lawless incarceration -- that he was a 'Dirty Bomber' (because the 'evidence' for that accusation was itself procured by torture and therefore unusable) -- but instead contained only the vaguest terrorism allegations. Since then, the federal judge presiding over Padilla's case (in the Southern District of Florida)has repeatedly expressed skepticism over the Government's case against him and has, on several times, admonished them to provide more inforamtion."

By all means, we should be vigorous in our effort to stop terrorist attacks. But Bush and his minions are undoing our basic American freedoms. And Bush supporters are letting him.