José can you see?
Patriots Trounce Padilla

What’s a bigger threat to justice than a secret military tribunal? For Americans, it’s a jury of our peers.

Since 9/11, our collective appetite for cowardice and paranoia has officially turned inward. This is evident from the August 16^th conviction of Brooklyn born José Padilla on conspiracy to harm people overseas and provide material support for terrorism.

Padilla was arrested in June, 2002 because—as the patriotic narrative goes—he was hell bent on detonating a radioactive “dirty bomb” in an American city. There has never been any evidence to support that claim, but perhaps you can’t unring the bell that sets Americans drooling for vengeance.

The dirty bomb charge against Padilla was eventually dropped because it was ridiculous. No matter, on the nightly news he was a “SUSPECTED DIRTY BOMBER,” and it wouldn’t be difficult to nail him on a lesser, vaguer charge. Who exactly Padilla conspired to murder or maim was never explained to the jury, but they knew he was inherently a bad man.

It hardly matters that “dirty bombs” don’t work. There have been only two nations deranged enough to test such a device in the ‘80s:  the U.S. and—our then ally—Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The tests showed that the devastation caused by a “dirty bomb” was limited to the size of the explosion radius. So that one day the “dirty bomb” would mythically evolve into the proverbial media boogeyman, the U.S. skewed the radioactivity exposure results to reflect a situation where victims didn’t move from the blast sight for an entire year. Your peers can hardly conceive of that scientific fact after consuming thousands of Fox News Alerts. Nor does it matter that constructing a “dirty bomb” is exceedingly perilous, and well beyond the expertise of a reformed Chicago gangbanger. The dirty bomb narrative has been pitched to the American consumer ad nauseam, and we’ve swallowed it hard for the past six years.

The prosecution in the Padilla trial merely had to point to him, tell his peers he was using “code words” in recorded—and ostensibly innocuous—telephone conversations, and play unrelated video of Osama bin Laden calling for Jihad against America. The case was weak. The best evidence the prosecutors put forth was an alleged Mujahideen training camp application form bearing Padilla’s fingerprints. There’s no evidence Padilla ever went to the camp, just a piece of paper with his fingerprints on it. It’s like being convicted of accessory to genocide after the fact because authorities supposedly found your band's demo on Pol Pot’s iPod. It shouldn’t wash in our legal system, but it has.

Nineteen assholes with box cutters managed to render us so terrified that our judicial system has become one of their weapons. In bin Laden’s wildest dreams, he couldn’t have fathomed a success so overwhelming it would have the infidel enemy torturing its own people and ruining their lives based on the overactive suspicions of its brand-loyal populace. “In blind taste tests, five out of five patriots prefer brand With Us® to brand Against Us®!” On at least one occasion during the trial, the Padilla jury literally wore its allegiance on their sleeves, with one row dressed in white, one in red, and one in blue. They clearly knew their role in this ritual.

It looks like the Bush Administration didn’t need secret show trials to convict Americans of terrorism, after all. Marketing geniuses they are, all they needed was to sell Padilla with the Al-Qaeda brand. Case closed.

Our “peers” are no longer up to the task of impartiality, and in the case of José Padilla, they have proven this case beyond a reasonable doubt.