Padilla’s Predicament

It didn’t take The New York Times but a few hours to leap to the defense of Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born lad being held as an enemy combatant at the Naval Consolidated Brig at Charleston, South Carolina, for his role in the dirty bomb plot. Even as American investigators were desperately trying to find out what young Padilla was doing while he was at an Al Qaeda training camp, editorial writers on West 43rd Street were cranking out a warning about how the poor fellow, an American citizen, is entitled to due process. Mr. Padilla, a convert to Islam, was arrested when he arrived at Chicago, apparently intending to scout American locations for a later attack. The Times makes much of the fact that Padilla has not been charged and that “whatever he might have been plotting,” as the Times puts it, “never got beyond the discussion stage.” It calls the government’s decision to label him an enemy combatant “unacceptable.”