Padilla’s Predicament
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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.”
One has to pinch oneself to remember that it was only a few days ago that the left was complaining that the administration had been too confounded lax with respect to security measures. The fact is that no amount of hand wringing on the extreme left about civil liberties — such as have never been observed in any country ruled by the left — is going to cut much mustard with the American people. Let the war-time civil libertarians study the 1942 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Ex Parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, which dealt with the four German saboteurs who slipped onto our shores. It turned out that one was born in America and claimed American citizenship. The Supreme Court would have none of it. It ruled that regardless of his citizen, he must be tried before a military tribunal instead of a civilian court. It cited a July 2, 1942, presidential order determining that any one — citizen or otherwise — who entered America with the intention of committing “sabotage, espionage, or hostile or warlike acts, or violations of the laws of war, shall be subject to the law of war and the jurisdiction of military tribunals.”
