Torture Helps Terrorists

While you were munching on your turkey yesterday, word came out that the reason that Jose Padilla, and American citizen, has been held prisoner for years without being charged with a crime is that his original arrest was triggered by information obtained by torture – and George W. Bush knew it. It is illegal to torture prisoners, and if Bush had Padilla prosecuted, then Bush’s involvement in the torture plans would have been made public. So, contrary to what the Bush Administration has been telling us, Jose Padilla’s prolonged imprisonment without trial was not conducted to protect Americans from terrorists. Rather, it was conducted to protect George W. Bush and his advisors from criminal prosecutions of their own. Bush trashed the Bill of Rights just to protect himself.

On top of that disaster, it now appears that the entire case against Jose Padilla may unravel. That’s not to say that Jose Padilla was not involved with al Quaida. Maybe he was, though the government has yet to prove that case. Instead, the problem comes from the fact that the fundamental information of Padilla’s connection with al Quaida was obtained through torture. Even if the Bush Administration has come up with secondary charges that are not directly related to the torture-derived information, the secondary prosecutions still rest upon the original insights that were tortured out of other prisoners. The case against Padilla, even on secondary charges, is on the verge of collapsing like a house of cards.

The Republicans now are beginning to blame this problem on the legal system set up under the Bill of Rights. They say that the problem is that information derived from torture is not legally admissable in court.

The Republicans have it backwards. The real problem is that, under the Bush Administration, the people who offer the most serious security threats to the United States cannot be brought to justice because our own government resorted to criminal means in its interrogation of them.

Thanks to Bush’s program of torture, America is presented with an unfortunate choice. We must either release al Quaida prisoners who have been held captive based on information gained through torture, or we must throw away our liberties and make our legal system itself a criminal enterprise.