Stopping Short

(source of photo)

This morning NPR News covers the Padilla conviction. The story does note that Padilla was held for "over three years, incommunicado and without access to a lawyer." But "torture" never comes up - what else can you call the Soviet style treatment that was documented by Padilla's lawyers and never disputed by the judge in the case.

The most shameful aspect of this morning's report is the way NPR's FBI correspondent, Temple-Raston, frames the whole "dirty bomb" sham that the Bush Administration used to seize and torture Padilla in the first place. Here's what Temple-Raston says:

"...prosecutors in Miami stopped short of charging Padilla with the allegations he may be most famous identified with - that he met with Osama Bin Laden and was dispatched to the US to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb. Instead prosecutors built a case around a terrorism conspiracy..."

Read that carefully. She is asserting that there is substance to the "dirty bomb" charges. It's just that prosecutors "stopped short of charging Padilla" with the dirty bomb plot and "instead" built a different case. This is complete spin. The "dirty bomb" allegations were groundless, and in fact were obtained by - guess what? - torture (the word that must not be spoken). Toward the end of the report Temple-Raston does mention that "the allegations of planning a dirty bomb attack couldn't be substantiated," but notice how weak and open ended that is compared to her initial statements.

I don't expect NPR to denounce the jury's verdict, no matter how scandalously rushed their deliberations were. It was a lawful (albeit red, white and blue) jury - but the cavalier attitude to such gross government behavior is really shameful.