Supreme Court shirks Padilla appeal against “enemy combatant” detention

Padilla was accused by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in June 2002 of plotting with Al Qaeda to detonate radioactive “dirty bombs” in the United States. President George Bush declared him an “enemy combatant”—a category his administration invented to deny people the protection of both US and international law. Subsequently, the government has dropped its allegations about a “dirty bomb” plot.

The immediate effect of Monday’s ruling is to uphold the reactionary opinion by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals—the most conservative court in the United States—which concurred with the Bush administration’s assertion of extraordinary executive power to apprehend American citizens on US soil and imprison them as “enemy combatants” for the duration of the “war on terror.” (See Court upholds power of White House to jail citizens as “enemy combatants”) The action has been viewed as a tactical victory for Bush, who appears to have avoided an adverse decision in the high court after almost four years of playing legal dodge ball.

The denial of Padilla’s appeal for the court to review his case—in legal language a petition for a writ of certiorari—represents the second time the case has been in the Supreme Court since the FBI apprehended the Brooklyn-born convert to Islam in Chicago on May 8, 2002 At that time, federal authorities claimed that they were holding him as a witness to testify before a Manhattan grand jury investigating the September 11 attacks.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/padi-a05.shtml