Time Magazine Looks at “Dirty Bomber” Trial

In The “`Dirty Bomber’ Goes on Trial” by Reynolds Holding, Time Magazine (here) looks at the trial of Jose Padilla.  The story starts like this:

Five years ago, Jose Padilla was the Dirty Bomber, a “known terrorist” at the core of “an unfolding terrorist plot” to wreak havoc on the United States with a “radioactive dirty bomb,” as then-attorney general John Ashcroft proclaimed. But today, as opening statements commence at Padilla’s federal criminal trial in Miami, he seems little more than some poor schmo who the government says got mixed up in a vague plan to support terrorist mischief abroad. Padilla’s downgrade from deadly menace to overeager errand boy is a tale of legal miscalculation and political overkill — a textbook case, critics say, of the overreaching of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Initially whisked away to the dark hole where “enemy combatants” go to be interrogated and held without charges, he emerged more than three years later as an almost conventional suspect endowed with constitutional rights. Gone were allegations of a dirty bomb and a scheme to annihilate apartment buildings. In their place were charges of conspiring to support terrorism and kill unspecified people overseas.

(emphasis added)

KJ