Jose Padilla's defense lawyers have subpoenaed Department of Defense officials and records pertaining to his treatment during his three years in the South Carolina brig.

Today, the feds moved to quash the subpoenas in an effort to prevent the defense from introducing evidence of his treatment and conditions of confinement at trial.

What the defense asked for:

Defense attorneys have issued subpoenas for at least four military officials, including a security officer and technical official at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where Padilla was jailed. They have also subpoenaed Maj. Gen. D.D. Thiessen, commander of U.S. Marine forces in Japan, about treatment of other enemy combatants, according to court documents.

Bloggers are weighing in on the torment of Jose Padilla.

Digby:

I know that all the tough guys on the right will say that Padilla is just being a typical whining malcontent but I have a feeling that most of them would crumble into blubbering babies after five minutes in his position. This treatment is extremely inhumane. They basically blinded, deafened and then isolated him, essentially destroying his mind. There is no reason on earth to put those goggles and earphones on him to go to the dentist in the prison in South Carolina except to keep him from ever feeling like a normal human being, part of the natural world. It's sick.

Lawyers for alleged "dirty bomber" and Bush-declared enemy combatant Jose Padilla have filed a new salvo in his Miami federal court terror case with new details of the torment and physical deprivation to which he was subjected during his three years in the South Carolina military brig.

Here's how he got taken to the dentist for a root canal:

Several guards in camouflage and riot gear approached cell No. 103. They unlocked a rectangular panel at the bottom of the door and Mr. Padilla’s bare feet slid through, eerily disembodied. As one guard held down a foot with his black boot, the others shackled Mr. Padilla’s legs. Next, his hands emerged through another hole to be manacled.

Wordlessly, the guards, pushing into the cell, chained Mr. Padilla’s cuffed hands to a metal belt. Briefly, his expressionless eyes met the camera before he lowered his head submissively in expectation of what came next: noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes. Then the guards, whose faces were hidden behind plastic visors, marched their masked, clanking prisoner down the hall to his root canal.

The point:

TalkLeft asked this question last year: "Are federal prosecutors worried that they can't convict Osama Awadallah if he has a fair trial?" If the prosecutors were indeed worried that a fair trial might produce an acquittal, they were right.

Awadallah was charged with committing perjury while testifying before a grand jury that was investigating the 9/11 attacks. His first trial ended with a hung jury. At the conclusion of a second trial, it took the jury only an hour to conclude that Awadallah is not guilty.

Courts don't often dismiss prosecutions to sanction outrageous governmental misconduct, but the government's conduct in a criminal case is seldom as outrageous as that alleged by Jose Padilla:

In the court papers, Mr. Padilla asserted among other things that interrogators had threatened him with “imminent execution” or with painful cuts; that he was forced to wear a hood and stand in “stress positions” for long periods; that noxious fumes were sometimes introduced into his cell; that he was forced to endure extreme heat and cold, bright lights or total darkness, denied opportunities to shower for weeks and deprived of sleep; and that he was not provided with a copy of the Koran.

The government must respond to Padilla's dismissal motion by November 13. TalkLeft's coverage of Padilla's case is collected here.

Update: Lynne Stewart got 28 months, not 30 years. Huge defeat for the Government. Congrats to Lynne. Now she won't die in prison.

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Original Post:

New York criminal defense lawyer Lynne Stewart faces sentencing today on her conviction for providing material support for terrorists by passing along messages from her imprisoned client, the blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. The Government is asking for 30 years for the 67 year old lawyer who suffers from breast cancer and other ailments.

A psychiatric report submitted to the federal judge in Manhattan who will decide the sentence, John Koeltl, claims that several emotional events in Stewart's life suggest her actions were motivated by "human factors of her client and his situation" and not by politics, according to portions of the psychiatric report.

The psychiatrist, Steven Teich, points to 11 emotional events that he claims prompted her to want to take action on Abdel Rahman's behalf, Stewart's attorneys say. Among the events that make Dr.Teich's list are her experiences seeing Abdel Rahman incarcerated and the 1995 suicide of a drug defendant named Dominick Maldonado, whom Stewart had once represented.

The psych report is sealed, but here are some more details:

Notwithstanding the great efforts by defense lawyers, including Terry Kindlon, an Albany federal jury has convicted two Muslims of terrorism charges in a sting case that has come to be known as the "Doogie Howswer" terror case.

Two Muslim immigrants who were targeted in an FBI sting were convicted on Tuesday of charges they supported terrorism by taking part in a fictitious plot to launder money from the sale of a shoulder-fired missile.

The case had galvanized the area's Muslim-American community, many of whom accused the FBI of using a manipulative and underhanded informant to unfairly target two hardworking immigrants who had no criminal history or direct links to any terrorist figures.

The Southern District of Florida Blog details Jose Padilla's Motion to Dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct. It's well-worth reading for Padilla's factual recitation of what was done to him during his three years of confinement. I especially like the introduction:

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 89 (Walter Kaufmann trans., Vintage Books 1966) (1886).\

Legal reporter Vanessa Blum covers the motion here.\

Update: The motion itself is here.

by TChris

Dennis Kucinich, speaking about the White House proposal to expand presidential power while denying fundamental rights to anyone it accuses of terrorism, says it all:

"This bill is everything we don't believe in."

Even Arlen Specter objected to the White House plan to eliminate habeas corpus protections for anyone accused of terrorism. Specter proposed an amendment to permit habeas review of military tribunal decisions, but that amendment was predictably opposed by nearly all Republicans in the Senate. It failed. Will that prompt Specter to vote against the bill, or to support a filibuster? Don't count on it.

That leaves the Democrats, who need to know that their constitutents support a filibuster. Senator Feingold explains why the bill deserves to die.

by TChris

It isn't surprising that Republicans would sell out the Constitution and endanger the country by supporting the president's proposal to weaken the Geneva Conventions and to try detainees without the fundamental protections of due process, but it should be shocking that Senate Democrats apparently won't use their power to stop this un-American bill.

An editorial in today's NY Times succintly explains seven key problems with the bill. Will its call to action fall on deaf Democratic ears?

There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

There's a federal terrorism trial going on in Albany, NY I've written about a few times. It is US v. Aref, which came about as a result of an FBI sting involving Yassin M. Aref and Mohammed M. Hossain, two members of an Albany mosque.

Prior to trial there were issues of warrantless NSA electronic surveillance. From a defense motion:

"The government engaged in illegal electronic surveillance of thousands of U.S. persons, including Yassin Aref, then instigated a sting operation to attempt to entrap Mr. Aref into supporting a nonexistent terrorist plot, then dared to claim that the illegal NSA operation was justified because it was the only way to catch Mr. Aref."

Fast-forward to today, the Government is about to call its final witness, a so-called terrorism expert named Evan F. Kohlmann. The Government's initial expert became unavailable so it hired Kohlman as a last-minute substitution.

by TChris

Fearful of being labeled "soft on terror," Senate Democrats continue to be timid in their opposition to the president's plan to give detainees sham trials before military tribunals. They need to wake up. Recent Republican changes in the bill endanger the rights of everyone.

The current definition of "enemy combatant," to whom the law would apply, broadens its reach from those who "engaged in hostilities against the United States" to those who "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." Material support is a vague concept that can be, and has been, applied to lawyers and interpreters assisting clients. Should lawyers who are United States citizens, acting within the boundaries of the United States and plainly protected by the Constitution, be subjected to trials before a military tribunal rather than a criminal court?

Another change undermines the meager progress that Republicans made to improve the bill. To avoid trials based on secret evidence, the bill gave suspects the right to "examine and respond to" the evidence. The latest version drops the word "examine," leaving suspects with the useless right to respond to evidence they aren't permitted to see.