American citizens detained for years without trial

One American who was held for three years without access to courts or lawyers is Jose Padilla.  This former Chicago gang member was a convert to Islam.  He was nowhere near the field of battle when he was arrested by US authorities.  Instead, he was picked up at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002 and first held as a "material witness."   Shortly before a judge was to rule on the validity of the warrant on which he was being held, President Bush issued an order that he be detained as an "enemy combatant" on the grounds that he was closely associated with al Qaeda and planned to set of a "dirty bomb" in the United States.

Could an American citizen be stripped of all due process rights if she or he were detained not in a war zone, but within the United States itself?  This was the issue debated by the courts while Padilla himself was marooned incommunicado in a military brig off the coast of South Carolina. 

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2003 denied that the President as Commander-in-Chief had the "inherent authority" to treat an American citizen in this way.  The government appealed to the Supreme Court, and the court threw out the case on a technicality – it said the case should have been heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  So back it went, to the Fourth Circuit Court.  That court upheld the president's authority to strip Padilla of his rights.  Padilla's lawyers then appealed to the US Supreme Court. 

Just before the Supreme Court was to hear the case, the government finally brought criminal charges against Padilla.  But these charges are far removed from government claims that he was on a mission to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the US as an agent of Al Qaeda.  Instead he now faces lesser conspiracy charges before a criminal court in Miami, leaving many people – including irate Fourth Circuit Court judges – to wonder what evidence the government had against Padilla in the first place. 

Read more about Jose Padilla: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2037444.stm