Padilla Guilty Verdict Being Called a Tainted Victory for Bush

   You can read here the first article I have seen that has to start to downplay the guilty verdict of Jose Padilla.

But critics and law experts called Thursday’s verdict a messy win for the government, in which it was able to avoid answering for its long detention and interrogation of Padilla without the legal rights normally granted U.S. citizens, and, his lawyers said, for torturing him.

Many people quoted in this article begrudgingly admit that the Padilla quilty verdict was a victory for the president, then they go on to diminish the verdict.

  Here are some quotes:

“The verdict is important because it provides cover. It validates the government’s tactics in a way that the jury may not have necessarily meant to,” said American University law professor Stephen Vladeck. “Padilla has had his day in court, but only with respect to the charges, and not to his treatment and not the lawfulness of his detention for 3-1/2 years in a Navy brig,” Vladeck said.

Amnesty International said “President Bush should not take (the verdict) as permission to continue to hold Americans outside the law at his whim.”

“It’s kind of a dirty victory because of the way the case came about, but still it’s a victory nonetheless,” said Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas.

“A lot of resources were wasted … by the attempt to expand executive power,”

  Above is just another example of how any Bush victory has to be cut down. Why is this just a victory for Bush anyway? I think it is a victory for America when you lock up a terrorist for life, not just for Bush.

  The media and the Democrats were hoping beyond hope that Padilla would be found not guilty. They wanted to de-legitimize the whole process of holding enemy combatants. A not guilty verdict would have been great fodder, an aphrodisiac, to the anti-war, anti-Bush crowd. Denied that verdict they so hoped for, they turn to the next best strategy, dirtying the verdict that was rendered.

  The part of this that bothers me the most, I think, is the fact that they are trying to portray Bush as expanding his executive power by holding enemy combatants during a time of war. These people either have no idea of history or chose not to remeber it, so I will either remind them or educate them now.

  From factmonster.com:

On February 19, 1942, soon after the beginning of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The evacuation order commenced the round-up of 120,000 Americans of Japanese heritage to one of 10 internment camps—officially called “relocation centers”—in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.

More than 2/3 of the Japanese who were interned in the spring of 1942 were citizens of the United States.

Two important legal cases were brought against the United States concerning the internment. The landmark cases were Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), and Korematsu v. United States (1944). The defendants argued their fifth amendment rights were violated by the U.S. government because of their ancestry. In both cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the U.S. government.

In 1944, two and a half years after signing Executive Order 9066, fourth-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescinded the order. The last internment camp was closed by the end of 1945.

  Franklin D Roosevelt, a Democrat mind you, rounded up every single Japanese CITIZEN in the United States and locked them up for over two years. No charges, no enemy combatants, just CITIZENS. In a time of war he made the judgement that in order to protect the American people he had to intern every single Japanese national living in the United States. The decision was upheld by the supreme court twice.

  Now you may judge whether you believe this decision was justified or not, but that is what he did. So to sit there and call George W Bush a dictator or a Nazi, or any other of the terms the far left throws out there, is either foolish, ignorant, negligent, or simply uncaring of the past history of war.