The WSJ Wonders...
The editheads over at the Wall Street Journal wonder at what point in time exactly did Jose Padilla, terrorist conspirator, became a symbol for the anti-war movement?

It's hard to pinpoint the precise moment when Jose Padilla became a liberal icon in the war on terror.

Was it June 2002, when President Bush, exercising the authority that other wartime Presidents have used, declared him an enemy combatant? Padilla had been arrested the previous month at O'Hare Airport, en route home from Pakistan, on allegations that he planned to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S.

Or perhaps the moment was December of that year, when a federal judge in Manhattan ruled that the President has the constitutional authority to detain enemy combatants. Padilla's case has since bounced around the federal judiciary, and this September a three-judge panel on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the President "unquestionably" has the right to detain a U.S. citizen who has taken up arms against his country. The appeals court invoked the precedent set by the Supreme Court last year in the Hamdi case, which concerned another American citizen being detained as an enemy combatant.

Somewhere along the way, Padilla became a symbol--not of the sort of threat we are up against in the war on terror, but as a victim of the U.S. government. A modern version of Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs. Largely absent from the public debate over one man's rights has been any discussion of the rights of the rest of us--namely, the right to be protected against enemy attack.

- posted by Base10 @ 9:59 AM