padilla: the dirty bomb story bombs

via laura rozen

Dahlia Lithwick on the Padilla indictment:

... Padilla is not, nor was he ever, a central figure in the war on terror. The Brooklyn-born former gang member who converted to Islam has sequentially been demoted from the "Dirty Bomber" to the "Apartment Bomber" to "Random Bad Fella." And thus he joins Hamdi, Zacarias Moussaoui, John Walker Lindh, and most of the other big terror suspects we've convicted, or incarcerated without charges, as walk-ons repurposed to be special guest villains in the legal war on terror. ...

The facts of the Hamdi, Padilla, Lindh, Moussaoui, and other terror cases have never mapped onto the propaganda used to sell them. The trouble, yet again, is those bedeviled facts. The problem the Bush administration keeps having with the legal system is that no matter how long you stall, speechify, and deny, in the end it all comes down to facts—facts that become increasingly inconvenient with every passing day.

Kevin Drum:

" ... Every time a dramatic set of charges turns out to be baseless, it sends a very public message that the war against terrorism is just a sham, a campaign of partisan fearmongering being used as little more than a political club. This is the same message sent by the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence, the lack of WMD in Iraq, the politically motivated orange alerts, the strategically timed marketing campaigns, and the transparent political stunts played by congressional Republicans last week in response to John Murtha's speech. ..."

and laura chimes in:

It is kind of staggering to realize the extent to which we may have been sold a fiction the past four years. Orwellian. All the more staggering because it's propaganda in the service of exaggerating a threat that needs no exaggeration. The signs were there from as early as Ashcroft's bizarre statement from Moscow all those years ago about Padilla ... Are Ashcroft and the administration going to have to face accountability for selling such a bald faced lie and trampling on the Constitution like that? Can we expect more speeches from Cheney about how Padilla really was with Mohammad Atta and the Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague? And anyone who says he wasn't is hurting the morale of our troops? Seriously, what demagogues, what dangerous demagogues. I think history will look back on this time and show that it was far worse than we had realized. Several recent news stories suggest that much of the past four years of the secret war on terror conducted at home -- the Detroit case, etc. -- has hardly even begun to be understood.

i agree with the general point in all of these quotes - but i take umbrage at the bold sections (emphasis mine) in laura's quote. the fiction is indeed staggering - but many of us were aware of it at the time - all the way through. we tried screaming, and then screaming even louder, and if i can quote judy miller "WE WERE PROVED FUCKING RIGHT" - not just about the padilla thing - about every-fucking-thing. we scoffed at tevery stupid claim they made, and we dissected them in real-time, the fictions were all transparently false - 'hidden in plain sight'

i remember rolling around the floor, laughing, terrified, watching comey announce the second generation of padilla claims. here's what i wrote at the time:

the padilla story is outrageuosly funny. or just outrageous. or something.

poor mr padilla was arrested in the 911 swarthy-sweep, and then he became 'dirty bomber' and now we see that he was trying to blow up apartments.
heres the transcript of the announcement - it reads like hanschristianfukking andersen

it seems that padilla had trained with alq explosives experts, learning "about switches and circuits and timers", but then decided to build a nuke with his mate with 'instructions from the internet'. after not much success with that, his second best option was to find apartment buildings with natural gas, rent out and duct tape a room, leave the oven on (presumably) and then blow the thing to smithereens. its a long step down from nukes to duct tape...

"...locate high-rise apartment buildings that had natural gas supplied to all floors, that they rent two apartments in each building, seal those apartments, turn on the gas, and set timers to detonate and destroy the buildings simultaneously.
"Shaikh Mohammed wanted them to blow up 20 apartment buildings simultaneously.
"In response, Padilla pointed out that he could not possibly rent that many apartments without drawing attention to himself, and that he might have to limit this operation to the destruction of two or three entire apartment buildings."

[snip]

anyways, given that the whole dirty bomb thing has been called off, and the new gas plan being organised, cnn's choice of title for the article "Suspected 'dirty bomb' plot *included* plan to blow up apartments" is at best misleading, but the intent quite transparent, as always.

padilla also "*admitted* that he attend the religious pilgrimage, the hajj" - and he also asked for a new passport: "a classic act of al Qaeda tradecraft"

and the final reassuring word from the dep AG:

"In my experience as a prosecutor, one of the hallmarks of truthfulness tends to be stories don't line up exactly. But the core elements do, and we've tried to include it all."

goodbye sweet idea of america

this story, and just about every other story were simply false on its face - the only story of theirs that we havent officially unravelled yet is the story that a bunch of 19 cave-dwellers who couldnt fly planes were able to hijack four planes simultaneously, and instead of flying directly to their targets, decided to take the 90 minute scenic route, rather than beeline - somehow confident that they wouldnt be intercepted.

laura's correct when she suggests that history will look back with amazement - but most of the amazement will be directed toward the people, not the govt. historians will know exactly why the govts did what they did, the only question will be why they were allowed to.