Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Padilla sues ex-Justice official over torture

By Karoun Demirjian
Tribune staff reporter
2:32 PM CST, January 4, 2008

In the latest legal contest over the treatment of detained terrorist suspects, attorneys for Jose Padilla filed a suit in a California federal district court this morning against John Yoo, the former deputy assistant Attorney General whose legal opinions formed the basis for Padilla's detention and the interrogation techniques used against him that the attorneys call torture.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who converted to Islam and attended terrorist training camps in Central Asia during the 1990s, has risen to prominence in the legal fight for rights of detainees, as a U.S. citizen kept in military custody as a suspected enemy combatant with ties to Al Qaeda.

In May 2002, Padilla was arrested coming through Chicago's O'Hare International Airport with $10,000 cash and a list of suspected Al Qaeda agents. Soon after, he was held in New York and later taken to a military brig in South Carolina, where he remained for three and a half years without being charged-because, the Bush administration argued, he was a known terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda who was behind a plot to attack the U.S. with a so-called dirty bomb, or radioactive device.

While in detention, Padilla alleges, in this suit and others filed previously, he was routinely subjected to torture that was authorized as legal and defensible by Yoo.

Those include being subjected to noxious odors, extreme temperatures, sleep and sensory depravation, and standing in painful stress positions in a fashion similar to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He also says he was given what he thought were hallucinogenic drugs, was routinely threatened with physical punishment, death, or translocation to Guantanamo, and forbade access to a Koran.

Padilla first challenged his detention in New York, and won a case directed at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in 2004, but the Supreme Court later remanded the case to a lower court in South Carolina based on a technical filing error. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia eventually found that the executive had the right to indefinitely detain citizens without charges in some cases-including Padilla's.

Padilla was eventually tried, and convicted in a federal district court in Miami last year, but on lesser charges that he was part of an overseas terrorist conspiracy-no mention of a planned dirty bomb attack inside the U.S..

The suit filed this morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, turns the spotlight of blame on Yoo, the author of a series of legal memoranda known collectively as the "Torture Memos." Drafted in 2002, when Yoo was a deputy assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department, they provided the legal justification for the interrogation techniques used on suspected Al Qaeda operatives that many, from former generals to presidential candidates, have since decried as torture.

"John Yoo is the first person in American history to provide the legal authorization for the instiution of torture in the U.S.," said Jonathan Freiman, an attorney representing Padilla in the suit. "He [Yoo] was an absolutely essential part of what will be viewed by history as a group of rogue officials acting under cover of law to undermine fundamental rights.it never would have happened without the legal green light. That made it possible."

Yoo, now a law professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, has published several books and articles in the past few years defending his interpretation of U.S. laws vis-a-vis detentions and torture. He had no comment on the lawsuit when contacted Thursday night.


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-padilla080104,1,6749180.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true