GEOFFREY FORDEN
Protecting us without tainting the ConstitutionUNFORTUNATELY for Jose Padilla, Attorney General John Ashcroft believes in disaster movies as much as Padilla does. The plot: high school dropout follows Internet instructions to make a weapon of mass destruction. Fortunately for all of us, Hollywood thrillers usually get the details wrong. And it is the details that make a weapon deadly. Nevertheless, this story line has been used to deny a US citizen his constitutional rights.
In June of 2002, Ashcroft accused Padilla of planning to explode a "dirty bomb," basically a bag of radioactive material wrapped in dynamite. Dirty bombs are the national security community's current favorite disaster with analysts vying with each other to see who can predict the most dire outcome. Some alarmists have even predicted that half of Manhattan would have to be abandoned due to a single terrorist dirty bomb. This fear is what the Bush administration used to deny Padilla his civil rights. The truth about dirty bombs is far less frightening, and that wasn't even what Padilla was originally trying to do. Instead, we learn that the government believes that Padilla was intent on a far more conventional attack on the United States. According to government allegations released recently in an attempt to explain why Padilla has not been allowed to see his attorney in two years, Padilla first tried to convince Al Qaeda that he could build an atomic bomb based on information he found on the Internet. When Al Qaeda didn't seem to believe that was possible, Padilla tried to sell them on his building a dirty bomb. It has become an urban legend that the Internet contains instructions for making almost any weapon of mass destruction. However, the practical details are almost always missing. For instance, Internet instructions for nuclear bombs always seem to contain the line "place the sphere of plutonium inside the high explosives" without explaining how to make a sphere of plutonium. In a similar way, analysts of dirty bombs always assume that the terrorists can manage the difficult task of creating a cloud of radioactive particles just the right size to float over large areas. In fact, nearly all the radioactive particles of any dirty bomb made by Padilla would have fallen in a small area and have been easily decontaminated. That, of course, assumes that Padilla could have stolen highly radioactive material and assembled the bomb without first being killed by the radioactivity. What is truly frightening is that Al Qaeda seemed to know these difficulties while Ashcroft did not. In fact, the papers the government released to the public make it clear that Al Qaeda is nothing if not practical. Al Qaeda's chief of operations dismissed both of Padilla's terrorist fantasies and insisted that Padilla stick to a much more practical plan: blowing up apartment buildings using rooms filled with natural gas. Let us assume for the moment everything the government now alleges against Padilla is true. Padilla possesses no unique knowledge for this attack. His Al Qaeda superiors had to tell him how to accomplish this attack. There is nothing to prevent Al Qaeda from sending in other agents to complete the attack. Padilla, on the other hand is completely known to the FBI and was at the time of his arrest. If he is released now, he could be watched and prevented from doing anything harmful. If Padilla stands trial now, it seems likely that any of the "evidence" the government has accumulated would be thrown out of court. That is the issue we should be debating right now: how to protect the populace and still guarantee the accused, and the government, a fair day in court. A credible threat to use a weapon of mass destruction, even one as ineffective as a dirty bomb, is enough to suspend a citizen's rights while the plot is being foiled. But once that is accomplished, the citizen should be returned to the protection of the Constitution. We need to find a way to protect the population without tainting the ultimate prosecution of a suspected criminal. What is now happening to Padilla has more to do with protecting Ashcroft's reputation than protecting American lives.
Geoffrey Forden, who was chief of multidiscipline analysis at the UN weapons inspection agency UNMOVIC, is a research associate in MIT's Security Studies Program. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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