You’d think this guy was actually dangerous…

The never ending saga of Jose Padilla the only American citizen ever to be picked up in the United States and held (for over three years now) entirely at the whim of the President takes yet another turn, as the Bush Administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and overturn a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals order precluding moving Padilla from military to civilian custody pending the Supreme Court’s decision on whether or not to review the Fourth Circuit’s own earlier decision in Jose Padilla v. C.T. Hanft denying Padilla’s habeas corpus application by reversing a lower court decision which had granted habeas relief.
The Fourth Circuit has essentially taken umbrage at the Bush Administration’s outrageous actions of taking dictatorial powers upon itself (even as it went out of its way to manufacture a legal basis for those dictatorial powers).
Well, Padilla’s New York-based attorneys Andrew Patel and Donna Newman (Ms. Newman is interviewed here) appear to have let the government have it (via TChris of TalkLeft) in their responsive papers to the High Court. Let’s hope they get their message through.
For the umpteenth time, boys and girls, this is the most important case of our lives: point blank, can our government, in the name of “protecting us”, just treat our most important constitutional protections as a dead letter… in short, are we a dictatorship… yes… or no?