All those who deny that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent now convicted terrorist Jose Padilla here to conduct a “dirty bomb” attack upon the United States need to visit the White House’s web site:

October 6, 2005
Overall, the United States and our partners have disrupted at least ten serious al-Qaida terrorist plots since September 11–including three al-Qaida plots to attack inside the United States. We have stopped at least five more al-Qaida efforts to case targets in the United States or infiltrate operatives into our country.

The top 3 of the top 10 plots foiled:

1. The West Coast Airliner Plot: In mid-2002 the U.S. disrupted a plot to attack targets on the West Coast of the United States using hijacked airplanes. The plotters included at least one major operational planner involved in planning the events of 9/11.

2. The East Coast Airliner Plot: In mid-2003 the U.S. and a partner disrupted a plot to attack targets on the East Coast of the United States using hijacked commercial airplanes.

3. The Jose Padilla Plot: In May 2002 the U.S. disrupted a plot that involved blowing up apartment buildings in the United States. One of the plotters, Jose Padilla, also discussed the possibility of using a “dirty bomb” in the U.S.

Our government arrested Jose Padilla when he landed in the U.S. yet this November 13, 2001, military order that President Bush issued ultimately prevented Padilla from being tried by a military commission:

To protect the United States and its citizens, and for the effective conduct of military operations and prevention of terrorist attacks, it is necessary for individuals subject to this order pursuant to section 2 hereof to be detained, and, when tried, to be tried for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws by military tribunals… The term “individual subject to this order” shall mean any individual who is not a United States citizen…

That was a major mistake. In this War on Terror, Jose Padilla and other U.S. citizens have individually declared war on the United States and plotted to conduct that war here and abroad.

Laws do not protect us from those who illegally wage war against us. We can only kill them wherever and whenever we find them or prosecute them via military commissions. We must use the full weight of the information gathered against those captured by us or turned over to us. We must not give rights to our enemies nor endanger the secrets of the United States.

The New York Times obfuscated the truth this morning in an editorial. Their lies are in bold [emphasis added mine] below:

Mr. Padilla was detained in 2002 in Chicago on suspicion that he was trying to assemble a “dirty bomb.” He was first designated a “material witness” and later an “enemy combatant” and held in federal detention cells or military brigs for years by a government intent on keeping him out of a federal court system where he would be endowed with rights — including access to a lawyer. In this alternative universe, government interrogators, with no checks from any other authority, used sensory and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and other forms of abuse to squeeze information from the prisoner. Mr. Padilla was, in short, “disappeared” into a system with methods we object to in the strongest terms when they are used in police states around the world.

The administration finally agreed to prosecute Mr. Padilla in federal court only when the U.S. Supreme Court seemed ready to repudiate the government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla and order his transfer to the federal courts.

Does the orderly disposition of Mr. Padilla’s court case prove that every terrorism prosecution can and should be channeled through U.S. courts? No, although civil libertarians will make that case, there will be genuine enemy combatants who may not belong in civilian courts. But every person held by the government — U.S. citizen or not — must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that U.S. citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Mr. Padilla’s abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated.

We cannot fully “rely on the federal courts to oversee” the prosecution of terrorists without revealing our secrets, endangering civilians here, placing our military in contact with the enemy at greater risk, and compromising foreign individuals and governments that assist in their capture. The Padilla case illustrates that clearly. And this is the only “aberration” that we should never allow to be repeated: