Jose Padilla

Guilty on all counts. This is good news for the rule of law - it turns out you can in fact try and convict terrorists in criminal court. I don't know why the New York Times feels obliged to open its story with "In a significant victory for the Bush administration..."

The greatest threat to the prosecution was the charge by Padilla's lawyers that he was subject to torture while in government custody. The judge ruled he was not, but how else do you describe the conditions described in firedoglake:

The accused was held in extreme isolation for 1,307 days. Held in a nine-by-seven-foot cell. The only window blacked out. He was the lone prisoner on the two-tier cellblock. He was given food through a slot in the door. He slept on a steel mattress. No reading material. No calendar. No clock. Nothing to connect him to the outside world.

But it was the short trip down the hallway for a dental examination that captured the utter isolation and sensory deprivation inflicted on Jose Padilla during his 3 ½ years in the Navy brig at Charleston, S.C.
Helmeted guards, their faces obscured behind dark plastic visors, manacled his hands and feet through slots in his cell door. They covered his ears with sound-canceling headphones, covered his eyes with blacked-out goggles.

Padilla, mind you, has been described by his jailers as docile “as a piece of furniture.”

At that point, after months of a dehumanizing interrogation regime, any useful information had long been squeezed from him.