The US public is being pushed by reaction on 2 important issues at this moment and is failing in both cases to respond anyway adequately to the challenges.

Issue #1 is Bush’s plan to war with Iran, and the US population is going about its business same as usual. That is a total failure to respond to a crisis in the making.

Issue #2 is the case of Jose Padilla, a man held for over 3 years without charges or any standard legal rights, all the while being tortured by the US government. Response of the US population over this time frame? Overall they show no indication that they care about their own rights, let alone the rights of those already imprisoned by their government!

Why does the title say that Jose Padilla must be freed now? Simple, and it is the same reason all reason all prisoners of war held by US forces in places like Guantanamo must be freed, regardless of guilt or not. When the government denies legal rights to people detained and in addition tortures them, then a just determination of innocence or guilt cannot actually then be made. So the government is left with only two alternatives, to continue the torture and illegality of its actions, or to forthright free the detained. That’s it. By denying rights to prisoners and torturing them, these 2 illegal government actions make the charges against the detained mute. A government that disregards the high ground of proper legal process, no longer has any moral authority ot detain any prisoners, let alone those held as supposed ‘terrorists’.

At this point in time, the US government under the direction of President Bush and the enabling US Congress has lost any moral authority in the taking and holding of prisoners of any type. That’s what happens when you run torture chambers. When torture is used, the government automatically sinks itself to a lower level than even any actual terrorist they might encounter in their dragnets. Why? It’s because the government itself has begun to act as the biggest terrorist out there. And since the government’s enforcement is via real people, the government itself converts itself into a collection of individual terrorists. The government becomes the principle terrorist gang at that point, and any court otehr than a kangeroo one should turn the government’s victims free.

Jose Padilla a must be freed now, otherwise our entire country becomes complicit with the government. In fact, that is really what the Padilla case is now about. The Bush Administration deliberately turned a US citizen into a vegetable much to see how the rest of us would react? And so far we are failing that test miserably, since there has been about zero US public outcry in regards to what was done. Americans now need no lessons from Germans are other nationalities about how it is that a whole nation gets turned into monsters. We can look at ourselves in the mirror and figure it all out. Free Padilla now! Do it for ourselves.

Read more about the case at Jose Padilla News