Add this story to the reasons you can’t trust anybody these days. A man who was charged with being a terrorist, although he committed no crimes related to terrorism, was first tortured in a South Carolina military prison. After that he was sent to the court system where he was threatened with a life sentence. In 2007 he was sentenced to 17 years in prison. But the justice system is a funny thing and the rules can change on a whim, which is what happened:
MIAMI (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge in Miami re-sentenced Jose Padilla on Tuesday to 21 years for a 2007 terrorism conviction after an appeals court deemed the original 17-year sentence too lenient.
Now instead of the original 17 years he going to be locked in a cage for 21 years. His crimes? Conspiracy to commit crimes, which means he didn’t actually commit a crime but the state merely said he was planning to do so:
Padilla, an al Qaeda recruit and the first U.S. citizen labeled an enemy combatant, was convicted on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people abroad, as well as providing material support for terrorism.
He was accused of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States. In all likelihood the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested him when he turned out to be too smart to actually press the button on the fake detonator for the fake bomb supplied to him by the agency in another one of its fake terrorist bomb plots.