It’s the last week of August, and even though the merciless heat that slow-roasted New York City through most of the summer has broken, the streets that lead to lower Manhattan’s Holland Tunnel are still steamy and jammed. Lights are too long. Tempers are too short and horns are blaring, a typical summer afternoon in New York.

If you closed your eyes and listened to the car horns and the curses you could almost forget that this is the new New York, the post September 11 New York, a wounded place with a gaping 16-acre scar in its belly where the World Trade Center used to be.

You could almost forget that you’re 20 blocks away from the spot where the war began, where the world changed, and where America changed. But then you open your eyes and see the slogans on bumper stickers – “United We Stand” and “God Bless America” – you see the tiny American flags, a little the worse for wear after a year on car antennas.

Attorney Donna Newman (AP)

As she slips her car into a line of traffic on the Jersey-bound lanes, attorney Donna Newman is in no mood for what she deems to be idle chatter or irrelevant questions.

It’s been a tough day.  Newspaper and television reporters, columnists and talk show bookers have been tying up her phones all day, all wanting to know her reaction to the government’s latest filing in the case of accused terrorist and “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla. She has read the secret declaration that lays out the government’s case against Padilla and its reasons for holding the one-time Chicago gang-banger as “an enemy combatant.”

She’s willing to accommodate the media requests. “Upon reading the declaration…I’m somewhat shocked to learn that the informants upon which they rely, during the time in which they’re getting this information, one had a drug problem and a medical condition and the other recanted,” Newman says.

She’s willing to discuss in great detail what she sees as the principal issue in the case, an issue that she says goes to the very heart of what it means to be an American in the post-September 11 era: how the government – the Bush Administration, the Defense Department, and the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft – has, in her view, assumed unprecedented power.

She’s willing to cite chapter and verse from her legal arguments challenging the government’s authority to declare Padilla an enemy soldier even though, in her words, “he never was a member of any military.” And she’s willing to discuss at length the fact that, as a result of that decision, the government asserts the authority to hold Padilla indefinitely and without charges, even challenging her right to serve as his attorney.

The one thing she will not discuss, however, is the man himself. Who is Jose Padilla, now known as Abdullah al Muhajir? How did this pudgy Catholic kid from Brooklyn, a one-time juvenile delinquent with a hip-hop attitude and a record of street crime, end up in a military jail in South Carolina, a prisoner of war suspected of conspiring with al Qaeda to build a so-called dirty bomb – a crude radioactive weapon – to explode it on the streets of Washington, D.C., or elsewhere?

Newman has no patience with questions about the man himself. “It is” she says flatly, “irrelevant.” The story of Jose Padilla, she says, should begin no earlier than his apprehension on May 8 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. It should focus, she contends, not on his alleged misdeeds as a youth, but on the complex legal issues that arise from his detention now.

“The fact is, in this country there are people who come from a variety of backgrounds and personalities, histories. The point of the matter is it’s not what he did before. It’s not who he is. It’s the fact that he’s an American citizen and his rights are being violated.”