Jose Padilla

Nabbed

Nabbed two weeks later, on May 6, according to published reports, authorities found him. He had, under the name Jose Padilla, booked a May 8 flight from Switzerland to Chicago.

Padilla had told his mother that he was coming to Chicago to spend a little time with his son, who had recently turned 12. But the FBI agents who pretended to snooze in the other seats on the flight and the cadre of Swiss Special Forces men who joined them in plainclothes had other ideas. Though he carried no bomb-making materials with him, they suspected that he planned to gather them in the United States. They were convinced that he had the know-how. Perhaps, the agents had been told, he was simply on a reconnaissance mission, dispatched back to America to scout out potential targets.

Armed with a warrant — signed by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mukasey in New York giving them the authority to arrest Padilla as a material witness — agents quietly grabbed him and whisked him away moments after the plane touched down. There was no announcement of the arrest, at least not at first. It seemed as if Padilla had just vanished.

In fact, he had been transported to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, half a nation away in lower Manhattan. In a federal courthouse just a few short blocks from the massive gouge in the earth that once was the World Trade Center, Mukasey appointed Newman to serve as Padilla's attorney. In the course of the next few weeks, Newman said, she met with him several times. But before she could take any action on her client's behalf, the rules of the game changed and changed dramatically.

On June 11, one day after Ashcroft made his dramatic announcement at a Moscow press conference about Padilla's arrest, Mukasey, acting on a request from government lawyers acting under the direction of Theodore Olsen, the solicitor general whose own wife had died in the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, vacated the warrant for Padilla's arrest and turned him over to Defense Department officials. With that, Padilla was no longer a potential defendant entitled to all the protections of the U.S. Constitution. He was a prisoner of war.