| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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labeled an enemy combatant, handed over to the Department of Defense, and was being held incommunicado by the military without access to an attorney or anyone else except those interrogating him.
As one might expect, Padilla filed for a writ of habeas corpus in an attempt to challenge his detention. The U.S. government, therefore, needed someone to explain this strikingly extreme situation to a federal court―to explain why it was necessary to hold someone in detention for a prolonged period without granting that person access to an attorney or outside assistance. For that, they turned to Vice Admiral Jacoby, who was the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (“DIA”).3
In his declaration, Vice Admiral Jacoby noted that interrogation“―“the art of questioning and examining a source to obtain the maximum amount of usable, reliable information in the least amount of time to meet intelligence requirements”―is a fundamental tool used in the gathering of intelligence.4 Prolonged incommunicado detention, the vice admiral argued, was critical to “minimize external influences on the interrogation process” and, thus, maximize the quality and quantity of intelligence produced.5 He concluded by declaring the following:
Four years after that memorandum was completed, in a 2007 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Michael B. Mukasey, the former district judge who signed the material witness warrant authorizing Padilla's arrest and who would soon after become U.S. attorney general, publicly called out for a statute that would give U.S. law enforcement investigative detention powers similar to their European counterparts, stating that