"This guy Padilla's a bad guy, and he is where he needs to be -- detained," President Bush said the day it was announced that Jose Padilla, a.k.a. Abdullah al Muhajir, the former Chicago gang member, was being held incommunicado as an "enemy combatant" for his alleged ties to Al Qaeda.

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And a bad guy he may well be. Good guys usually aren't convicted, at age 14, on charges related to a man's murder. Good guys don't punch cops. Good guys don't shoot at fellow motorists. Good guys don't assault prison guards. Padilla has done all these things -- and if the government is to be believed, he is capable of much worse.

Nonetheless, the government has not charged Padilla, a Brooklyn-born U.S. citizen, with any crime -- nor does it plan to, apparently. It is holding him, just as the president said, because it believes him to be a bad man. Back on June 10, when Attorney General John Ashcroft broke from meetings in Moscow to announce Padilla's detention, he boasted that the United States had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" that could have caused "mass death and injury." But the timing of Ashcroft's breathless declaration was suspect from the start. Padilla had actually been detained a month earlier and held in federal jail on a material witness warrant. Facing a June 11 deadline to press criminal charges, the government chose instead to declare him an enemy combatant -- with no right to meet with his attorney or review the evidence against him -- and to transfer him to the Consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina. The government's timing was fortuitous in other ways. Weeks of headlines on pre-9/11 intelligence-agency bungling and territoriality threatened to bloom into a full-scale congressional inquiry. But Padilla's arrest, President Bush and FBI chief Robert Mueller claimed, was proof that the agencies had learned to cooperate. Furthermore, the announcement came the day that news of Bush's military doctrine permitting "preemptive first strikes" appeared in the press, and provided, if not a justification, a distraction.

True, Ashcroft's central assertion -- that Padilla planned to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil -- was utterly horrifying. But law-enforcement officials and White House aides, often speaking on condition of anonymity, quickly distanced themselves from such dire claims. Calling Padilla a "small fish" with no ties to Al Qaeda cells in the United States, they admitted to the Associated Press that the FBI had no evidence a plot was under way, only that it had been "thought out as a possibility." "Some fairly loose talk," according to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Nevertheless, officially the administration still insists that during meetings with "senior Al Qaeda operatives" in 2001 and 2002, Padilla received training in explosives and schemed possible attacks on U.S. interests, including a plan to build a dirty bomb. The only evidence that Padilla's lawyer has been allowed to review is a six-page Department of Defense summary of the government's allegations. And it concedes that the captured Al Qaeda members who fingered Padilla may not have been "completely candid" and that some information "remains uncorroborated and may be part of an effort to mislead or confuse U.S. officials."

Despite or perhaps because of this, the administration is fighting a frantic legal battle to hold Padilla mute. In December, U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey ruled that while those the president deemed enemy combatants could be held until the end of the hostilities, Padilla did have the right to meet with counsel and offer evidence contesting the government's allegations. Claiming that would be too great a security risk, and that his interrogation might yet yield valuable information, the government was seeking a reconsideration of the ruling as Mother Jones went to press. But whatever the outcome of this round of courtroom wrangling, no end to Padilla's legal limbo appeared anywhere in sight. And the longer it drags on, the less likely it seems that his detention is entirely driven by security concerns. Padilla may be a small fish in the world of international terrorism, but in the world of domestic politics he is proving to be the perfect fall guy.

In 1996, Osama bin Laden was beginning to make headlines, but Americans were far more worried about a homegrown threat. An influential book published that year described a new generation of "radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters, including ever more preteenage boys, who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious communal disorders" but "do not fear the stigma of arrest, the pains of imprisonment, or the pangs of conscience." That tome, Body Count: Moral PovertyÉand How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs, was written by three heavy hitters in conservative policymaking circles: William J. Bennett, John P. Walters, and John DiIulio Jr. It was DiIulio, an outspoken academic, who coined a new term for what had formerly been known as a juvenile delinquent: the superpredator.

In fact, DiIulio, Bennett, and Walters had constructed a paper tiger. Violent juvenile crime had already begun to decline nationwide before Body Count came out and has continued to drop. Furthermore, the most famous "superpredators" -- the boys accused of the Central Park jogger "wilding" gang rape -- were eventually cleared and released. But politicians continue to stoke voters' fears about inner-city youth -- who, as the most disenfranchised of all Americans, make ideal whipping boys. George W. Bush, for example, who had wielded juvenile crime as a major issue in his gubernatorial campaign, shifted the emphasis of Texas' juvenile justice system from rehabilitation to punishment. Upon becoming president, Bush appointed Body Count co-author Walters, a longtime proponent of criminal penalties for users, to be the nation's drug czar.

After September 11, of course, the "War on Crime" and the "War on Drugs" were almost completely overshadowed by the "War on Terror." But then Jose Padilla came along. He was every political hobgoblin of the last half century rolled into one -- 1950s fifth columnist meets 1990s street thug meets today's Muslim radical. He was the hyperpredator. He was the Bad Guy. And he was completely expendable.

At her modest apartment in Chicago's rough-and-tumble Austin neighborhood, Miriam Hernandez keeps a pair of old snapshots. One shows a group of teenage boys in an alley -- some goofing for the camera, others trying to look tough. The shot, she explains, is of the Adidas Boys, a break-dancing group her sons and their friends formed in the mid-1980s. In their track suits, they could just as easily be from the West Bank as the West Side of Chicago, and I am reminded again that terrorist groups and street gangs alike thrive in places like this, where employment is scarce and civil society is in ruin.

Kneeling in the foreground, his chin resting on his index finger, is a handsome kid with broad arms and fierce dark eyes. "These boys used to spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, and everything with me," she says, "and Jose, when I was cooking, he used to pick at the food."

She remembers him as something of a lost soul, a quiet boy whose father was dead and whose mother had several other children with multiple fathers. Once, she says, he showed up on her doorstep with a "little suitcase" after a fight with his mother. She sent him home, but he continued to spend much of his time at the Hernandez home, often referring to Miriam as "Mom."

The next photo is dark and grainy but there he is, the alleged dirty bomber, busting a move. Feet thrust in the air, the entire weight of his body supported by a lone palm on the pavement, Padilla is captured in a moment of boyish glee.

"He was real strong and good-looking," Hernandez recalls. "All the girls liked him. They all had break-dancing nicknames, and his was Sex because the girls liked him so much."

The shot was taken in 1985, the year Padilla was arrested not far from this apartment after he and some fellow Latin Disciples mugged a rival gang member and left him to die. Padilla was sent to a juvenile detention facility until he was 18; following his release, he had many more run-ins with the law. But even after the government's new allegations, Miriam Hernandez prefers to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"I could tell by looking into his eyes," she says. "When they're bad, you can always tell by looking in a boy's eyes. But he was a good kid."

Her son Jimmie takes a somewhat more cautious view. "He was a nice guy, but he had problems," he says. "He got in trouble and stuff. He always felt pissed off." Perhaps the reason lay in a tattered clipping Padilla carried about: an article, at least as Jimmie remembers it, on his father being shot by a cop. Reading it caused Padilla to "freak out."

Jimmie Hernandez looks tough and world- weary now, but he was one of the awkward adolescents in the Adidas Boys photo. He and Padilla were close, though Hernandez says he hasn't heard from Jose since he moved to Florida in the early 1990s.

"He finally got away from everything and he changed his life," Jimmie remembers thinking. "I was just happy for him."

But Padilla took trouble to Florida, where he spent 303 days in the Broward County jail for taking shots at a motorist. Not long after he was released his interest in Islam began to bloom, and after a series of dead-end jobs and a failed marriage, he moved to Egypt in 1998 and, according to the government, plunged into the extremist underground. Jimmie seems baffled by the strange turns in Padilla's life, but says he knows enough to doubt the terrorist allegations.

"I don't think that he had any intention of doing something bad," he says. "I think he just saw money" -- Padilla was reportedly carrying $10,000 in cash at the time of his arrest -- "and he was going to run off with it. I think he was going to double-cross them."

This theory strikes me as fairly implausible -- but then again, so does the one posed by the Justice Department. And neither John Ashcroft nor Jimmie Hernandez is backing up his version of events with evidence.

Padilla's case, many legal scholars agree, marks a dramatic escalation of the broad detention powers that the government claimed in the wake of September 11. The White House initially assured Americans that any encroachments on civil liberties would affect only foreign nationals. But the Justice Department later declared that Yaser Esam Hamdi -- a Saudi captured by Northern Alliance forces -- qualified as an enemy combatant, despite the fact that he was born in Louisiana. Unlike Hamdi, however, Padilla's citizenship was never in doubt. And far from being captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan, he was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, after federal agents -- who evidently didn't consider him enough of an immediate threat to prevent him from boarding a plane -- tailed him back from Pakistan.

Padilla was not even granted the same rights as John Walker Lindh, a U.S. citizen who took up arms against American forces but was nonetheless allowed to plea-bargain in federal court. There may be many reasons for the difference in the two men's treatment, but it's impossible to ignore the most obvious ones: Lindh is well connected and white, while Padilla is poor and Puerto Rican. Unlike Lindh, whose father is a prominent attorney, Padilla can count on little support from his family -- which, according to one report, includes a half brother in jail on first-degree murder charges and a homeless sister. Lindh had a high-priced legal team; Padilla's attorney, Donna R. Newman, is a court-appointed lawyer with relatively few resources. And while Lindh underwent a public-relations makeover, with family members releasing clean-cut pictures of him as an adolescent and insisting he "loves America," Padilla cannot begin to hope for middle-class sympathy.

Indeed, his ethnicity and criminal history "make him a convenient vehicle for the government to assume this really extraordinary power," says David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and co-author of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Secur-ity. "In the end, if the government's ability to do this is limited, it will be because people are concerned that they will be next. But when the government targets someone who does not look like the rest of us, whom the majority can continue to consider different from them, that gives people some sort of solace -- a false solace -- that their own rights aren't at stake."

Little is known about Padilla's life in the brig at Charleston. According to one new report, his cell is floodlit 24 hours a day. He has been interrogated for months. He has no contact with the outside world. No mail, no phone, no newspaper or television. No way to know that his lawyer -- who was allowed to meet with him before he was declared an enemy combatant -- is still working on his behalf. And despite her efforts, he is likely to be there a very long time.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that enemy combatants won't be released until the War on Terror is over -- and that the war won't be over until no terrorist organizations of potentially global reach are left in the world. "We're going to cure the common cold before we extirpate political violence from the face of the globe," says Cole. "And in today's world, everyone has potentially global reach. So Rumsfeld is essentially claiming that the war on terrorism will last forever -- and that they have the authority to keep people forever, without any hearing, without any trial, even without any access to a lawyer."

Even so, civil-liberties groups, spread thin by the administration's sweeping attack on due process, have been unable to focus much public attention on the case. Jose Padilla makes poor martyr material. Were he to be found guilty in a court of law, he would deserve to remain in prison for a very long time. Until the government grants him his constitutional rights, however, it's not just one Bad Guy being held captive, but an entire system of justice.

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