So for some god forsaken reason I was watching the network news last night.  Oh…right…I know what it was.  I was watching for stories about that escaped convict that killed two people down in southern Virginia.  First of all I have family down there, but secondly the crime itself seemed just dumbfoundingly stupid.  Stupid beyond stupid being its own excuse.  Here’s this…kid, basically…who was in jail for attempted armed robbery, and he tries to escape and in the process kills two people and now he’s facing a death sentence.  Far as I could tell it was his first arrest so there was no "three strikes" kind of thing going on there.  What kind of drooling moron turns a few years in prison into an appointment with the gas chamber?  Making an escape attempt if the opportunity just threw itself at you I could see (it’s still dumb, but not catastrophically dumb), but when the guns come out, hey, just go quietly man.  It’s just attempted armed robbery.  Just do the fucking time and deal with it.  But no…and now he’s 24 and headed for death row.  So I was searching for any insight into this guy I could snatch from the news stream.  That’s why I happened to be watching CBS News last night…

…and among the stories Bob Schieffer read to me was a little nugget about the Jose Padilla case.  Padilla, you may recall, had been in a South Carolina brig for over three years as an ”enemy combatant”…an American citizen accused but never charged in the Bush administration way of doing things, of planning to set off a ”dirty bomb” somewhere in the U.S.  Padilla is one of the guys the Bush administration has been holding out as a reason for doing away with that troublesome bill of rights that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and liberals.  But rather then loose a fight over it in the supreme court before he could pack it with enough right wing lunatics who were willing to declare Bush King George The First, the Bush administration finally brought Padilla into court.  Schieffer casually informed me last night that the judge had thrown out one of the three counts against him.  And as I was busy searching for news about the Virginia killings, I casually shrugged off the story just as Schieffer did while he was reading it.

But…no…there was more to it…

Judge drops Padilla terror charge

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — A federal judge in Miami on Monday dismissed a terror count against Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen once identified as a "dirty bomb" suspect and detained as an "enemy combatant."

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said in a written opinion that the charge — conspiracy to "murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country" — duplicated other counts in a federal grand jury indictment handed down last year.

"An indictment is multiplicitous when it charges a single offense multiple times, in separate counts," Cooke wrote. As charged, she added, the indictment exposes Padilla and his co-defendants to multiple punishments for a single crime.

The indictment, Cooke noted, "alleges one and only one conspiracy" and that the same facts are "re-alleged in each of the consecutive counts."

Cooke also ruled that a second count against Padilla and his co-defendants was "duplicitous" — charging them with the same offense under two sections of federal law. She ordered the government to choose between the two counts, which provide for different penalties, by Friday.

The counts in question are conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, and providing material support to terrorists.

The main terror charge against him was thrown out.  Not just …one out of three.  And…in case you haven’t been following this…remember that the accusation the Bush gang had been throwing around, that he was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S., was never even part of the indictment.  So now it’s just two charges of conspiracy to support terrorists abroad, and get this, the charges are that he was involved in a plot for five years, and the other charge is that he was involved in Exactly The Same Plot, for 15 years. 

What the fuck?  I’m shocked that the Bush gang didn’t manage to find fifteen squared charges in that fifteen years of plotting to…er…support terrorists abroad.  Count one:  Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year.  Count two:  Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for two years. Count three: Padilla was involved in conspiracy ‘a’ for one year, and then again for one year more.  And so on until you get fifteen times fifteen counts against him that you can wave around as proof that the president needs more power then the constitution gives him, because these are very dangerous times.  What the judge said was, no…that’s all just one conspiracy.

I discovered what the implications of the ruling were not from CBS News, but via Americablog, which had a link to a Miami Herald article that gave me the details CBS News didn’t feel like I needed to have, and once again I hit the roof.  I hate those bastards.  I really hate them.  I used to watch the evening network news avidly.  I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley.  Maybe it was just living in the Washington D.C. suburbs.  Maybe it was just the hungry curious about the world mind I always had.  But I had to have my news fix every day after dinner, even when I was an elementary school kid, and anxious to watch Astro Boy too when the news was over.  And now I can’t really bear to watch TV news anymore.  Why even bother, when I have to double check everything I hear them tell me anyway?