The New New Journalism

by digby

If you haven’t heard, Firedoglake is once again expanding the parameters of netroots blogging and they’ve engaged veteran journalist Lew Koch to cover the Padilla trial in Miami. Judging from the first dispatch it’s going to be fascinating.

Now that the case is finally coming to trial, I wondered how much has the five year pursuit of this relatively unremarkable thug Padilla cost the taxpayer so far? Adding up the fractional salary costs of the people and prisons we have two Attorney Generals, two, four Deputy Attorney Generals and several Assistant U.S. Attorneys, the Solicitor General, Deputy Solicitors General and Assistants to the Solicitor General, three U.S. District Court Judges, two Federal Courts of Appeals Judges, law clerks by the dozen, several baker’s dozens of FBI agents, intelligence community agents, U.S. Marshals, supervisory and support personnel for the law enforcement agents overt and covert., at least three full-time federal public defenders, many court reporters, plus personnel benefits for all federal employees and the salaried of the benefits managers, imprisoning for five years including solitary confinement for three and a half years, under close observation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week in a Navy brig, and what appears to be a six month trial in Miami, Florida, the cost to the United States Government and its hapless taxpayers comes to more than $20 million. And counting. All to justify an absurd-on-the-face-of-it contention that Padilla– a misfit Chicago Latin King gang thug – was going to trigger a radioactive dispersal device –a “dirty bomb” when the more likely reality was that this former thug-dishwasher wanted to go down in history as a somebody.

The government could argue that the cost was worth it if Padilla was bent on “unleashing hell” on the United States.

But there’s another cost involved in this case – one that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, the costs to a citizen’s constitutional rights under law.

Stay tuned. This is going to be very interesting. The government lost its collective mind for a time — I suppose we could have expected it after 9/11. But they have refused to regain it once the smoke cleared and have been covering up for it ever since then in innumerable ways. There are huge lessons to be learned about human nature and the nature of power. (And I must admit that I am waiting most anxiously for the novelists and playwrights to use this material. I think it may be the only way we will really understand it.)

But in the meantime, I am greatly looking forward to reading Koch’s tale of the trial on FDL and congratulations to Jane and her crew for putting this together. Some people may not want to admit it, but real journalism is being done on some of these here blogs and “real good” journalism at that.

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