Padilla and the Constitution

Phil Carter has worthwhile thoughts on the frighteningly Kafka-esque arguments being employed in favor of continued detention of Jose Padilla. His key paragraph:

There is a term of art that lawyers use to refer to a case that can only be proven by ill-gotten evidence: "bootstrapping". If there was ever a textbook case of bootstrapping, this is it. The Justice Department declined to indict Jose Padilla in May 2002 when it had the chance, and instead has deployed lawyers to fight for the White House's right to hold him as an enemy combatant. Now, it has built a criminal case against him, but only by questioning him in violation of his Constitutional rights in a way that means this evidence can never be used in court. Without this evidence, the Justice Department can't make its case. And indeed, without this evidence, the entire case against Jose Padilla probably goes away. The irony of that is that good police work and Constitutional interrogation might have been able to crack Mr. Padilla, while leaving open the possibility of a criminal trial should he eventually be charged in federal court. But more importantly, this evidence (gathered through admittedly unconstitutional means) is not being used in court — it's being used to justify Mr. Padilla's continued detention without any court proceedings at all. I can't figure out which cart is before which horse, because so many things are backwards here.

I can't figure it out either.