In addition, these withdrawals are -- we know this thanks to a Seymour Hersh piece, Up in the Air, in the December 5th New Yorker -- to be accompanied, as in South Vietnam in the Nixon era, by an unleashing of the U.S. Air Force. The added air power is meant to compensate for any lost punch on the ground (and will undoubtedly lead to more "collateral damage" -- that is, Iraqi deaths).

It is important to note that all promises of drawdowns or withdrawals are invariably linked to the dubious proposition that the Bush administration can "stand up" an effective Iraqi army and police force (think "Vietnamization" again), capable of circumscribing the Sunni insurgency and so allowing American troops to pull back to bases outside major urban areas, as well as to Kuwait and points as far west as the United States. Further, all administration or military withdrawal promises prove to be well hedged with caveats and obvious loopholes, phrases like "if all goes according to plan and security improves..." or "it also depends on the ability of the Iraqis to..."

Since guerrilla attacks have actually been on the rise and the delivery of the basic amenities of modern civilization (electrical power, potable water, gas for cars, functional sewage systems, working traffic lights, and so on) on the decline, since the very establishment of a government inside the heavily fortified Green Zone has proved immensely difficult, and since U.S. reconstruction funds (those that haven't already disappeared down one clogged drain or another) are drying up, such partial withdrawals may prove more complicated to pull off than imagined. It's clear, nonetheless, that "withdrawal" is on the propaganda agenda of an administration heading into mid-term elections with an increasingly skittish Republican Party in tow and congressional candidates worried about defending the President's mission-unaccomplished war of choice. Under the circumstances, we can expect more hints of, followed by promises of, followed by announcements of "major" withdrawals, possibly including news in the fall election season of even more "massive" withdrawals slated for the end of 2006 or early 2007, all hedged with conditional clauses and "only ifs" -- withdrawal promises that, once the election is over, this administration would undoubtedly feel under no particular obligation to fulfill.

Assuming, then, a near year to come of withdrawal buzz, speculation, and even a media blitz of withdrawal announcements, the question is: How can anybody tell if the Bush administration is actually withdrawing from Iraq or not? Sometimes, when trying to cut through a veritable fog of misinformation and disinformation, it helps to focus on something concrete. In the case of Iraq, nothing could be more concrete -- though less generally discussed in our media -- than the set of enormous bases the Pentagon has long been building in that country. Quite literally multi-billions of dollars have gone into them. In a prestigious engineering magazine in late 2003, Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, was already speaking proudly of several billion dollars being sunk into base construction ("the numbers are staggering"). Since then, the base-building has been massive and ongoing.

In a country in such startling disarray, these bases, with some of the most expensive and advanced communications systems on the planet, are like vast spaceships that have landed from another solar system. Representing a staggering investment of resources, effort, and geostrategic dreaming, they are the unlikeliest places for the Bush administration to hand over willingly to even the friendliest of Iraqi governments.

If, as just about every expert agrees, Bush-style reconstruction has failed dismally in Iraq, thanks to thievery, knavery, and sheer incompetence, and is now essentially ending, it has been a raging success in Iraq's "Little America." For the first time, we have actual descriptions of a couple of the "super-bases" built in Iraq in the last two and a half years and, despite being written by reporters under Pentagon information restrictions, they are sobering. Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post paid a visit to Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, 68 kilometers north of Baghdad and "smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq." In a piece entitled Biggest Base in Iraq Has Small-Town Feel, Ricks paints a striking portrait:

The base is sizeable enough to have its own "neighborhoods" including "KBR-land" (in honor of the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the base-construction work in Iraq); "CJSOTF" ("home to a special operations unit," the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, surrounded by "especially high walls," and so secretive that even the base Army public affairs chief has never been inside); and a junkyard for bombed out Army Humvees. There is as well a Subway, a Pizza Hut, a Popeye's, "an ersatz Starbucks," a 24-hour Burger King, two post exchanges where TVs, iPods, and the like can be purchased, four mess halls, a hospital, a strictly enforced on-base speed limit of 10 MPH, a huge airstrip, 250 aircraft (helicopters and predator drones included), air-traffic pile-ups of a sort you would see over Chicago's O'Hare airport, and "a miniature golf course, which mimics a battlefield with its baby sandbags, little Jersey barriers, strands of concertina wire and, down at the end of the course, what appears to be a tiny detainee cage."

Ricks reports that the 20,000 troops stationed at Balad live in "air-conditioned containers" which will, in the future -- and yes, for those building these bases, there still is a future -- be wired "to bring the troops Internet, cable television and overseas telephone access." He points out as well that, of the troops at Balad, "only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi."

Recently, Oliver Poole, a British reporter, visited another of the American "super-bases," the still-under-construction al-Asad Airbase (Football and pizza point to US staying for long haul). He observes, of "the biggest Marine camp in western Anbar province," that "this stretch of desert increasingly resembles a slice of US suburbia." In addition to the requisite Subway and pizza outlets, there is a football field, a Hertz rent-a-car office, a swimming pool, and a movie theater showing the latest flicks. Al-Asad is so large -- such bases may cover 15-20 square miles -- that it has two bus routes and, if not traffic lights, at least red stop signs at all intersections.

There are at least four such "super-bases" in Iraq, none of which have anything to do with "withdrawal" from that country. Quite the contrary, these bases are being constructed as little American islands of eternal order in an anarchic sea. Whatever top administration officials and military commanders say -- and they always deny that we seek "permanent" bases in Iraq -– facts-on-the-ground speak with another voice entirely. These bases practically scream "permanency."

Unfortunately, there's a problem here. American reporters adhere to a simple rule: The words "permanent," "bases," and "Iraq" should never be placed in the same sentence, not even in the same paragraph; in fact, not even in the same news report. While a LexisNexis search of the last 90 days of press coverage of Iraq produced a number of examples of the use of those three words in the British press, the only U.S. examples that could be found occurred when 80% of Iraqis (obviously somewhat unhinged by their difficult lives) insisted in a poll that the United States might indeed desire to establish bases and remain permanently in their country; or when "no" or "not" was added to the mix via any American official denial. (It's strange, isn't it, that such bases, imposing as they are, generally only exist in our papers in the negative.) Three examples will do:

The Secretary of Defense: ""During a visit with U.S. troops in Fallujah on Christmas Day, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said ‘at the moment there are no plans for permanent bases' in Iraq. ‘It is a subject that has not even been discussed with the Iraqi government.'"

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq: "We already have handed over significant chunks of territory to the Iraqis. Those are not simply plans to do so; they are being executed right now. It is not only our plan but our policy that we do not intend to have any permanent bases in Iraq."

Karen Hughes on the Charlie Rose Show: "CHARLIE ROSE: …they think we are still there for the oil, or they think the United States wants permanent bases. Does the United States want permanent bases in Iraq? KAREN HUGHES: We want nothing more than to bring our men and women in uniform home. As soon as possible, but not before they finish the job. CHARLIE ROSE: And do not want to keep bases there? KAREN HUGHES: No, we want to bring our people home as soon as possible."

Still, for a period, the Pentagon practiced something closer to truth in advertising than did our major papers. At least, they called the big bases in Iraq "enduring camps," a label which had a certain charm and reeked of permanency. (Later, they were later relabeled, far less romantically, "contingency operating bases.")

One of the enduring mysteries of this war is that reporting on our bases in Iraq has been almost nonexistent these last years, especially given an administration so weighted toward military solutions to global problems; especially given the heft of some of the bases; especially given the fact that the Pentagon was mothballing our bases in Saudi Arabia and saw these as long-term substitutes; especially given the fact that the neocons and other top administration officials were so focused on controlling the so-called arc of instability (basically, the energy heartlands of the planet) at whose center was Iraq; and especially given the fact that Pentagon pre-war planning for such "enduring camps" was, briefly, a front-page story in a major newspaper.

A little history may be in order here:

On April 19, 2003, soon after Baghdad fell to American troops, reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt wrote a front-page piece for the New York Times indicating that the Pentagon was planning to "maintain" four bases in Iraq for the long haul, though "there will probably never be an announcement of permanent stationing of troops." Rather than speak of "permanent bases," the military preferred then to speak coyly of "permanent access" to Iraq. The bases, however, fit snugly with other Pentagon plans, already on the drawing boards. For instance, Saddam's 400,000 man military was to be replaced by only a 40,000 man, lightly armed military without significant armor or an air force. (In an otherwise heavily armed region, this insured that any Iraqi government would be almost totally reliant on the American military and that the U.S. Air Force would, by default, be the Iraqi Air Force for years to come.) While much space in our papers has, of late, been devoted to the administration's lack of postwar planning, next to no interest has been shown in the planning that did take place.

At a press conference a few days after the Shanker and Schmitt piece appeared, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. was "unlikely to seek any permanent or ‘long-term' bases in Iraq" -- and that was that. The Times' piece was essentially sent down the memory hole. While scads of bases were being built -- including four huge ones whose geographic placement correlated fairly strikingly with the four mentioned in the Times article -- reports about U.S. bases in Iraq, or any Pentagon planning in relation to them, largely disappeared from the American media. (With rare exceptions, you could only find discussions of "permanent bases" in these last years at Internet sites like Tomdispatch or Global Security.org.)

In May 2005, however, Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported that we had 106 bases, ranging from mega to micro in Iraq. Most of these were to be given back to the Iraqi military, now being "stood up" as a far larger force than originally imagined by Pentagon planners, leaving the U.S. with, Graham reported, just the number of bases -- 4 -- that the Times first mentioned over two years earlier, including Balad Air Base and the base Poole visited in western Anbar Province. This reduction was presented not as a fulfillment of original Pentagon thinking, but as a "withdrawal plan." (A modest number of these bases have since been turned over to the Iraqis, including one in Tikrit transferred to Iraqi military units which, according to Poole, promptly stripped it to the bone.)

The future of a fifth base -- the enormous Camp Victory at Baghdad International Airport -- remains, as far as we know, "unresolved"; and there is a sixth possible "permanent super-base" being built in that country, though never presented as such. The Bush administration is sinking between $600 million and $1 billion in construction funds into a new U.S. embassy. It is to arise in Baghdad's Green Zone on a plot of land along the Tigris River that is reportedly two-thirds the area of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The plans for this "embassy" are almost mythic in nature. A high-tech complex, it is to have "15ft blast walls and ground-to-air missiles" for protection as well as bunkers to guard against air attacks. It will, according to Chris Hughes, security correspondent for the British Daily Mirror, include "as many as 300 houses for consular and military officials" and a "large-scale barracks" for Marines. The "compound" will be a cluster of at least 21 buildings, assumedly nearly self-sufficient, including "a gym, swimming pool, barber and beauty shops, a food court and a commissary. Water, electricity and sewage treatment plants will all be independent from Baghdad's city utilities." It is being billed as "more secure than the Pentagon" (not, perhaps, the most reassuring tagline in the post-9/11 world). If not quite a city-state, on completion it will resemble an embassy-state. In essence, inside Baghdad's Green Zone, we will be building another more heavily fortified little Green Zone.

Even Tony Blair's Brits, part of our unraveling, ever-shrinking "coalition of the willing" in Iraq, are reported by Brian Brady of the Scotsman (Revealed: secret plan to keep UK troops permanently in Iraq) to be bargaining for a tiny permanent base -- sorry a base "for years to come" -- near Basra in southern Iraq, thus mimicking American "withdrawal" strategy on the micro-scale that befits a junior partner.

As Juan Cole has pointed out at his Informed Comment blog, the Pentagon can plan for "endurance" in Iraq forever and a day, while top Bush officials and neocons, some now in exile, can continue to dream of a permanent set of bases in the deserts of Iraq that would control the energy heartlands of the planet. None of that will, however, make such bases any more "permanent" than their enormous Vietnam-era predecessors at places like Danang and Cam Rahn Bay proved to be -- not certainly if the Shiites decide they want us gone or Ayatollah Sistani (as Cole points out) were to issue a fatwa against such bases.

Nonetheless, the thought of permanency matters. Since the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases -- call them what you will -- have been at the heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction" of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain at the secret heart of Bush administration "reconstruction" policy. As long as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and ever more valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal" from Iraq, nor even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them and the press -- with the exception of the odd columnist -- won't even put the words "base," "permanent," and "Iraq" in the same paragraph.

It may be hard to do, given the skimpy coverage, but keep your eyes directed at our "super-bases." Until the administration blinks on them, there will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has recently come out in paperback.

Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt

Had the normal policy been followed, it is very likely that all the women held by the United States would have been released by now. By delaying the releases of female detainees to strike a tough anti-terrorism pose, the administration has increased the risk to Jill Carroll's life.

Carroll's abductors, who threatened on Jan. 17 to kill Carroll if all female detainees were not released by Jan. 20, did not carry out the threat. But they announced a new deadline of Feb. 26 for the release of all the female detainees in a video aired by a Kuwaiti TV station over the weekend.

When the initial deadline was announced by Carroll's abductors, a major release of hundreds of prisoners had already been planned, and Iraqi officials had expected six female detainees to be included among them.

The Iraqi ministries of justice and human rights revealed to reporters that they had reviewed the cases of the six women brought to them and had recommended to U.S. authorities that all six be released on the grounds that there was no solid evidence against them. Apparently the release had originally been scheduled before the deadline announced by Carroll's captors.

"In my opinion, all of them are innocent," said Deputy Justice Minister Busho Ibrahim Ali.

The Pentagon, however, at first refused even to comment on the possible release of the women. When the Jan. 20 deadline was aired by the Al Jazeera television network, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter of the Central Command was quoted as saying of the female detainees, "There is no expected resolution of their cases in the near future."

But Reuters reported on Jan. 25 that Iraqi officials "have been at odds with their U.S. counterparts" over the release of the women, and that the Iraqis were suggesting that "the delay in releasing the women was linked to the demands of the kidnappers of Carroll..."

Thus U.S. officials -- contrary to the expressed position of the Iraqi authorities involved -- were blocking the release of six female detainees as part of a previously scheduled release. That decision was apparently motivated by a desire to appear tougher on terrorism to the U.S. public.

On Jan. 26, five of the six women were released, along with 419 others. The sixth woman, whom the Iraqi officials had judged innocent, is still being detained without explanation.

Even after that release, a total of six women were still held in U.S. prisons in the country. Jill Carroll's life was still in danger, as nothing had been heard from her captors since the original deadline had been announced on Jan. 17.

But the problem of female detainees could have been resolved quickly under existing U.S. policy. U.S. command spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson alluded to that policy on Jan. 20 when he said, "Of course, we understand the cultural sensitivities in detaining females and pay particular attention to assessing their files."

Reporters understood that Johnson meant that the U.S. military would make special efforts to process the cases of women more quickly than those of men. Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor, for which Carroll had been writing, reported Jan. 26 that the policy of giving priority to releases of women was prompted by the "anger and violence generated by U.S. detention of women".

The six women remaining in prison could have been considered for another release scheduled to take place on Feb. 5. When 50 more prisoners were released on that date, however, none of the six female prisoners was among them. In order to avoid any appearance of being responsive to the kidnappers, the U.S. command had not even followed its own policy on female detainees.

The U.S. command has claimed that all the women who are detained are considered dangerous to security. All detainees are automatically charged with "aiding terrorists or planting explosives".

Based on the record of the first two and a half years of the U.S. system of detention, however, it is almost certain that every one of the women still detained will ultimately be freed because of lack of evidence against them.

Last November, "Raw Story", an alternative web-based news site, reported figures from the U.S. Central Command showing that 35,000 people had been detained for extended periods since the beginning of the war, of whom 21,000 had been released and only 1,259 ever formally accused of illegal activities. Of those who were accused, only 636 were convicted.

Thus, 98.6 percent of the detainees in the U.S. system have eventually been released.

Documents obtained the American Civil Liberties Union and the testimony of former detainees and a U.S. general suggest that most of the female detainees over the past two years were being held because of family ties to suspected insurgents.

Nancy Youssef of Knight-Ridder reported on Jan. 28 that a woman who had been detained at Baghdad International Airport in September 2004 said she found that all eight women in her cell had been detained only because their husbands or fathers were suspected of being in the insurgency.

A memo by a civilian intelligence officer who participated in a raid on the house of suspect near Baghdad in May 2004 recalled that units carrying out the operation were told that, if the wife of the suspect was present, she should be "detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender".

Former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the military police commander at Abu Ghraib Prison when the abuse story broke, told the Associated Press that she knew of "perhaps 15 or 20 cases" of detention of wives of suspects in 2003, and that it was the practice for "higher value detainees".

As the Christian Science Monitor's Dan Murphy observed, Iraqis generally assume that U.S. prisons still abuse female detainees, regardless of changes that may have been made in U.S. policy on their treatment.

Iraqi memories of the abuses of women in Abu Ghraib remain an open wound. A letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib in December 2003 told of multiple rapes of prisoners and of several women who had become pregnant.

The "Taguba report" on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses said photographs shot by U.S. guards at the prison included images of both male and female prisoners stripped naked, a male guard in a pose of having sex with a female detainee and naked male and female detainees forcibly arranged in various sexual positions.

(*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.)

It said that by "taking control of virtually all of Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, the Taliban have gained a significant base from which to wage their resistance against US-led forces in Afghanistan.

..."At the same time, the development solidifies the anti-US resistance groups in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, which will now fight under a single strategy," the report in the Hong Kong-based magazine said.

In a related report, 'The Friday Times' said "the growing influence of militants and resultant insecurity have forced tribesmen in the restive North and South Waziristan to migrate to adjacent districts of the North West Front Province".

Copyright © 2006Times Internet Limited

“Taleban attacks will further increase with a decrease in the winter cold,” a former Taleban governor of Kandahar province, Mullah Mohammad Hassan Rahmani, told Reuters by satellite telephone from an undisclosed location.

Fighting in Afghanistan traditionally eases off during the winter months when mountain passes get snowed under.

But violence has surged in recent months, including 15 suicide blasts since November.

US military officials say the Taleban have changed tactics since suffering heavy losses in clashes last summer and are now increasingly using roadside blasts and suicide bombers against soft targets.

The four US troops were killed when their armoured Humvee vehicle was hit by a blast in the central province of Uruzgan, the US military said.

Suspected Taleban insurgents burned down a school in an eastern province in the latest attack on the US-backed government’s efforts to promote education. One guard was wounded in the Monday night attack, a provincial spokesman said.

The violence comes as the first 150 of about 3,300 British troops were leaving Britain for the southern Afghan province of Helmand.

The 150 Royal Marines commandos are part of an advance party of 850 British troops deploying to Helmand this month to help prepare for the arrival of the full contingent in the summer, a British military spokeswoman said.

“Heavy losses”

Britain, Canada and the Netherlands are leading an expansion of a NATO peacekeeping force into the volatile south while the United States is hoping to withdraw 3,000 of the more than 18,000 troops it has in a separate force battling the insurgency.

Rahmani said the more foreign forces there were, the more targets the Taleban would have to attack.

He said the Taleban had grown stronger since they were ousted by US and Afghan opposition forces after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and the suicide bombers were helping to drive US forces out.

“American forces have become helpless before the Taleban’s suicide and other attacks,” he said.

“The Taleban are inflicting heavy losses on American forces in men and material and it is to hide the cowardice and failure of their troops that America is reducing its forces.”

While the British forces will be stationed in Helmand, the Dutch will be in neighbouring Uruzgan province. Canada will soon have about 2,000 troops in Kandahar province, another insurgent hotspot in the south.

The Taleban are fighting to expel foreign forces and defeat the government but most Afghans say they need foreign troops in their country to ensure security.

The court papers were filed last week in preparation for the detention appeal to be argued Friday before U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke. Padilla's defense attorneys are trying to get the accused terrorist released on bond.

Prosecutors were expected to reply in writing to the defense's renewed request for bond before the hearing. Calls to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami were not returned before deadline Monday.

The trial of Padilla and co-defendants charged with providing material support, money and fighters for Muslim terrorists around the world is scheduled to start in September before Cooke and may take six months.

Padilla is accused of going to Afghanistan to attend a terrorist training camp. The U.S. citizen was charged in November after spending more than three years in military custody as an "enemy combatant" without any charges filed against him.

In his appeal, lead counsel Michael Caruso, chief deputy federal public defender in Miami, disputes many of the allegations the government is making to prove its case that Padilla supported a Muslin holy war and trained to be a terrorist.

The most dramatic contention made by the defense is that the form produced by prosecutors may be a fraud. The government should have conducted a fingerprint analysis, the defense contends.

"There are several difficulties with the government's reliance upon this form that should trouble this court," Caruso wrote in the court filing.

The government claims Padilla completed the form in July 2000, but the government didn't get a copy until December 2001, Caruso pointed out.

"The chain of custody of this form is thus unknown," he states. "Although the government has had this form for 4 1/2 years and has had Mr. Padilla in custody for 3 1/2 years, the prosecution has yet to submit this form for fingerprint analysis."

Additionally, the government has no proof that Padilla writes or speaks Arabic, although it provided a copy of the form in Arabic to the court.

"The document is meaningless without evidence that Mr. Padilla actually completed the form," the defense maintains.

The government also offered no proof that the name on the form, Abu Abdallah al Mujahir, was adopted by Padilla, Caruso said. The name Abu Abdallah "is a common one," noting that Abu means "father of" in Arabic.

The government also offered no proof that Padilla actually attended a terrorist training camp, Caruso asserts in the court filing.

At Padilla's pretrial detention hearing Jan. 12, Justice Department lawyer Stephanie Pell claimed that the training camp application was authenticated by a cooperating government witness. She also said Padilla's date of birth, Oct. 18, 1970, was on his application.

As evidence that Padilla should be detained in solitary confinement, prosecutors stated they intercepted 50,000 phone calls in the alleged eight-year terrorism conspiracy among the five defendants.

But the defense contends that Padilla is only alleged to have participated in seven of those conversations.

The defense said that limited role was not disclosed to U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry Garber, who denied bond for Padilla Jan. 12 after he was released from a Navy brig.

Caruso also took issue with the content of those conversations. At Padilla's initial detention hearing, the government alleged the callers used code words.

In a July 1999 conversation, Padilla allegedly spoke with co-defendant Adham Amin Hassoun and requested "supplies such as an army jacket and a sleeping bag because there was a rumor that a route had been found to enter into an area of an armed conflict."

The defense said a transcript of the call disclosed that Padilla never said "armed conflict" but used the phrase "the door was open somewhere."

The defense version conflicts with the government's assertions in the indictment that the defendants used words like "tourism" and "travel" to mean jihad.

Similarly, a prosecution claim that Hassoun told Padilla to "prepare himself financially so that he could move to an entry area close to an armed conflict" also is unsupported, the defense says. Hassoun used the phrase "close area."

The government has not substantiated its claim that Hassoun supported Padilla when he lived in Egypt for four years, the defense said.

"The government has failed to show that Mr. Padilla received any significant amount of money from Hassoun," the appeal states.

Caruso also slammed the government for failing to provide final transcripts from its intercepted phone conversations, and only drafts. The drafts "are not entitled to any serious weight," he states in the appeal.

Padilla is not a flight risk and should be released from jail until his trial, Caruso asserted in the appeal, noting his mother lives in Broward County, Florida, and he has a wife in Chicago.

"Mr. Padilla has very strong family ties to the Southern District of Florida and to the United States," states Caruso. "Because of these significant family ties he is not a serious flight risk."

Aside from ties to the community, a judge considering bond also must decide whether a defendant poses a risk to the community.