The appalling part of the Jose Padilla case is that, whatever -- if anything -- this American citizen is ultimately convicted of having done, he has so far been imprisoned with no trial for three-and-a-half years.

Mr. Padilla, a 35-year old civilian, was first detained by federal authorities in Chicago in 2002. His arrest came in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was said to have been planning to set off a "dirty bomb" and was labelled an "enemy combatant" in spite of his American citizenship. But no indictment was returned and he was imprisoned under military custody with no lawyer. The U.S. Navy tossed Mr. Padilla in jail and threw away the key for the next 30 months.

Various legal appeals were made on his behalf to attempt to insert him and any charges that were to be made against him in court into the American civilian judicial system. Days before the U.S. Supreme Court was to become involved, the Bush administration pulled him out of U.S. military imprisonment and turned him over to the civilian justice system for disposition.

From the point of view of Mr. Padilla himself and his right to be dealt with under due process of U.S. law, which includes habeas corpus -- charge or release -- not much has changed. He is still locked up; he has still not been tried, although he has now been charged with conspiracy.

In principle, it shouldn't make any difference that he is an American citizen and that the many others who are held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and possibly other locations by the U.S. military and by the CIA, are not. On the other hand, most Americans like to think that their citizenship counts for something in how they are treated by their government. For Mr. Padilla it has been about as bad as it gets, in spite of his citizenship.

Not that that line of argument means that it is all right for American authorities to hold hundreds of citizens of other countries outside the law, without trial, on the grounds that they either hold useful intelligence information or might be a future threat to U.S. interests if they were released. They, too, deserve a trial if the United States is to be considered a nation of law.

The long and the short of it is that Jose Padilla has been very badly treated by the government of his country. It is already very late in the day, but at the very least, he should now be tried or released, very expeditiously.

The bottom line for the rest of the American population is that the same treatment -- preventive detention, one of the most obnoxious practices of the world's worst police states -- could be administered to any one of them by their own government, with no ready appeal. The injustice done Mr. Padilla is a case of executive authority out of control and a total betrayal of American standards.

What is going on in this country?