Padilla Convicted
So, after five years of legal wrangling, Padilla has had his day in court and is destined to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
It was back in May, 2002 that FBI agents detained Padilla, an American citizen with a criminal past, upon arrival at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Soon, he was publicly accused of plotting with al Qaeda to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" on the homeland.
"We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States," then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced just eight months after the Twin Towers fell. Within a month, the Bush Administration proclaimed the Muslim convert an "enemy combatant" and whisked him to a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
While his court-appointed attorneys fought it, the government detained Padilla in Guantanamo-style military custody for three-and-half-years, in near total isolation, without charges levied. It was a state of legal limbo his attorneys challenged all the way to the Supreme Court and which the high court may still address. The Miami trial judge rejected complaints by Padilla's attorneys that the harsh treatment left Padilla mentally unfit to stand trial.
And, so he has, along with two elders portrayed as leaders of a South Florida support cell –- Adnan Hassoun, a former computer programmer, and Kifah Jayyousi, a former school administrator, both 45. From hundreds of hours of wiretapped phone calls dating back to the mid-1990's, the jury heard Padilla and his co-defendants discussing what the government asserted were plans for "violent jihad," or holy war, in support of Muslim insurgents in places like Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Prosecutors labeled Padilla, heard on seven calls, a "star recruit."
"Whatever Allah ... has open for us ... I'm still ready, are you?" Padilla, then living in Egypt, asked Hassoun in a July 1999 call. A year later, Padilla was filling out an application to train with al Qaeda. The prosecution's key evidence was that five-page document bearing Padilla's signature and seven of his fingerprints.
A key government witness who filled out the same form was Yayha Goba, one of those six Buffalo-area men serving prison time for going to the camps. Goba described for jurors how trainees underwent extensive firearms and explosives training.
Then, in the trial's most contested evidence, the defendants were tied directly to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden when excerpts of his 1997 threat-filled interview with CNN were played for the jury, followed by a wiretapped call of Hassoun and Jayyousi praising bin Laden.
But during the trial, no specific plots, attacks, or deaths were said to have resulted from the alleged conspiracy. Padilla called no witnesses and presented no evidence. His codefendants did, chiefly arguing that their actions were humanitarian relief efforts.
The ethnically diverse jury of seven men and five women – five Latinos, four whites, three blacks – took just a day and half to decide the case, the shortest jury deliberation in a major terrorism case in recent memory.