August 16, 2007
Padilla Found Guilty Of All Charges
UPDATED.
Jose Padilla and two co-defendants have been found guilty of all the terrorism counts against them, including conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas and providing material support for terrorism.
The seven men and five women on the jury reached their decision after a day and a half of deliberations in the U.S. District Court in Miami. Padilla and his co-defendants could receive a life sentence for the conspiracy charges; the material support charges carry up to 15 years.
For Padilla (pronounced puh-dill-ah), one of the most high-profile accused terrorists in the U.S., the three-month trial capped a topsy-turvy legal saga and a rare public test of the Bush administration's post-9/11 domestic prosecution of the war on terror.
Brooklyn-born Padilla, 36, wound up a member of a Latino street gang in Chicago in his early teens. After hearing about Islam during a stint in prison, Padilla evidently became curious about the religion and eventually converted in his mid-20s, by which time he was living in south Florida.
Padilla first earned notoriety after his 2002 arrest at O'Hare International Airport. The Department of Justice alleged that Padilla planned on detonating a radioactive, or "dirty," bomb in the U.S. Padilla became one of a handful of U.S. citizens held by the government as an enemy combatant. He spent nearly four years in mostly solitary confinement aboard a naval brig, during which time, he alleges, he was tortured by his handlers.
With little solid proof tying him to al-Qaida and a possible Supreme Court challenge looming, the Bush administration de-classified him as an enemy combatant and transferred him into the civilian judicial system. His case was lumped in with those of Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, who were separately accused of running a North American sleeper cell. The government quietly dropped its "dirty bomber" accusation; there was little mention of that alleged plot during the trial.
Instead, prosecutors alleged Padilla was recruited by Hassoun, a Palestinian born in Lebanon, at a south Florida mosque. Prosecutors relied heavily on what they termed an al-Qaida job application that bore Padilla's fingerprints. Defense attorneys countered that Padilla had travelled to the Middle East to learn more about his faith and to inquire about providing humanitarian aid to Muslims in conflict zones like Chechnya. And in secretly taped recordings in which Hassoun and Jayyousi are heard discussing ways to support Chechnyan separatists and al-Qaida, Padilla's voice is rarely heard.
U.S. officials allege that Padilla admitted to reaching out to al-Qaida. But that evidence was inadmissible, having been obtained while he was being held as an enemy combatant at the South Carolina naval brig, without access to an attorney.
In late 2005, the Bush administration requested the courts transfer Padilla to civilian custody -- a roundabout way of saying it did not have sufficient cause to keep holding him as an enemy combatant. The maneuver earned the ire of the conservative 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the request gave "the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake." The decision was written by J. Michael Luttig, one of President Bush's short-list contenders for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Today's verdict could be hailed as a victory for DOJ -- if doing so didn't bring to mind the convoluted way the department got here. The Padilla saga is one of two terrorism cases (Zacarias Moussaoui being the other) that have ended with a mixed verdict for the U.S. justice system's ability to tackle al-Qaida at home.
The Christian Science Monitor examined Padilla's time in military custody ahead of today's decision. BBC News has a profile of Padilla.
Posted at 3:31 PM
Posted to:
Bush Administration, Jose Padilla, Terrorism
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