Guardian Unlimited

May 14, 2007

Padilla stands trial on terror charges

The terrorism suspect, José Padilla, finally went on trial in Miami today, five years after he was arrested and accused of planning a radioactive dirty bomb attack in the US.
The charges faced by Mr Padilla are, however, now far less serious following a long battle by lawyers for the former Chicago gang member and Muslim convert to get him removed from military custody and brought before a civil court.

He, along with two co-defendants, is instead charged with being part of an al-Qaida-linked support cell that provided equipment, money and Islamist fighters to militant groups around the world.

After his arrest in May 2002, Mr Padilla was held at a US naval base in South Carolina for more than three years. He said he was tortured there, something US officials deny.

After a long legal battle, Mr Padilla's status as an "enemy combatant" - the legal basis for detaining terrorism suspects at the Guant´namo Bay detention centre - was dropped and he was transferred to civilian jurisdiction.

Following months of legal wrangling ahead of the trial's opening, the assistant US attorney, Brian Frazier, told the jury today that Mr Padilla, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi were "members of a secret organisation, a terrorism support cell, based right here in south Florida".

"The defendants took concrete steps to support and promote this violence," he said.

According to Mr Frazier, Mr Padilla was recruited by Mr Hassoun as a prospective fighter to be trained by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

"José Padilla was an al-Qaida terrorist trainee providing the ultimate form of material support - himself," the prosecutor said. "Padilla was serious, he was focused, he was secretive. Padilla had cut himself off from most things in his life that did not concern his radical view of the Islamic religion."

Mr Padilla and his fellow defendants face life in prison if convicted, and the case is being seen as a key test of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism tactics.

However, the dropping of the dirty bomb accusations to leave only less serious charges involving no specific acts of violence, has prompted some of the US media to mockingly call the current trial "Padilla-lite".

"For what was supposed to be this grand, central case in the government's war on terror, this is going out with much more of a whimper than a bang," a University of Miami law professor, Stephen Vladeck, who previously challenged Mr Padilla's detention in the courts, told the Miami Herald newspaper last week.