MIAMI: The Sept. 11 attacks cast a long shadow over the terrorism support trial of Jose Padilla and his two co-defendants, with some of the most riveting testimony given by Osama bin Laden himself in the form of a decade-old television interview and al-Qaida connections emphasized constantly by prosecutors.
Even though most of the evidence involved 1990s conflict zones such as Chechnya and Bosnia, it was a five-page form Padilla completed in 2000 to an attend an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan that linked the three defendants to the terrorist group blamed for the 2001 attacks that killed some 3,000 people in the U.S.
To drive that point home for jurors, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier mentioned al-Qaida 91 times in his opening statement and more than 100 times in his closing, according to court transcripts.
"There's the old saying that when you lie down with dogs, you get fleas," said Michael Greenberger, law professor and director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security. "It's fair game for the prosecutors to mention al-Qaida and for Osama bin Laden to be portrayed."
Padilla and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi face possible life prison sentences after a jury convicted them Thursday of murder conspiracy and terrorism material support charges. Jurors deliberated just 11 hours after a three-month trial. They have declined to talk to reporters about their verdict.
Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen, was held as an enemy combatant for 3 1/2 years after his May 2002 arrest on a supposed al-Qaida mission to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the U.S. He was added to the Miami terror support case in late 2005, with the "dirty bomb" allegations quietly discarded.
U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke often reminded the jury that the case was not about Sept. 11 and dozens of jurors were struck from the panel because they had expressed prejudices related to the attacks or doubted their ability to be fair.
Yet it was difficult not to think about that September day when bin Laden darkly threatened the U.S. in a seven-minute video clip played on a giant screen for jurors on June 26. The video, from a 1997 interview on CNN, was played over defense objections, particularly from Padilla's lawyers who said there was no evidence he had ever seen it.
Jayyousi lawyer William Swor took it one step further, saying repeatedly during the trial that prosecutors were attempting to link Muslims as a group to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida. The key defense argument for Jayyousi and Hassoun was that they were providing humanitarian aid for persecuted Muslims as required by Islam, in which one of the five key pillars of the faith is aiding the poor and needy.
"Non-Muslims who made the same statements and did the same actions would not have been convicted," Swor said after the jury's verdict.
Prosecutors, however, said the clear intent of the defendants — as reflected in some of the 300,000 wiretap intercepts collected by the FBI in the case — was to support violent jihad, or holy war, around the world to help establish fundamentalist Islamic regimes modeled after the Taliban-run government in Afghanistan.
The use of code words like "football" and "tourism" to mean "jihad" and "eggplant" and "zucchini" to mean military weaponry only underscored the secret, illegal nature of what the men were doing, Frazier said.
"They wanted to recruit, fund and train fighters," Frazier said. "Playing this kind of football was more important than anything else to these men. What they were doing was no game."
As the trial played out over three months, it often seemed as if Padilla was an insignificant part of the cell. His voice was only picked up on seven of the FBI intercepts, he never talked in code and when others discussed him, it was always with vague reference such as travel to "the area of Osama."
But without Padilla, jurors would not have been able to link Hassoun and Jayyousi directly to al-Qaida through the 2000 camp application. And without the other two, Padilla could likely have been tried only for providing material support — himself_ to al-Qaida, which carries a 15-year maximum sentence instead of the life term possible for the murder conspiracy conviction.
In closing arguments, Frazier again reminded the jury that Padilla had gone to become an al-Qaida trainee, calling him "the star recruit of a terrorist support cell" based in South Florida.
Cooke has scheduled sentencing for all three defendants for Dec. 5. Lawyers for the three have said they plan to appeal the convictions, at least in part based on claims that use of the bin Laden television interview was improper.
"An innocent man has been convicted and we're going to do what we can to clear his name," said Swor of his client, Jayyousi.
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