NYT : Prosecutors Turn to Padilla for Closing Arguments

Prosecutors Turn to Padilla for Closing Arguments

By ABBY GOODNOUGH | August 14, 2007

MIAMI, Aug. 13 — Prosecutors barely mentioned Jose Padilla for long stretches of his three-month terrorism trial, focusing instead on his two co-defendants and dozens of wiretapped phone conversations between them.

Mr. Padilla, an American convert to Islam who became one of the country’s first “enemy combatants,” received top billing in the government’s closing arguments on Monday, a reminder of the importance of his prosecution.

A federal prosecutor told jurors that Mr. Padilla attended a training camp in Afghanistan “to learn how to kill, kidnap and maim according to Al Qaeda’s techniques.”

Mr. Padilla, 36, was arrested in 2002 and described as an operative of Al Qaeda plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States. His detention without charges lasted more than three years and became a test case of President Bush’s powers in the effort against terror.

The government transferred him last year to civilian custody here, just as the Supreme Court was weighing taking up the legality of his military detention.

At that point, prosecutors added his case to those of Adham Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Kifah Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born engineer who was a school administrator in Detroit. The accusations about a dirty bomb are not part of the case.

On Monday, Assistant United States Attorney Brian K. Frazier called Mr. Padilla the “star recruit” of a terrorism support cell that included Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi.

Mr. Frazier focused heavily on the “mujahedeen data form” that the government says Mr. Padilla filled out, in Arabic and under an alias, to attend the Qaeda training camp in 2000.

“You don’t mail away for it,” Mr. Frazier said of the five-page form on which Mr. Padilla reportedly wrote personal information and left seven fingerprints. “You are already inside the Al Qaeda organization when you get this form.”

The Central Intelligence Agency found the form in 2001 in Afghanistan, after the American invasion. It had Mr. Padilla’s actual birth date and said the applicant could speak English, Arabic and Spanish, as Mr. Padilla does.

Mr. Padilla’s lawyers have said he moved to Egypt in 1998 in hopes of becoming an imam. He married there and had two children, returning alone to Chicago, where he grew up, in May 2002.

On Monday, Mr. Frazier recalled how the F.B.I. agent who arrested Mr. Padilla at O’Hare International Airport had testified that Mr. Padilla had been evasive. Mr. Padilla acknowledged living in Egypt, the agent said, yet claimed not to remember simple details of his time there, including his wife’s phone number.

“Why wouldn’t he give simple information at O’Hare?” Mr. Frazier asked. “Why would an official Al Qaeda document be recovered from Afghanistan with his prints on it? These are not coincidences.”

Mr. Frazier said the government had proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Padilla had spent time in Afghanistan. In fact, it never produced a witness who saw him there.

Instead, prosecutors presented a phone call from September 2000 in which someone told Mr. Hassoun that “Ibrahim,” a supposed alias for Mr. Padilla, was in “the area of Usama,” which an expert witness described as code for Afghanistan.

In a call from October 2000, someone else told Mr. Hassoun that “Abu Abdallah,” another supposed alias for Mr. Padilla, was “currently in Afghanistan.”

Mr. Frazier repeatedly invoked the testimony of Rohan Gunaratna, a government witness described as an international terrorism expert. Dr. Gunaratna backed up a main government theory, that Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi used code words when discussing their scheme by phone.

“Playing football” meant engaging in jihad, prosecutors said, “the dogs” meant the United States government, and “zucchini” meant weapons.

Mr. Hassoun’s lawyers sought to discredit Dr. Gunaratna in their closing arguments and restated their premise that Mr. Hassoun wanted just to “give relief” to persecuted Muslims in places like Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.

Lawyers for Mr. Jayyousi and Mr. Padilla will present their final arguments on Tuesday, and the jury will probably start deliberating on Wednesday. If convicted of the most serious of the three charges, conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people in a foreign country, the defendants could face life in prison.