The trial of Jose Padilla, the US convert to Islam charged with conspiring to support terrorism, opened on Monday with federal prosecutors describing what they called a calculated plan to provide money, equipment and recruits to al-Qaeda.
Brian Frazier, an assistant US attorney, spent a good part of his opening arguments defining terms like "terrorism support cell," "jihad" and "mujahedeen" for the jury of seven men and five women.
He described one of Padilla's two co-defendants, Adham Hassoun, as a zealot who "indoctrinated people and converted them to become al-Qaeda fighters," and the other, Kifah Jayyousi, as "the money man" who provided financing and equipment to terrorist groups overseas.
Frazier said Padilla, who was declared an enemy combatant soon after his arrest in 2002 but was eventually moved to the criminal justice system, had gone even further, traveling to a training camp in Afghanistan.
"We will prove that Jose Padilla became an al-Qaeda terrorist trainee," Frazier said.
Padilla was described after his arrest as an operative of al-Qaeda plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the US. But that charge does not figure in the case being tried before Judge Marcia Cooke of the US District Court, because, the government has said, it got the information by questioning other terrorism suspects abroad and interrogating Padilla during his initial confinement at a military brig in South Carolina. Federal rules of evidence prohibit or limit the use of information obtained during such interrogations.
Padilla's detention without charges lasted more than three years and became a test case of US President George W. Bush's powers in the fight against terror. The government transferred him to civilian custody in Miami in 2005, just as the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention. With the transfer, prosecutors added his case to those of Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born engineer.
The trial is being conducted under heavy security. Federal marshals have been brought in from around the country to help protect the courthouse, and a bomb-sniffing dog was outside the courtroom on Monday.
Padilla and the other defendants, dressed in dark suits and blending in with their lawyers, sat quietly through the day's proceedings, following attentively.
Frazier, the prosecutor, gave a history lesson of sorts, describing ethnic and religious conflicts in Lebanon, Somalia, Kosovo and Chechnya. He said al-Qaeda had sent recruits to those regions, using the conflicts to advance its own violent agenda.
Al-Qaeda "needed people who were willing to fight and even kill" for Islamic fundamentalism, he said — people like the three defendants. Their "South Florida support cell," he said, "fit right into this pattern of training."
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