MIAMI: There has never been a US criminal defendant quite like suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla.
Padilla is a US citizen on trial for allegedly joining a support cell for Islamic activists. The government was forced to prosecute him even though it would have preferred to lock him up without trial.
Legal experts say his case could have long-lasting legal implications for the war on terrorism because of what the verdict will say about the tactics of the administration of President George W. Bush.
The case may help determine whether future terrorism suspects are tried in federal courts or left to military tribunals, where they have far fewer rights and rules of evidence are less strict.
“Padilla was properly classified as an enemy combatant, but he gets access to the federal courts because he happened to be born here,” said Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Centre for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University.
Monday marked the second week of testimony in a trial expected to last into August. Padilla and two co-defendants face possible life sentences.
Padilla, 36, was arrested without criminal charge in 2002. He was held for 3 1/2 years in isolation by the military at a Navy brig. For months, he saw no lawyer or family and had no conversations with anyone except his jailers and interrogators.
Media attention on Padilla has been limited. No cameras or audio recorders are permitted in federal court. There are no protesters or paparazzi.
“What this trial is about is that it is possible for the government to have a good shot at addressing the war on terror and getting convictions of terrorists in the criminal courts,” said Martin Flaherty, a Fordham University law professor who co-chairs the school’s international human rights programme.
Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor who worked in former President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department, said Padilla is a symbol of the Bush administration’s “circumventing of normal constitutional processes in the name of fighting terror.”
A spokesman for the US Justice Department declined to comment on the case on Monday, referring questions to federal prosecutors in Miami. Prosecutors also declined to comment but have insisted their case is strong.
In May 2002, Padilla stepped off a plane in Chicago and was met by federal agents armed with a material witness warrant, which enabled them to arrest him without a criminal charge.
Padilla spent a month in a jail on that warrant, until Bush declared him an enemy combatant, sparking a lengthy legal battle over presidential powers to detain US citizens indefinitely.
At the time, authorities explained, they were acting on suspicions that Padilla had been on an Al Qaeda mission to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a US city.
Padilla was not charged with a crime or afforded basic constitutional rights until late 2005, when the US Supreme Court was poised to take up his appeals.
In the meantime, evidence for the “dirty bomb” plot fell apart. The government has a massive amount of evidence that Padilla was an Al Qaeda soldier — including clues that he may have been on a mission to blow up high-rise apartments using natural gas. But none of the evidence would stand up in civilian court because he allegedly “confessed” during interrogations with no lawyer present.
Many of the witnesses who might place Padilla at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan are unavailable, some because they are being held at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Others are in custody overseas or dead.
So prosecutors were left with a “mujahideen data form” that Padilla allegedly filled out to attend the camp and a few intercepted telephone conversations in which his name comes up or he is heard speaking about his travels. Expert witnesses are expected to fill in the gaps, but there is no hard evidence of a specific act of violence tied to Padilla.—AP
