The Padilla jury began deliberations yesterday – and they are already back with a verdict which has just been read. The speed of this decision is stunning – and hopefully a sign that the jury saw through this Kafkaesque case.

Over the three months of the trial, we’ve all been following the case thanks to Lew Koch’s coverage – and you can review the background here as we wait for the verdict to be read. And Lew will be joining us as we discuss the news as it’s announced – Lew’s been covering this case for five years and it all comes down to today.

“Padilla, 36, and co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, both 45, face life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas and up to 15 years on each of two terrorism material support counts.”

The evidence presented by the prosecution was sparse at best – taped wiretaps of Hassoun and Jayyousi captured discussions of vegetables and family life – discussions the prosecutors claimed were code for terrorist activities rather than humanitarian aid work as claimed by the defense. For Padilla, the hyped charges that initially presented this “jomoke” (to quote Lew) as a “star recruit” for Al Qaeda amounted to a supposed “application” to AQ with seven Padilla fingerprints on it. Blocked from the trial was evidence of the torture of Padilla during the 3 1/2 years he was held as an enemy combatant.

UPDATE: Jonathan Turley on CNN says “many lawyers believed he could secure his freedom” because of his treatment. “The complication is that he has all these issues where he can appeal.”

Turley is suggesting that the conviction leads now to “a very robust” set of appeals to discuss the conditions under which Padilla was held.

But when Assistant United States Attorney Brian K. Frazier called Jose Padilla, Chicago’s not-very-bright–wanna- be, a star recruit for Al Qaeda, he gave hyperbole a whole new meaning. Then the prosecution dug back in their paltry bag of cookies to the original indictment to proffer three chilling acts, telling jurors that Mr. Padilla attended a training camp in Afghanistan “to learn how to kill, kidnap and maim according to Al Qaeda’s techniques.”

In case the jury had forgotten 9/11, the prosecutor produced this outrageous bit of bigot-theater:

On Monday, the prosecution set up a a slide projector showing black and white pictures of the three defendants wearing kaffiyeh, an Arab headdress, as 12 jurors heard the closing arguments.

”What al Qaeda did writ large, these defendants did on a smaller scale,” Frazier said.

Get it?

Al Qaeda big! Twin towers collapsing. Defendants: small: zucchini Busch Gardens. All wearing kaffiyeh.

There was not one shred of testimony, not one witness who testified to Al Qaeda drill sergeants teaching Padilla anything.

Worse, was the crime of being evasive.

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.”

No, they are not coincidences. They are the normal kinds of responses almost any kind of American citizen would give when abruptly arrested and taken into custody without being allowed – as is his constitutional rights – the Miranda warning.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you at interrogation time and at court.

I didn’t read about the Supreme Court ruling that Miranda applies to everyone except for Padilla.

Did prejudice enter into the indictment? Yes, said William Swor, attorney for Kifah Wael Jayousi.

“Why use the word Islam?” Swor asked jurors during closing arguments in Miami federal court Tuesday morning. “Because it’s frightening. We have a recent history. We have fears and we have a cultural prejudice going back almost 1,000 years.”

There’s one story that summed it up for me by Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor.

As Richey tells it, it becomes a tale that makes implicates all those who participated – from the lowest ranking military person to the highest ranking officials of the Justice Department and the White House, with the President himself knowing what was occurring under his watch. Read this..and weep.

For a month, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been questioning Padilla in New York City under the rules of the criminal justice system. [Note: without an attorney.] They wanted to know about his alleged involvement in a plot to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” in the US. Padilla had nothing to say. Now, military interrogators were about to turn up the heat.

Padilla was delivered to the US Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., where he was held not only in solitary confinement but as the sole detainee in a high security wing of the prison. Fifteen other cells sat empty around him.

The purpose of the extraordinary privacy, according to experts familiar with the technique, was to eliminate the possibility of human contact. No voices in the hallway. No conversations with other prisoners. No tapping out messages on the walls. No ability to maintain a sense of human connection, a sense of place or time.

In essence, experts say, the US government was trying to break Padilla’s silence by plunging him into a mental twilight zone. Padilla was not the only Al Qaeda suspect locked away in isolation. Although harsh interrogation methods such as water boarding, forced hypothermia, sleep deprivation, and stress positions draw more media attention, use of isolation to “soften up” detainees for questioning is much more common.

“It is clear that the intent of this isolation was to break Padilla for the purpose of the interrogations that were to follow,” says Stuart Grassian, a Boston psychiatrist and nationally recognized expert on the debilitating effects of solitary confinement. Dr. Grassian conducted a detailed examination of Padilla for his lawyers.

We are no longer in a situation where we are waiting for the barbarians. The barbarians have arrived and they are us.

I don’t give a damn what the jury says about these three hapless wannabes. I want to know what we’re – you and me — going to do to protest this terrible injustice perpetrated by the nation’s most powerful leaders Rather than a “star recruit” for Al Quada, our “leaders” have made Jose Padilla a star victim of civil rights and Bill of Rights abuses.

Regardless of the verdict, which should come the middle of next week, the name Padilla will now go down around the world, next to those of Sacco and Vansetti and Koramatsu and Gideon and Miranda as people who put our United States Constitution to the test.

(With Christopher Austin)

Louis Fisher and I have two interests in common: Jose Padilla and tennis.

Fisher happens to be one of the nation’s foremost authorities on arbitrary imprisonment and stretching presidential power and is a senior scholar in the Law Library at the Library of Congress and author of more than a dozen books, several of them landmark works dealing with unchecked presidential power –titles including Presidential War Power, Constitutional Conflicts between Congress and the President, Military Tribunals and Presidential Power. Then there’s the first book of his I read –Nazi Saboteurs on Trial – A Military Tribunal & American Law–which led me to the conclusion that Bush and then Attorney General John Ashcroft had gotten the basis for Padilla’s arrest completely wrong,

The case of the eight Nazi saboteurs who landed on the East Coast in June 1942 (often referred to as the Quirin decision) was a classic rush to judgement by everyone from the President to the Supreme Court and later, as the hysteria faded, Presidents, prosecutors and Justices realized how legally flawed the effort had been Even to the point where Justice Felix Frankfuter later remarked, “ [Quirin] was not a happy precedent.” But that was the exact precedent the Government chose for the prosecution of Padilla.

Fisher’s recently published article in the Journal of National Security Law & Policy, “Detention and Military Trial of Suspected Terrorists: Stretching Presidential Power” is the best expose of Bush’s unconstitutional overeaching. Since the article is 51 pages long and 287 footnotes, let me mine the pure gold of the article’s conclusion:

The treatment of Padilla and other enemy combatants by all three branches of government has done much to impair the rights of defendants, going far beyond the boundaries mapped out by the Supreme Court in Quirin [the Nazi Saboteurs] and Yamashita [the Japanese General put on trial following the end of World War 2 by a military court for violations of the law of war.] The [Bush] Administration claimed the right to hold U.S. citizens as enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without being charged, given counsel, or tried. Alexander Hamilton expressed the fear of arbitrary imprisonment, where there is no opportunity to prove one’s innocence:

The observations of the judicious Blackstone . . . are well worthy of recital: “To bereave a man of life, [says he,] or by violence to confiscate his estate, without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the whole nation.” (Emphasis added.) The Federalists No 84, at 533 (Benjamine F. Wright ed, 1961)

So – those of you who have been outraged by the Padilla debacle and angered by the insistence of warrantless wiretaps and other desecrations of the Fourth Amendment you are in good company with Alexander Hamilton. Those who see little or no harm side with King George.

The Framers rejected political models that concentrated power in a single branch, especially over matters of war. To minimize abuse and injustice by government officials, they relied on a system of checks and balances, separation of powers, review by an independent judiciary, and the operation of republican principles. (Emphasis added)

The Supreme Court has a sixty-three year history of declining the power that George Bush seeks to seize.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned about centralizing power in a single branch. In 1946, it emphasized the important constitutional principle that courts “and their procedural safeguards are indispensable to our system of government” because the Framers “were opposed to governments that placed in the hands of one man the power to make, interpret and enforce the laws.” In 1957, Justice Black and the plurality in Reid v. Covert warned that if the President “can provide rules of substantive law as well as procedure, then he and his military subordinates exercise legislative, executive and judicial powers with respect to those subject to military trials.” Such a concentration of power runs counter to the core constitutional principle of separation of powers and the Framers’ fear of wars. (Emphasis added)

The Founding Fathers wanted the law to be able to function under the greatest duress.

The Framers designed the Constitution for times of peace and war and expected republican government and procedural safeguards to meet the common danger. It is especially during war and emergencies that the institution of the presidency poses the highest risk, executive errors inflict the greatest damage, and individual liberties are placed at maximum peril. Institutional checks are needed more, not less.

Fisher forcefully makes the case that the current crisis has undermined those safeguards with each passage of Bush-conceived legislative incursions.

Unfortunately, in periods of national crisis the legislative and judicial branches typically forfeit their independence and throw their support behind presidential initiatives, no matter how costly to the nation and its citizens. (Emphasis added)

In other words, legislators and judges bow to the fears and threats, real or imagined by the nation’s temporary president. There are other means of disposing of such a President – elections, impeachment. All it takes is the tenacity and courage of an Alexander Hamilton or the wisdom of the author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison. Presently we have Alberto Gonzales, and torture-memo author John Yoo.

Fisher concludes (with my emphasis):

It is the obligation of scholars, citizens, and the media to constantly urge upon Congress and the courts that safeguarding individual rights, constitutional values, and structural checks are far more important than a show of national unity behind a particular President. Patriotism worth its name grants the highest priority to the nation, not the Chief Executive, and knows the difference between the two.

Will the jurors in the Padilla case put the nation first?? The defense has rested. Closing arguments begin next week.

Truth be told, it all seems so weary now if it weren’t for the fact that the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and some of the most critical Supreme Court decisions protecting those freedoms, hadn’t been grossly violated by this corrupt Bush-Gonzales regime. Can you find any non-ideologue in this nation who doesn’t believe the Attorney General is a liar, a perjurer?

As the trial comes to a close, it’s important to single out reporters from the often (and often deservedly) maligned Main Stream Media (MSM) who have been covering the Padilla trial from the very beginning and who, to their credit and to the credit of the profession of journalism, have not wearied in pointing out the gas in the government’s case.

I want to name names and then provide one sample of those who almost daily churn out responsible, fair stories about the trial.

Here’s my list and not in any particular order:

• Carol J. Williams – Los Angles Times Staff Writer.

• Laura Parker – USA Today

• Curt Anderson – Associated Press Writer

• Vanessa Blum – South Florida Sun-Sentinel

• Warren Richey -Staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor

There have been others who’ve dipped in and out of the story, not as regularly as the above but they too deserve mention:

• Deborah Sontag – The New York Times

• Carrie Weimar – Saint Petersburg Times

What separates the above mentioned from others in the MSM has been there absolute and total dedication to the truth of the trial. These men and women when writing about Padilla and the trial, never failed to mention that there had been “dirty bomb” charges – which the government dropped, and other charges, which the government dropped, and/or that Padilla was folded into this “conspiracy” case, late, after it had been filed against two other men.

I went to the trial in person, mainly to see Padilla, and his lawyer who’d been with him five long years, Federal Public Defender Andrew Patel. I also wanted to get a feel for the reporters covering the trial because I knew I had to rely on them for my information, putting it into a context almost never permitted in the MSM.

So, as things draw to a close, I want to parse one story, by Jay Weaver of the Miami Herald because it is an example of how, given the right conditions and the right reporter, it is still possible to get a fix on the truth of a story. Weaver’s story, focusing on a witness called by the defense team, was published last Friday, August 3rd. (I will keep my notations to a minimum)

With the end of the trial near, a defense team in the Jose Padilla terror case put on its strongest witness Thursday, when he testified that a suspected front for terrorists was actually a legitimate Islamic relief group.

Erol Bulur testified that he used his New Jersey warehouse to store tens of thousands of pounds of used clothes, canned foods and medicine donated by American Worldwide Relief, an organization run by a defendant in the Padilla trial.

Bulur said in Miami federal court that the relief group’s efforts accounted for as much as twothirds of all the supplies that he shipped from his warehouse through Turkey to Chechnya’s embattled Muslims in 1995 and 1996.

”A lot more than two or three boxes were sent by American Worldwide Relief,” said the Turkishborn Bulur, rebutting a prosecutor’s attempt to downplay the group’s significant humanitarian role in the Chechen conflict. Indeed, jurors were shown video of Bulur’s warehouse and 40foot cargo containers.

His testimony was powerful because it called into question a central theme in the U.S. government’s case: that defendant Kifah Wael Jayyousi, a leader of American Worldwide Relief, used the group as a front to provide money, equipment and other supplies to Islamic terrorists overseas.

(Weaver has, rightfully with his experience with the entire trial, offered his evaluation of the strength of Erol Bulur’s words, rather that the inadequate and so misleading “he said.” Weaver continues with a recitation of why this testimony is taking place in this courtroom.)

He [Jayyousi] is accused of conspiring with former Sunrise computer programmer Adham Amin Hassoun and Padilla, also formerly of Broward County, to support terrorists such as al Qaeda between 1993 and 2001.

The highprofile trial, which began in early May, is expected to wrap up with closing arguments and jury deliberations in midAugust. If convicted, each of the defendants faces up to life in prison.

Prosecutors claim Jayyousi collaborated with Hassoun, a onetime vocal member of a Fort Lauderdale mosque, who in turn recruited Padilla and others to join ”violent jihad” abroad.

They accused the trio of conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people in Chechnya and other theaters where ethnic Muslims were under siege.

(Since Padilla’s name was the most prominent of the three, Weaver brings him into the story. Weaver neither shys away from the truth of Padilla’s violent youth nor his jail-house conversation.)

Padilla himself traveled in 1998 to Egypt, where the former gang member turned Muslim studied the Koran and Islamic culture.

(Now comes the most critical and most responsible part of Weaver’s story.)

At trial, prosecutors produced what they claim was Padilla’s Mujahedin application form, which he allegedly filled out before training with al Qaeda in Afghanistan in fall 2000.

(This, you may recall, is the only “hard” evidence of Padilla’s alleged intentions in the entire trial. Weaver puts it in context stressing how weak the case is.)

But the government’s case built largely on FBI wiretaps of phone conversations offered scant evidence of any of the defendants’ direct involvement in any jihad theaters. [Emphasis added]

During trial, prosecutors introduced evidence showing Jayyousi raised almost $50,000 to buy satellite phones for Chechen rebels fighting Russian soldiers. His defense lawyers, William Swor and Marshall Dore Louis, argue that the phones were used for coordinating relief efforts in Chechnya.

Padilla has shrunk to insignificance during this four month trial, Jayyousi became a relief worker for the Chechen rebels – the same ones the United States supported with cash and military arms.

Of course, the 12 jurors who will decided the fate of Padilla, Jayyousi and Hassoun do not have access to Weaver’s fine analysis of the evidence or lack thereof, but such reporting will at least help the public make sense of the verdict when it is delivered.

That is Main Stream Media at its best.

(With Christopher Austin)

It was a not-very-subtle way of signaling that the paucity of the government’s case against Padilla isn’t even worthy of a rejoinder, that he wouldn’t even dignify the credibility of the charges against his client and their unconvincing witnesses by providing no rebuttal witnesses. It appears that closing arguments will be the week of the 13th.

So suddenly the terrorists conspiracy case against Jose Padilla, and his two relatively unknown alleged co-conspirator is coming to a very anticlimactic end–not with a bang but a whimper.

This seemed to be the single sloppiest, high-stakes case in Federal Court ever. But I learned, to my surprise, that many government cases alleging terrorism with the Justice Department in charge have a record of failure and mismanagement.

Laura Parker at USA Today consulted legal scholars and terrorism experts about government allegations of terrorism. statistics.

“What we see time and again is a big press conference and Justice Department statements about how we’re prosecuting the war on terrorism, and then the cases either fizzle out or the charges are reduced to relatively minor guilty pleas,” says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in national security.

And the Department of Justice track record?

A “terrorist report card” prepared in September by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University Law School found that in 510 cases since 9/11 that the government said were terrorism-related, only 158 defendants have been prosecuted on charges of terrorism or giving material support to terrorism. The rest have been prosecuted on lesser charges, and no link to terrorism was proved in court. The figures are the most recent available from NYU.

The report found a 29% conviction rate in terrorism prosecutions, compared with the Justice Department’s 93% conviction rate in other criminal prosecutions.

After the twelve weeks of the prosecution’s case against Jose Padilla, one wonders if it will join the 71% of Justice Department terrorism prosecutions which ended in failure to convinct. The evidence–or lack thereof–has been extensively reviewed in this column–the alleged fingerprints on a document allegedly obtained from an Afghanistan “stranger” and handed, gratis, to a mysterious CIA agent, the 7 out of 300,000 wire taped conversations in which Padilla was involved, with different translators offering different interpretations of his mention of “zucchini”–vegetable or roadside bomb?

Was Padilla working with _______planning to murder, kidnap and maim people outside of the United States on behalf of Al Qaeda? Who were they planning to murder, kidnap and maim? What steps had they taken in that direction? What methods were they planning to employ? Busch Gardens.

With such a paucity of evidence, why did the Feds pursue this case for five years and break a half-dozen or more laws? FDL reader “mack” offered a reason last week:

You float the lamest as the trial balloon. That establishes precedent.

In other words if that can nail Padilla they can nail anyone.

Let’s look at where the FBI stands, since they, along with the Justice Department, were responsible for pursuit of this case.

According to ABC’s Justin Rood

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

Ah yes, Americans spying on Americans. How…East German of them.

Even Pravda acknowledged there had to be a limit to that kind of intramural spying, pointing to East Germany as the logical end of that kind of citizen-spys-spying-on-its-citizens.

By the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, it was estimated that 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants were employed by the Stasi.

In other words, about one in fifty East Germans collaborated with the Stasi—one of the highest penetrations of any civilian society by an intelligence-gathering organization.

William Arkin of the Washington Post, (cited by Watson) points out the CIA and NSA are old hands at this kind of spying a long time, with the military working furiously to catch up.

Billions, trillions, even quadrillions, hell, quintillions of wire taps– go for it if that’s what takes to defeat terrorism and preserve the American way of life!

The National Security Analysis Center (NSAC) would bring together nearly 1.5 billion records created or collected by the FBI and other government agencies, a figure the FBI expects to quadruple in coming years, according to an unclassified FBI budget document obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com. (Emphasis added)

Let ‘er rip!

…the FBI’s stated hopes to “pro-actively” mine the data to find terrorists using “predictive” analysis…

In theory, predictive analysis involves mapping a known pattern of terrorist behavior — for instance, the sequence and timing of such mundane activities as bank transactions and travel purchases — against a massive collection of such records like the NSAC databases. If an individual’s actions match the pattern, they can be considered a suspect, even if they
have no known ties to any suspected terrorists or known terrorist groups.

Such a method would help identify “sleeper cells,” the FBI claims

Sleeper cells, indeed. Nice thought to put yourself to sleep with tonight. Counting potential spies not sheep.

(With Christopher Austin)

In the 10 weeks that this conspiracy trial has taken place, where Padilla, Hassoun and Kifah are charged with conspiracy to murder, kidnap or maim people outside the United States, there have been some remarkably creative plays on many vague words, innocuous syllables, virtuous letters, said to reform in crafty variances of pure evil. You – ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the press, the citizens tuning in at home or abroad – are supposed to be convinced of their guilt based on intuition, guesswork.

You – we – are supposed to believe that phrases and words like “playing football”, “eating cheese” and paying $3,500 for “zucchini”, were code for nefarious, illegally evil terrorist deeds and actions for which these three should spend the rest of their lives in jail. Indeed, there was no sting operation which managed to collar these men inside a house with stockpiled weapons, documented plans or poisons. Instead of Semtex, they netted an endless pile of syntax.

The prosecution would have us all believe that words, perhaps millions of surreptitiously tape recorded words, have suspicious, duplicitous terrible hidden meanings. The Feds have 300,000 taped phone calls. Two hundred and thirty of those conversations form the core of the prosecution’s case, of which 21 make reference to Padilla. Of those tapes, Padilla’s voice is heard in only seven of them, and not a single time is Padilla discussing violence. The prosecution hasn’t produced one weapon used for murder, not one blindfold to be used in a kidnapping, not one knife to be used in a maiming.

The government has not allowed the jury or the public to view eighty-seven video tapes of Padilla being questioned in solitary confinement where we could see him, blindfolded, his ears muffled. This could prove that he was or wasn’t handed a piece paper or told to scribble his name in exchange for an extra ten minutes in the exercise yard. Why hasn’t the prosecution shown those tapes?

It doesn’t matter that the Feds have brought in their translators, a CIA operative-in-disguise, and one expert in terrorism whose expertise seems available only to governments. The case boils down to 300,000 telephone conversations with the jury listening only to a teeny-weeny,itsy-bitsy portion of the transcriptions. The prosecutions have made their selections. Here’s one of mine.

Here is part of one phone call on one day –2/08/97 August 2, 1997 never before revealed.

Among the participants in the call are:
ADHAM HASSOUN
UMM SAMIR, ADHAM’S mother-in-law)
HAJJ, (Nahid’s father in law/Adham’s father in law)

First Adham and Umm note it was the holiday of Eid, the Islamic holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

UMMM SAMIR Did you lose weight or are you still the same?
ADHAM HASSOUN No, I’m pretty much the same
UMM SAMIR Yeah Praise me to Allah
ADHAM HASSOUN the same, the same, losing weight…my wife is not feeding me at all [sarcasm]

Then Hassoun and Umm discuss work-related vacation time.

ADHAM HASSOUN I an entitled to two weeks per year
UMM SAMIR Yea
ADHAM HASSOUN I would have been there for one year
UMM SAMIR Yeah
ADHAM HASSOUN And besides, I am tired. I have been working almost 6 or 7 days a week.
UMM SAMIR Yea, that’s right
ADHAM HASSOUN It’s work/work, work/home…They don’t even leave me alone when I’m on vacation…they keep calling me.

Later they talk of marriage

HAJJ Is she taking care of you?
ADHAM HASSOUN Her? Whatever Allah wishes…she is fixing me fava beans this morning.
HAJJ She is a righteous girl, a righteous girl, just like you.
ADHAM HASSOUN May Allah keep you.
HAJJ May Allah keep you
ADHAM HASSOUN By Allah, she comes from a prominent family, Hajj
HAJJ May Allah keep you
ADHAM HASSOUN May Allah send you one just like her
HAJJ Allah willing, Allah willing.
ADHAM HASSOUN Funeral! [popular interjection in Palestinian dialect which means Damn!”]
HAJJ By All, honor the honorable. May Allah keep you in good health keep away the evil doers…Allah willing.
ADHAM HASSOUN May Allah keep you Hajj.
HAJJ May He keep your children and may He keep your bride, Allah willing.
ADHAM HASSOUN May Allah keep you, may Allah always keep you…and the bride is already married…
HAJJ She is my beloved, she will always be a bride
ADHAM HASSOUN Yea
HAJJ To me she will always be a bride.
ADHAM HASSOUN Why? Could you be thinking about someone else Hajj? [Laughs]
HAJJ [Laughs] May Allah forgive me…by Almightily Allah…she will always be a bride in your presence..yeah
ADHAM HASSOUN [Laughs]
HAJJ You will always be her groom, hovering over her head…Allah willing…

Later they talk of children.

ADHAM HASSOUN No but every month she tells me, I think..uh..I might be pregnant.
HAJJ By Allah
ADHAM HASSOUN So every month, I tell her..
HAJJ Hopefully she will bear you twelve children.
ADHAM HASSOUN Yea

There you have the subject matters of another part of those 300,000 telephone taps: gaining weight, the need for more vacation time, fava beans and marriage, brides and the hope for twelve children.

Judge Cooke said at the beginning of the trial that the evidence was thin. Her exact words were, “Very light on facts.”

Thin? Light on facts? If you substituted the words “Jesus” for Allah, the conversation is more like a segment from The View.

(With Christopher Austin)

that they conspired to commit acts of murder, kidnapping, and maiming outside the United States, that they committed one or more overt acts in the United States in furtherance of those acts, providing material support and resources, and concealing and disguising the nature of those actions to be used in preparation for a conspiracy to murder, kidnap or maim on foreign soil

It’s clear the prosecution isn’t talking about actual deeds committed by terrorists. But what evidence has the prosecution presented of planning to commit deeds of terrorism? The defense is currently disputing the “few bits” of alleged evidence.

Here’s how Warren Richey of the Christian Science Monitor sees it:

The three [Hassoun, Jauuousi and Jose Padilla] are facing charges that they plotted to spread violent jihad through a murderous campaign around the world. But federal prosecutors say it is unnecessary to link the terror suspects to an actual plan of terror.

Instead, government lawyers argue that a series of shady phone calls and a few documents are enough to establish the existence of a terror conspiracy and send all three defendants to prison potentially for the rest of their lives.

But after an eight week presentation of evidence by the government, prosecutors have not identified a single individual as a potential target for murder, kidnapping, or maiming, nor have they identified any specific plot to accomplish someone’s murder, kidnapping, or maiming.. 

While no one bets on the outcome of a jury trial, the government has set out a record of spectacular failure when it comes to terrorism cases. Laura Parker at USA Today consulted legal scholars and  terrorism experts about government allegations of terrorism statistics.

“What we see time and again is a big press conference and Justice Department statements about how we’re prosecuting the war on terrorism, and then the cases either fizzle out or the charges are reduced to relatively minor guilty pleas,” says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who specializes in national security.
 

And the Department of Justice track record?

A “terrorist report card” prepared in September by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University Law School found that in 510 cases since 9/11 that the government said were terrorism related, only 158 defendants have been prosecuted on charges of terrorism or giving material support to terrorism. The rest have been prosecuted on lesser charges, and no link to terrorism was proved in court. The figures are the most recent available from NYU. (Emphasis added)

The report found a 29% conviction rate in terrorism prosecutions, compared with the Justice Department’s 93% conviction rate in other criminal prosecutions.   

Meanwhile back at the Padilla trial it began to boil down to who’s portrait of the mujahedeen do you believe? Which translation do you regard as true?

Tuesday the imam of the first mosque Padilla studied at following his release from jail, Raed Awad of the Masjid Al-Iman in Ft. Lauderdale, took the stand. Awad admitted his worshipers raised funds to send Padilla to Egypt to study Islam and Arabic. When challenged by Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier that Awad’s mosque was raising funds for terrorists, Awad – according to the AP’s Curt Anderson — pointed to a “distinction between terrorists and Islamic mujahedeen who were fighting in defense of Muslims in places like Chechnya, Bosnia and Somalia.”

The mujahedeen (meaning “strugglers”), whom Ronald Reagan praised as “freedom fighters” and who bled the Soviet Union to death, have now become a number of politically diverse, sometimes conflicting groups “struggling” in several parts of the globe with many religious and political differences.     

On Monday, the defense’s translation expert, Kamal Yunis, a Palestinian-born chemist and state-certified Arabic-English translator,  testified that the word “tourism” as used by Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifiah Wael Jayyousi, is not the equivalent of “jihad” but rather “exploration” or “a religious pilgrimage.” The expert contradicted the prosecutor’s claim that “send you two eggplants” meant “sending rocket-propelled grenades purchased through Muslim charitable donations.” “Eggplants,”according to the defense translator, meant $2000 in donations for Muslim children.

Reporters wonder “where’s the beef,”or in this case, where’s the evidence of deeds – even planned deeds. So far it’s word games, “he-said-he-said,” as the case of dueling translators continues. All the prosecution has shown are words and one document  allegedly with Padilla’s signature and fingerprints. Words and one paper.
  
The jury is expected to begin deliberations in August. Will they be able to see that disputed words and one piece of paper –even with fingerprints –  do not constitute actual terror deeds such as murder, kidnapping and maiming? 

(with Christopher Austin )

There also may be something terribly right with the federal judicial system when a United States District Court Judge appointed by President Clinton can write a 64 page memo with 190 footnotes dismissing fraud charges because the Justice Department prevented the defendants from putting on a defense on their own behalf.

In the Padilla first case, Judge Marcia Cooke appears to have walked a tightrope pulled taut by the zeal of the Justice Department. While she refused to have Padilla appear in her courtroom in handcuffs, she also made it clear that she wasn’t interested in how Padilla had been treated for three and a half years in a Naval brig where he suffered from systematic sensory deprivation at the very least and possibly other forms of torture. The judge was certain this treatment didn’t render him mentally unfit to stand trial. From there it was mostly downhill for Padilla and his two co-defendants, Adham Hassoun and Kafah Jauuouisi charged with conspiracy to “commit acts of murder, kidnapping, and maiming outside the United States.”

Meanwhile in New York, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan — not known as a civil libertarian –has gutted what the government claimed at one time was the largest criminal tax case in U.S. history “against 16 former partners at KPMG LLP and two others accused of designing and selling fraudulent shelters to wealthy individuals,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Davies.

At one recent hearing, Judge Kaplan said the government had turned the case into “a holy mess for itself.” On July 26, he ruled that federal prosecutors violated the Fifth Amendment rights of two former KPMG partners by “deliberately” coercing them to speak with investigators before they were indicted; he barred the statements from being used at trial. A week earlier, he delayed the trial by four months, citing government delays in turning over information to defense lawyers, and the unresolved legal fee dispute. Judge Kaplan is considering imposing sanctions on the government and hinted that he could dismiss the case.

This is how Judge Kaplan characterized the prosecution in the first paragraph of his lengthy memo :

The government threatened to indict, and thus to destroy, the giant accounting firm, KPMG LLP (“KPMG”). It coerced KPMG to limit and then cut off its payments of legal fees of KPMG employees. KPMG avoided indictment by yielding to government pressure. Many of its personnel did not. They await trial, four of them deprived of counsel of their choice and most of the others unable to afford the defenses that they would have presented absent the government’s interference.

Days later Judge Kaplan dismissed charges against 13 defendants from the accounting firm KPMG.

Now, compare Judge Kaplan’s remarks to Judge Cooke’s remarks at the conclusion of the prosecution’s case against the three defendants as detailed by the AP’s Curt Anderson.

Defense attorneys insisted the government evidence did not prove the existence of such a conspiracy. Padilla attorney Michael Caruso pointed out that Padilla’s voice is heard on only a handful of the intercepted phone calls and is never overheard discussing any type of violence.

“There’s not an agreement by Mr. Padilla to commit a murder. If there was a plan, he was not a willing participant,” Caruso said.
Hassoun lawyer Jeanne Baker contended that her client was interested “with passion” in assisting Muslims in conflict zones such as Chechnya, Bosnia and Somalia but mainly for humanitarian reasons. She said that Hassoun has no connection to al Qaida and that FBI intercepts in which he urges others to travel to battle areas did not necessarily mean they had violent intent.

That brought a rejoinder from the judge.

“Well, he wasn’t telling people to go there to open lemonade stands,” Cooke said.

It’s possible Judge Cooke may be auditioning to be the next Judge Judy or, failing that, auditioning for a seat on the Supreme Court next to Justice Antonin Scalia, who, a new study concludes, is 19 times as funny as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

(with Christopher Austin)

Indeed there has been a tightly knit conspiracy but not the one Frazier is trying to portray.

The conspiracy – and one doesn’t need 300,000 wiretaps to expose it — is between President Bush, his chosen legal representatives – former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft, former Deputy AG James Comey, current AG General Alberto Gonzales and the representatives in a Miami Federal courtroom prosecuting the case against Jose Padilla — Frazier, John Shipley, Russell Killinger and Stephanie Pell. It is a conspiracy to commit of a travesty of justice. A conspiracy of dunces.

On the day Padilla’s capture was announced to the American public by then Attorney General Ashcroft via satellite from Russia (n doubt during KGB Heritage Month,) took its brand new “John Yoo Constitution” out for a test drive. Ashcroft flat out accused Padilla of being “an al-Qaida operative…exploring a plan to build and explode a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Bush immediately followed by declaring Padilla an “enemy combatant.” Two years later those charges vanished, just like Superman’s nemesis Mr Mxyzptlk (pronounced mix yez pittle ick) used to appear and disappear into the Fifth Dimension.

Next Deputy Attorney General James Comey stepped up to the microphone with
with his own take on Padilla’s guilt – saying Padilla had been planning to use gas stoves to explode high rise apartment buildings in the United States.

This did, however, present Comey with a conundrum:

The challenge of the Padilla case, for me as the United States Attorney, was the absence of a hammer. If I can’t credibly threaten criminal charges, no lawyer in the world is going to tell their client to talk to me, because any good lawyer would know, what I’m sure Mr. Padila’s lawyers knew, that if you just clam up, they can’t do anything with this.

The United States Supreme Court stepped in and gave Padilla and his now available legal counsel a get-out-of-jail outline of the legal steps he should take to be freed. Presto! Comey’s exploding gas stoves charges were mooted

Alberto “I don’t recall…remembering” Gonzales then substituted brand new charges – Padilla was part of a conspiracy involving, “murder, kidnaping and maiming.” Prosecutors Frazier Shipley, Killinger and Pell were given their marching orders. They saluted smartly.

Here’s the “hard evidence” the defense has to neutralize:

1. The prosecution produced an Al Qaida training camp application form (no College Board or SATs required) which, miracles of miracles, has allegedly been entrusted to an English-only speaking and reading CIA agent in Afghanistan, by a mysterious stranger, along with a truckload of documents in Farsi or Sanglechi Ishkashimi. The CIA agent then managed to pluck out from this plethora of paper one single document: Padilla’s signed application form along with, what was later discovered, were his fingerprints. Of course, those fingerprints could have been placed anytime during the three-and-a-half years Padilla was in custody, as no chain of evidence was ever presented by the prosecution for the form.

2. The prosecution has in its possession 300,000 wire taped conversations involving Padilla’s two alleged co-conspirators Adham Hassoun and Kifak Jayyousi, of which 230 were the core of its case. Only 21 of these 300,000 make reference to Padilla. Of these the government produced 7, count ‘em 7, phone calls with Padilla’s voice and not one making a reference to the charges he was indicted on “murder, or kidnaping or maiming.” The government claims the conversation were in code but produced witnesses who, without a code book, and could only guess as to the meaning of certain words.

3. There is, however, a wiretap conversation of Padilla’s alleged co-conspirators, Adham Hassoun and Kifah Jayyousi discussing a CNN interview with Osama bin Laden they had seen on television interview – which Padilla never heard or discussed.

4. And finally, a government favorite “terrorism expert” who never had one word to say about the three prisoners in the dock. Instead Rohan Gunaratna recited old shibboleths once-a-terrorist-always-a-terrorist (Revolutionary War historians take notice.)

Ashcroft, then Comey, and now Gonzales, Frazier, Shipley, Killinger and Pell have built a case on fantasy, supposition, prejudice and fear mongering. Can the defense make the jury see the shocking inadequacies of the prosecution’s case? Will they be able to separate Padilla’s treatment and the “evidence” against him from the case against Hassoun and Jayyousi?

The defense begins tomorrow. Stay tuned.

(with Christopher Austin)

The prosecution has concluded its case against Jose Padilla, and two others charged with conspiracy to help support violent Islamic extremist groups worldwide. The total hard evidence against Jose Padilla consists of an alleged Al Qaeda training camp application form document Padilla allegedly signed in July 2000. The paper was among a myriad of documents handed to a CIA agent in a remote area of Afghanistan by a complete stranger.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, a little over five years ago (06/10/02) when our Attorney General at the time, John Ashcroft announced:

I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the War on Terrorism. We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or “dirty bomb,” in the United States.

Of course he was speaking of “Abdullah Al Muhajir (born Jose Padilla).” Ashcroft concluded his remarks with these thoughts, which could only make the nation feel more secure.

To our enemies, I say we will continue to be vigilant against all threats, whether they come from overseas or at home in America. To our citizens, I say we will continue to respect the rule of law while doing everything in our power to prevent terrorist attacks.

Yesterday, July 12, we learn that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been asleep at the wheel. It’s either that or they thought that Ashcroft’s dirty bomb story was simply performance art.

In the category of “Oops, my bad” (story from Eric Lipton at the New York Times):

Undercover Congressional investigators [from the GAO] set up a bogus company and obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in March that would have allowed them to buy the radioactive materials needed for a so called dirty bomb.

The Government Accounting Office (GAO)…pesky little buggers:

demonstrated once again that the security measures put in place since the 2001 terrorist attacks to prevent radioactive materials from getting into the wrong hands are insufficient…(emphasis added)

Did you get that? “Once again”

[The GAO] used a similar approach last year when trying to smuggle radioactive materials across the border.

Could it be that even though Jose Padilla – our original dirty bomb threat – is safely shackled and manacled in jail, the danger of others producing such a blast remains real?

The GAO was pretty cool about their set up. A post office box-only construction company, with no office, Internet site or phones applies to the NRC for a license to purchase “dozens of portable moisture density gauges, which cost about $5,000 each and are used to read the density of soil and pavement when building highways. The machines include americium 241 and cesium 137…”

Like the one Padilla allegedly had in mind, “The bomb the investigators could have built would not have caused widespread damage or even high level contamination. But it still could have had serious consequences, particularly economic ones, in any city where it was set off.” This is why these dirty bombs are more properly called “Weapons of Mass Disruption”, rather than those of Mass Destruction.

The “bomb” the GAO could have constructed would have contaminated “the length of a city block.” Hell, a block, a mile, an entire city – the hysteria would have been the same. But hey, it’s not all bad, according to Edward McGaffigan Jr., a member of the regulatory commission’s governing board. They had already taken steps to remedy the situation. Yeah, like they had in 2003.

McGaffigan wanted to look on the bright side. The GAO effort, he contended, would not have been able to secure all that much radioactive material and was very expensive. McGaffigan had a better idea, more bang for the buck as it were. He suggested, “Why would I not blow up a chemical tanker on a train with chlorine in it or other toxic materials, at a tiny fraction of the cost before doing this very elaborate exercise?”

Has the arrest and current trial of Jose Padilla, spanning five years and counting, served as a dangerous distraction from the real threat of a highly disruptive if not devastatingly destructive dirty bomb? As Homer Simpson would say, “Doh!”

(with Rachel M. Koch)