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The others on trial in Padilla case
The terror case against two of Jose Padilla's codefendants hinges on secretly recorded calls.
By Warren Richey | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the May 29, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 3
MIAMI - In 1993, several months after a truck-bomb ripped through the basement of the World Trade Center, the US government began listening to the private conversations of a computer programmer in south Florida and an Islamic newsletter publisher in San Diego.
The FBI suspected that the two men, Adham Hassoun and Kifah Jayyousi, might be affiliated with Muslim terrorists. They wanted to find out before more bombs exploded, so agents tapped their phones, recording everything they said.
Now, 14 years and 300,000 secretly recorded conversations later, federal prosecutors say the men should go to prison for the rest of their lives for allegedly plotting with terrorists to murder and maim people.
Defense lawyers for both men counter with a question: If Mr. Hassoun and Mr. Jayyousi are so dangerous, why did the government wait so long to file charges? Despite the surveillance, Jayyousi went on to work as a senior administrator in the public school systems in Detroit and Washington, D.C.
Hassoun, Jayyousi, and suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla are on trial in a Miami federal courtroom for allegedly providing money, equipment, and recruits to various Islamic terrorist groups waging violent jihad overseas.
This week, prosecutors are expected to begin presenting to the jury English translations of thousands of hours of intercepted conversations in Arabic. Jurors will hear discussions allegedly related to Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Somalia, and Lebanon.
Lawyers for Hassoun and Jayyousi say their clients are being targeted for prosecution, not for any violence they planned or carried out, but because they were outspoken members of the Muslim-American community who held political and religious beliefs unpopular in the US.
Prosecutors say they formed a support cell for Islamic terror.
Of the 300,000 recorded calls, prosecutors have selected 123 for possible use as evidence at the trial. Of those, 53 are mentioned in the indictment.
"We will prove that the defendants committed the charged crimes through their own words," Assistant US Attorney Brian Frazier told the jury in his opening statement on May 14.
"You will hear what the defendants said to each other in their private conversations about violent jihad," he said. "Because they were talking to each other, they expressed their true beliefs." Sometimes they spoke in code, the prosecutor told the jury.
In one recorded conversation in October 1996, Hassoun reportedly told a colleague in Egypt to go to the Ogaden region of Ethiopia near Somalia. "Go to the area that I told you about.... Brothers have arrived there … and God willing, you will go, uh … start a company with them … and forget about the worldly brides and the worldly home, OK?"
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