The case against Padilla to wrap up

Government attorneys prosecuting Jose Padilla are expected to rest their case today after nine weeks of testimony on items including his 1996 passport application and the notes and photos found in his wallet when he was arrested six years later.

The evidence presented against 36-year-old Padilla and two codefendants traced a paper trail of bank transfers and cashed checks among the defendants alleged to belong to a North American terrorism support cell. It portrayed them as evasive under questioning by law enforcement and cryptic when conversing by phone.

Padilla, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi are charged with conspiracy to kill, maim or kidnap people abroad and with providing material support to terrorist groups.

In more than 100 wiretapped phone calls played for the jury, the three men expressed concern for Muslim victims of ethnic strife overseas and talked about wanting to help them. But what the government attempted to impart to the jury was that the three men were ideologically aligned with Al Qaeda and the masterminds of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

Huge pictures of Al Qaeda kingpins and a 1997 CNN interview with Osama bin Laden were introduced as “demonstrative exhibits” as a Sri Lankan terrorism expert spent two weeks on the stand providing jurors with a primer on the global reach of radical Islam.

Padilla, arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2002, was initially accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city. He spent 3 1/2 years in solitary confinement at a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina after President Bush branded the U.S. citizen an “enemy combatant.”

None of that came up in the testimony provided by 23 prosecution witnesses. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke ruled before the start of the trial that Padilla’s experiences in the hands of his military jailers were irrelevant to the federal case being tried in her courtroom. That ruling precluded the use of purported confessions elicited during interrogations at the brig, where Padilla was denied legal representation.

Facing the likelihood of a U.S. Supreme Court order to release Padilla, the Pentagon transferred him to the federal court system in late 2005. He was added to the terrorism support indictment of Hassoun and Jayyousi in January 2006.

As the prosecution neared the end of its presentation Thursday, Assistant U.S. Atty. John C. Shipley brought before the jurors one more time probably the most important piece of evidence against Padilla: a five-page form said to be his application for Al Qaeda terrorist training.

The form was reviewed multiple times -- including by a covert CIA agent explaining how he obtained it in Afghanistan; by an FBI fingerprint expert who matched seven prints to Padilla; by a convicted member of the “Lackawanna Six” terrorism support group who had filled out a similar application; and Thursday by U.S. Secret Service Agent Gerald Laporte, who attested to the possibility that the ink on the paper was put there on the July 24, 2000, date noted on the paper. The application is the only physical evidence placing Padilla in Afghanistan.

What was probably the most damning evidence didn’t involve Padilla. Jurors heard Hassoun and Jayyousi excitedly discussing the May 1997 interview with Bin Laden in one of the eavesdropped calls. Cooke noted for the jury that there was no evidence to suggest Padilla had seen or discussed the interview.

Defense attorneys plan to begin calling witnesses Monday, but none of the defendants is expected to take the stand. The defense will probably rely on experts to refute the government assertions that the defendants were conspiring to harm innocents in their efforts to help Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia and Chechnya.

Legal teams for all three defendants have sought from the outset to have their cases tried separately, but Cooke has denied those requests. She also rejected their demands for a mistrial after government witnesses sought to connect the defendants with the Sept. 11 attacks.

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carol.williams@latimes.com