Abdullah al-Muhajir, AKA Jose Padilla, Convicted!

Abdullah al-Muhajir (AKA Jose Padilla), Adham Amin Hassoun, and Kifah Wael Jayyousi were convicted today for conspiring to murder, kidnap, and maim people overseas, and also on two counts of providing material support for terrorism. Sentencing is scheduled for 05 December 2007.

The three were accused of being part of a North American support cell that provided supplies, money and recruits to groups of Islamic extremists. The defense contended they were trying to help persecuted Muslims in war zones with relief and humanitarian aid.

Padilla was first detained in 2002 because of much more sensational accusations. The Bush administration portrayed Padilla, a U.S. citizen and Muslim convert, as a committed terrorist who was part of an Al Qaeda plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the U.S. The administration called his detention an important victory in the war against terrorism, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. [...]

Padilla's attorneys fought for years to get his case into federal court, and he was finally added to the Miami terrorism support indictment in late 2005 just as the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to consider President Bush's authority to continue detaining him. Padilla had lived in South Florida in the 1990s and was supposedly recruited by Hassoun at a mosque to become a mujahedeen fighter.

The key piece of physical evidence was a five-page form Padilla supposedly filled out in July 2000 to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, which would link the other two defendants as well to Usama bin Laden's terrorist organization.

Let the scumbags rot in prison. Good riddance to the three of them.

USMC 9971 OUT