Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was picked up, held, tortured, and deprived of his rights for 3½ years, was finally given his day in court. The claim that he was an al-Qaeda operative was dropped. After three months of trial, Padilla and his foreign-born co-defendants were convicted of conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people, and two counts of providing material support to terrorists.

The third defendant Kifah Wael Jayyousi, a naturalized citizen from Jordan, ran an organization called American Worldwide Relief and published a newsletter called the Islam Report that provided details of battles and political issues in the Muslim world. The FBI claims that some 30,000 wiretaps between the three defendants employ the use of code words like “tourism” or “football” to mean things like jihad and ammunition. Defense lawyers insist the organization was a legitimate relief operation. Though the evidence that led to this verdict sounds rather imagined, the verdict itself is rather irrelevant to the larger picture of dictatorial control the case represents.

Neal Sonnett, a prominent Miami defense lawyer who heads an American Bar Association task force on treatment of enemy combatants, said the verdict proves that the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is unnecessary to deal with terrorism suspects.This verdict once again demonstrates that federal courts are perfectly capable of handling terrorism cases,” Sonnett said.

.S. officials said Padilla, while incarcerated in a military brig in South Carolina, admitted exploring the dirty bomb plot. But that evidence could not be used at trial because he was not read his rights and did not immediately have access to an attorney.

adilla’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.

hey claimed that he was routinely subjected to harsh treatment and torture, including being forced to stand in painful stress positions, given LSD or other drugs as “truth serum,” and subjected to loud noises and noxious odors.

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