US ‘dirty bomber’ is a trial for CIA

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2159270.ece

IT WAS a terrorist trial that seemed to have everything - including a CIA agent testifying in disguise and a mysterious reference to a female donkey. But the long-awaited court appearance of Jose Padilla, a US citizen once known as America’s “dirty bomber”, has turned out to be missing a crucial ingredient - evidence that he actually did anything wrong.

More than two months after federal prosecutors first stood up in a Miami courtroom and depicted Padilla as a would-be jihadist (holy warrior) who with two codefendants was conspiring to “murder, kidnap and maim”, the case has become a potential embarrassment to US security officials.

After weeks of testimony about alleged Al-Qaeda plots, travels to the Middle East and the defendants’ use of secret code words such as “going on a picnic”, the prosecution rested its case with only one piece of physical evidence allegedly linking Padilla to Al-Qaeda – a half filled-out training camp application form that was said to bear his fingerprints.

A defence application for the case to be dismissed for lack of evidence was rejected by Judge Marcia Cooke, who said it would be up to the 12 federal jurors to decide on the prosecution’s claims.

Yet Cooke had earlier told prosecutors that their original indictment was “very light on facts”, and the case has begun to attract international attention for the problems the US government has faced in presenting a terrorist prosecution in a civilian court. An acquittal for Padilla, a 36-year-old Muslim convert, would further complicate Wash-ington’s efforts to hold Al-Qaeda suspects without proper trials at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.