MIAMI — A month into the trial of terrorism suspect Jose Padilla, the jury heard the defendant's voice for the first time Friday, in a tape of a 10-year-old wiretapped phone call in which he tells his alleged recruiter that he is ready to set off on a mission to help embattled Muslims abroad.
Along with at least two dozen other tapes played for the jury this week, the conversation between Padilla and Lebanese-born Adham Amin Hassoun was cryptic, and the exact nature of the mission is never named.
"It's gonna happen soon," Padilla says in a deep, tough-sounding voice. He left South Florida for Egypt 15 months later.
Padilla, originally charged with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city, is on trial with Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi on federal charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism and offering material support to terrorists.
Hassoun's wife, Nahed, commented to one caller -- who phoned to convey suspicions that Hassoun was under surveillance -- that "we know that the lines are always ... always monitored, but Adham doesn't care ... he talks."
More than 100 taped discussions are to be played at the trial, which is expected to last through August.
The discussions played for the jury covered mostly logistic matters: how to get a satellite telephone to Muslim rebels in Chechnya, how to get money to would-be holy warriors in the Middle East, how to move volunteers to Kosovo or Bosnia to help defend Muslims under siege by Serbian and Croatian Christians.
For the jurors, it was a global history lesson ranging back to the 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, involving complicated conflicts.
Prosecutors jumped from year to year and battle to battle in a presentation apparently aimed at providing the jury with a glossary of allegedly coded language, such as using the word "tourism" in the place of jihad, "getting married" for killed in battle, "green goods" for money and "iron" for weaponry.
The overall effect of the rapid-fire tour of the world's hotspots might have been to show the jury how keenly Hassoun and Jayyousi followed the fate of Muslims under attack abroad and how passionately they sought to help them. The tone and language of the talks also may have left an impression that the men were trying to hide something and up to no good.
But there has been no mention in the evidence presented so far of any intent by the three defendants to murder, maim or kidnap people in foreign countries, the wording of the conspiracy charge against them.
