Bin Laden Video Takes Center Stage In Terrorism Trial

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS Los Angeles Times

Published: Jun 27, 2007

MIAMI - Jurors hearing the support-for-terrorism case against alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla on Tuesday watched a 10-year-old CNN video in which Osama bin Laden denounced the United States as tyrannical and vowed to send "messages without words" to then-President Clinton.

That chilling harbinger of the Sept. 11 attacks compounded, at least emotionally, government evidence and expert testimony linking Padilla's two co-defendants to top al-Qaida figures and deadly violence in Somalia, Bosnia and Chechnya.

In the first evidence in the seven-week-old trial suggesting that they shared bin Laden's radical ideology, Kifah Wael Jayyousi and Adham Amin Hassoun were heard on wiretapped phone calls praising bin Laden for his defiance of U.S. policy in the Muslim world.

"May Allah protect him," Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian, is heard saying after the al-Qaida leader's CNN interview. Jayyousi, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Jordan, praised bin Laden's televised message as "quite powerful."

Jurors watched with rapt attention as the video, edited from 20 minutes to seven to delete editorial commentary, played on a large screen in U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke's courtroom. The jurors betrayed no emotion as bin Laden hailed terrorist bombings that killed U.S. troops in his native Saudi Arabia and warned American civilians to get out of sacred Muslim territories or face the same fate.

In his parting comment in the 1997 video, a message for Clinton, bin Laden said the president's name evoked his "disgust" and that "our people in Arabia will send him messages without words, because he does not understand words."

Cooke told the jury before and after the interview was played that the defendants aren't on trial for any Sept. 11 involvement. The clip was being shown only to help them determine the "state of mind" of Jayyousi and Hassoun, Padilla's alleged recruiters, at the time they were alleged to be running a North American terror support cell.

She added that the bin Laden interview shouldn't be considered in judging Padilla because there is no evidence he ever saw, heard or discussed it.

All three defendants are charged with conspiracy to murder, maim or kidnap persons abroad and with material support to terrorist groups.