Word: padilla
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...Padilla first caught the government's eye in the 1980s. He was a teenager, a Chicago gang member who pulled an armed robbery and got sent to juvenile detention. Later, he went to adult prison for brandishing a gun in Florida, and he stayed there until 1992, when he turned 22. After his release, Padilla embraced Islam, and in 1998 he moved to Egypt. While on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in February 2000, he got cozy with al-Qaeda operatives, who recruited him to train for jihad in Afghanistan, the government claimed in court records. On July...
...Padilla was in Afghanistan when the U.S. invaded in October 2001, moving "from safe house to safe house," the court records say, until he made it to Pakistan. There he allegedly met suspected terrorist honchos like Abu Zubaydah (to whom he allegedly suggested making a dirty bomb) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (who allegedly told him to go to the U.S. and blow up apartment buildings...
...December 2001, a CIA agent received the Mujahadeen Data Form from an Afghani, who claimed to have found it in a safe house. When Padilla traveled to Egypt in May 2002, U.S. officials were hot on his tracks. They followed him on a flight to Zurich, and then to Chicago. On May 8, as he left the plane at O'Hare International Airport, customs agents pulled him aside and passed him to the FBI for questioning. He was allegedly carrying $10,000 in cash, a cell phone and a book containing numbers of al-Qaeda contacts...
...Over the next month, the government tried to make a court case against Padilla. But on June 9, he was abruptly classified as an "enemy combatant" - someone who engaged in battle against the U.S. - and thrown into the brig at a South Carolina naval base. The following day in Moscow, Ashcroft announced Padilla's capture as "a significant step forward in the war on terrorism...
...Padilla's path from the brig to a Miami courtroom has been riddled with fits and starts. On June 11 in New York (where he had first been held), the ACLU filed a petition for Padilla's release, arguing that as an American citizen captured on U.S. soil, he had to be let go or charged and tried in a civilian court. In December 2003, a federal appeals court in New York agreed, but then the government dodged a bullet: the Supreme Court ruled that Padilla's petition should have been filed in South Carolina, not New York...