Padilla Guilty of Aiding Terrorism

A US District Court convicted Jose Padilla, a US citizen once suspected in a dirty-bomb plot, of conspiring to commit terrorism abroad by providing aid to Islamic extremists. Padilla, a former Guantanamo detainee who became symbolic of the Bush administration's aggressive legal arguments for detaining suspected terrorists, was not charged with the sensational nuclear plot.

Padilla and his two co-conspirators will be sentenced on December 5, and face life in prison. Padilla's lawyers fought to get him tried in federal court, rather than in the shadowy detainee courts set up by the PATRIOT Act. The trial's key piece of evidence was a five-page document Padilla supposedly filled out in an Al Qaeda training camp. (More Jose Padilla stories.)