Christians Under Attack

his treat, Hassoun said, and a chance to meet "some nice, uh, brothers."

Padilla, a New York-born Puerto Rican who had converted to Islam a few years earlier, knew Hassoun, an outspoken Palestinian, from his mosque. Still, according to a transcript of the conversation obtained by The New York Times, Padilla equivocated while Hassoun exhorted.

"We take the whole family and have a blast," Hassoun said. "We go to, uh, our Busch Gardens, you know. You won't regret it. Money-back guarantee," he said, referring to a U.S. amusement park.

Padilla, laughing, suggested that they not discuss the matter over the phone.

"Why?" Hassoun said. "We're going to Busch Gardens. What's the big deal?"

Given that Padilla and Hassoun are criminal defendants in a terrorism conspiracy case in Miami, it sounds suspicious, as if Hassoun were proposing something more sinister than a weekend of leisure. He well may have been — but maybe, too, he was sincere or joking about a Muslim retreat.

Deciphering such chatter to construct a convincing narrative of conspiracy is a challenge.

Yet, prosecutors say, the government will rely largely on wiretapped conversations when it puts Padilla, Hassoun and a third defendant, Kifah Jayyousi, on trial as a "North American support cell" that sent money, goods and recruits abroad to assist "global jihad."

Tens of thousands of conversations were recorded. About 230 phone calls form the core of the government's case, including 21 that make reference to Padilla, prosecutors said. But Padilla's voice is heard on only seven calls. And on those seven, which The Times obtained from a participant in the case, Padilla does not discuss violent plots.

But this is not the version of Padilla — Qaeda associate and would-be bomber — that John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, unveiled in 2002 when he interrupted a trip to Moscow to trumpet Padilla's capture.

In the four and a half years since then, as the U.S. government tested the limits of its power to deal with terrorism outside the traditional law enforcement system, Padilla is the only terrorism suspect to have gone from enemy combatant to criminal defendant.

His criminal trial, scheduled to begin late this month, will feature none of the initial claims about violent plotting with Al Qaeda that the government cited as justification for detaining Padilla without formal charges for three and a half years. Those claims came from the government's overseas interrogations of terrorism suspects, including Abu Zubaydah, which, according to the government, Padilla corroborated, in part, during his own questioning in a military brig in South Carolina.

But, constrained by strict federal rules of evidence that would prohibit or limit the use of information obtained during such interrogations, the government will make a far more circumscribed case against Padilla in court, effectively demoting him from Al Qaeda's dirty bomber to foot soldier in a somewhat nebulous conspiracy.

The initial dirty-bomb accusation did not disappear, however. It quietly resurfaced in Guantánamo. The government filed the dirty bomb charges against a supposed accomplice of Padilla — an Ethiopian-born detainee — at about the same time that it indicted Padilla on relatively lesser offenses in criminal court.

The change in the status of Padilla from enemy combatant to criminal defendant was abrupt. It came late in 2005, as the Supreme Court was weighing whether to take up the legality of his military detention and the Bush administration, by filing criminal charges, pre-empted its review.

The prosecution of Padilla was a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court. After apprehending him at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago in May 2002, the Bush administration made a choice: to detain him militarily, to thwart further plotting, rather than to follow him in order to gather evidence that might serve a criminal prosecution.

Now that Padilla has ended up a criminal defendant after all, the prosecution's case does not fully reflect the view of the Bush administration of who Padilla is or what he did.

Senior government officials have said publicly that Padilla provided self- incriminating information during interrogations, admitting, they said, to undergoing basic terrorist training, to accepting an assignment to blow up apartment buildings in the United States, and to attending a farewell dinner with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected master planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, before he flew to Chicago in 2002.