February 21, 2003

Indictment Ties U.S. Professor and 8 Others to Terror Group by ERIC LICHTBLAU with JUDITH MILLER

Federal prosecutors brought racketeering charges today against a Florida professor and seven other people, accusing them of financing and helping support suicide bombings in Israel.

In one of the Justice Department's longest-running and most controversial terrorism investigations, a 50-count grand jury indictment unsealed in Tampa relies heavily on expanded prosecutorial powers granted to the department after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The indictment charges that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, linked to more than 100 killings in Israel, has been deeply rooted within the United States since the 1980's, using American academic and fund-raising groups as fronts.

Prosecutors charged that Sami Al-Arian, a suspended professor at the University of South Florida whose case has become a cause célèbre for Arab-Americans and free-speech advocates, was the group's North American leader and conducted a wide-ranging conspiracy to funnel money, support and logistical advice to terrorists operating out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But Arab-American leaders quickly rallied to Mr. Al-Arian's defense, and his lawyer declared him a political prisoner.

Law enforcement officials and terrorism specialists said the indictment represented one of the most important prosecutions to emerge from the Justice Department's stepped-up efforts to apprehend people in the United States believed to have provided support for terrorists abroad. It will also provide an important first test of the government's expanded powers to use intelligence gathered in foreign surveillance operations in a domestic criminal investigation, experts said.

Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert who has complained about Mr. Al-Arian's activities in the United States for nearly a decade, said today that he was gratified that the government had finally taken action.

"The indictment shows an elaborate, sophisticated, comprehensive campaign, going back to 1984, and explicitly how Al-Arian and others were serving as actual leaders of a militant Islamic group within the U.S.," he said.

While suspicions of terrorist ties have swirled around Mr. Al-Arian for years because of his outspoken advocacy for Palestinian causes, the authorities said they were stymied in bringing charges against him because of restrictions that, before the passage of the 2001 Patriot Act, limited the use of foreign intelligence information in criminal cases.
[...]Mr. Al-Arian, according to the 121-page indictment, was the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or P.I.J. American authorities first designated the group as a terrorist organization in 1995 and blame it for the killings of more than 100 people in the West Bank and Gaza, including two young American women. Among the most recent attacks linked to the group was a suicide bombing in Haifa, Israel, on June 5, 2002, that killed 20 people and injured 50.

The indictment maintains that the University of South Florida, where Mr. Al-Arian taught computer engineering and where one other defendant also worked as an instructor, provided a place where Palestinian jihad members "could receive cover as teachers or students."

[...]
Mr. Al-Arian's defense lawyer, Nicholas M. Matassini, asked that the defendants be given copies of the Koran in their cells and told the judge that his client would begin a hunger strike in jail.
[...]
Arab-American groups portrayed Mr. Al-Arian as the victim of a witch-hunt and challenged the credibility of the evidence against him.
[...]
The F.B.I. has been investigating Mr. Al-Arian and his possible links to terrorism since at least the early 1990's, just a few years after he became a permanent resident of the United States. He was born in Kuwait and first came to the United States in 1978 to attend North Carolina State University, becoming a permanent resident in 1989.

Around that time, the authorities said, he began attending organizing meetings around the United States for fellow pro-Palestinian advocates who wanted to raise money and recruit members to their cause.
[...]
In a 1991 meeting in Cleveland of pro-Palestinians ? one of dozens of detailed conversations, phone calls and meetings cited by prosecutors ? Mr. Al-Arian is said to have urged his followers to "damn the allies of America and Israel unto death" and to go to the Holy Land for Muslims in order to commit jihad, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors said Mr. Al-Arian and the other defendants were also actively involved in helping P.I.J. to organize overseas. And the indictment listed numerous payments, some totaling $100,000 or more, that Mr. Al-Arian and his followers are said to have made in the 1990's to support terrorism operations and to provide money to the families of suicide "martyrs" killed in terrorist attacks.

In 1994, the indictment said, Mr. Al-Arian received a three-page fax "listing people killed and names and account numbers of people receiving money on their behalf."

The indictment also says there are close ties between the group and Syria, which long served as host to its leader, and Iran, which provided it with money. It also says P.I.J. members tried to disguise Iran's contributions by speaking in code, referring to Iran as "the north."

Rita Katz, a terrorism analyst, called the indictments a breakthrough by targeting a group other than Al Qaeda. "Al Qaeda is not our only enemy in the war on terror," Ms. Katz said.

Make that the War on IslamoFascist Terror, Ms. Katz.
Note that Judith Miller helped with that piece and what she knows about the world of Islam could fill volumes.
They quote terror expert Steve Emerson, but now here's Emerson's own take on the arrest in the NYPost:
A 19-year Deceit

THE indictment yesterday of the Islamic Jihad terrorist leadership operating out of the United States since 1984 was unprecedented in scope and magnitude. With 50 counts (166 pages), it revealed in fascinating detail the internal conversations, discussions, planning and covert financing of one of the most murderous terrorist enterprises in the world. It uncovered a world we never get to see: how a terrorist enterprise was created, maintained, financed, and coordinated from the safety of the United States.

From issuing communiques on behalf of suicide operations to arguing how their monies were being spent by factions in the Islamic Jihad, the indictment - spanning 19 years - shows a key to Islamic terrorists' success in planting themselves in the heart of the West: the ability to deceive the public, media and government in portraying themselves as part of America's pluralist ethnic mosaic.

Islamic Jihad has been officially headquartered in Damascus, Syria, but the indictment makes clear that its CEO was a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Sami Al-Arian - who ran the terror apparatus under the guise of externally operating three seemingly innocent entities: a Muslim academic institute, a Palestinian humanitarian-aid group and an Islamic religious center. As yesterday's evidence makes staggeringly clear, Al-Arian & Co. used these entities as a perfect cover to operate a violent terrorist group that has killed more than 100 civilians, including two Americans.

The indictment contains conversation after conversation of Al-Arian conspiring with Islamic Jihad leaders outside the United States to coordinate and finance the Islamic Jihad group. Count 42 states: "The enterprise members, while concealing their association with PIJ [Palestine Islamic Jihad], would and did seek to obtain support from influential individuals in the United States under the guise of promoting and protecting Arab rights. The enterprise members would and did make false statements and misrepresent facts to representatives of the media to promote the goals of PIJ."

Back in 1994, I produced and reported "Jihad in America," a PBS documentary that exposed the secret Islamic Jihad cell that Al-Arian ran from Tampa. I interviewed Al-Arian - who, of course, denied any terrorist affiliation. But the documentary also revealed statements by Al-Arian championing terrorism, the existence of Islamic Jihad publications distributed from his office, the use of his academic institute as a cover for Islamic Jihad and actual videos of Islamic Jihad terrorist conferences he organized in the United States.

Virtually every national Islamic "civil rights" group - created with the same guile that fostered the success of Al-Arian's organization - responded by claiming that we were "attacking Islam" and that we were stereotyping all Muslims. That pattern of obeisance to terrorism was repeated yesterday following issuance of the indictment.

Hiding under the patina of promoting Arab and Muslim rights, these groups gathered impressive supporters in the media, Congress and intelligentsia who jumped on to the "Al-Arian is the victim" refrain, further emboldening him to literally get away with murder.

The list of scoundrels who assiduously and systematically protected Al-Arian's terrorist enterprise included then-Rep. David Bonior[One of our "Americans who travel to Baghdad to support Saddam"--Jen], Martin Merzer of the Miami Herald, The St. Petersburg Times' Sue Aschoff and countless others.

Al-Arian was so successful in his deception that he was invited to the White House four times, meeting with both President Clinton and President Bush.[If this is true about Bush, Ouch!--J.T.]
In the end, Al-Arian succeeded in his deception via the same exact formula that constrained the FBI - deterred by the fear of being accused of "racial profiling" - from investigating Islamic militants training in U.S. flight academies in the months before 9/11. This formula lies at the heart of Western vulnerability to terrorist groups implanted in our midst. Al Qaeda and Hamas used it in setting up Islamic "civil rights" groups and charities throughout the '90s- designed to tar with the broad epithet of "racism" anyone who would have exposed their secret terrorist connection.

Yesterday, the Justice Department demonstrated that the United States was not going to sit quietly and allow this murderous deception to continue. Democracies only act, a British politician once said, when there is blood in the streets. For the last 10 years, rivers of blood have flooded Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York and Washington. Unfortunately, the terrorist facade, while damaged by the indictment yesterday and the series of post-9/11 effective one-two counter-terrorist punches by the Bush administration, is still vibrant in the United States.

The terrorists had a good 10 years on us. Whether we are able to truly dissipate their infrastructure in the future will depend on the response that is forthcoming.

Wow. Pretty sobering stuff.
One gets lots of realizations out of this the first one being that the Patriot Act of 2001, so derided by the Dimocrat Liberals, actually is effective at doing what it was designed to do--catch terrorists and NOT as an excuse for the government to spy on you and me.
Secondly, there is Emerson's implied warning that there are more of these Islamist murderers out there.
My personal theory is that Al-Arian was the head (or at least one of the top guys) in a Florida cell: remember, this is where Mohammed Atta and a couple of his friends took flying lessons.
Actually, they went to Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida, but it's not that far from Tampa.
Remember also that the first anthrax attacks were in Florida: to wit, at the American Media Corporation in Miami.
I'm thinking that there's at least one and probably many mosques in western Florida that are gathering places for these IslamoFascist killers.
Lastly, and the biggest outrage of all to me, is not only the murders that were brought about these evildoers.
That is the worst. (BTW, I think that the indictment only lists 100 killed because those are the ones they can prove.
I'd be willing to bet that Palestinian Islamic Jihad and their "friends" have killed a lot more people than that.
What makes me the angriest at this moment is that they are pervetedly using the freedoms and civil liberties of my wonderful country against us and our friends, the Israelis.
Yes, we have Freedom of Religion here, but not if it's a religion that preaches the murder of non-believers.
And yes, citizens have a right to their political affiliations, if it doesn't involve the overthrow of this country, as setting up an Islamic government and law by shar'ia would.
Islamism is wrong and NO, it's not "rascist" to say so.
Believers in Allah, Mohammed and the Koran do not constitute a race.
Believe it, friend.
Good work, John Ashcroft, Robert Mueller and the FBI!
Let's make sure we get a conviction on these bad guys and that they don't "walk" because the ACLU finds some loophole and gets them off as "political prisoners."