Indictment Details Paper Trail (American Jihadi al-Arian)
Tampa Tribune ^ | 6/5/05 | ELAINE SILVESTRINI
Sami Al-Arian sat with a blank expression, bowing his head, as a cleric described him as the leader of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, ``the active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine.''
It was 1991, and U.S. troops were fighting the Persian Gulf War in Iraq and Kuwait. Al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, was in Cleveland for a fundraiser.
Al-Arian stepped to the lectern. Holding a microphone in his left hand, he gestured emphatically with his right, lecturing the audience in Arabic about the ``oppressive war,'' asking, ``Why did we stop'' the protests?
``Let us damn America!'' he fumed, according to a U.S. government translation of the videotaped event. ``Let us damn Israel! Let us damn their allies until death!''
The next year, Al-Arian, a popular computer science professor, was granted tenure at the University of South Florida.
Monday, Al-Arian and co- defendants Sameeh Hammoudeh, Hatim Naji Fariz and Ghassan Zayed Ballut will begin what is expected to be a six-month trial. They are accused in a 53-count indictment of helping organize and finance the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Prosecutors say they served as the communications arm for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, spreading the word and raising money, fueling the cycle of suicide bombings.
The charges contrast with Al-Arian's public image. His advocacy for civil liberties and Palestinian causes earned him a national reputation as a human rights defender and a voice for understanding between cultures. He was welcomed into the halls of Congress, briefed at the White House and photographed with presidents.
He campaigned for the election of George W. Bush and took credit for swinging enough votes in Florida to tip the balance in the 2000 election.
The entire time U.S. intelligence investigators were secretly monitoring Al-Arian's phone conversations.
If the indictment is to be believed, Al-Arian led two lives. It will be up to jurors to determine whether Al-Arian's public face was, as prosecutors contend, just part of the deception, or whether the charges represent, as Al-Arian claims, the persecution of a Muslim who champions views that differ from the U.S. government's.
Jurors will be asked to consider how it is possible that a man accused of aiding international terrorism was embraced and courted by this country's political elite.
David Bonior, former Democratic whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, was one of many politicians who worked with Al-Arian.
``From my experience with him, he fought for people's basic human rights and freedoms and liberties,'' said Bonior, of Michigan, who said he was surprised when Al-Arian was indicted in 2003. ``I can't imagine these charges being true. But we shall see.''
Al-Arian's daughter, Laila, testified at a bail hearing after her father's arrest that he ``supported armed struggle, but only against the military in accordance with international law.'' She said her father believed the killing of innocent people was ``abhorrent.''
Freedom And History
Al-Arian's trial will take jurors from monumental issues to minute details. The jurors likely will have to sort through competing versions of the history of Israel - on which, it seems, few can agree. They will listen to expert testimony on terrorism financing, read stacks of faxes and bank documents and hear hundreds of hours of conversations in Arabic captured on surveillance tapes.
The material on the tapes is expected to be a source of controversy, as defense attorneys challenge prosecution translations of some of the conversations and argue that the government has taken others out of context. Defense attorneys maintain that some translations they have received from the government differ from what is recounted in the indictment.
The case will pit some of the most cherished values in the United States - freedom of speech, association and religion - against the right of a nation to protect its allies from violent attacks. It will focus on when charitable contributions can be considered to be financing terrorism.
As Al-Arian's attorneys argued in a court filing, ``Like it or not, the people who have suffered at the hands of this never-ending conflict [in Israel] have the right to explain the conflict, their side of the story and the conflict's history. They also have the right to explain even why suicide bombings are justified.''
The indictment charges that Al-Arian did more than criticize the government. The prosecution alleges he and his co-defendants helped run and finance the terrorist organization ``to further the goals of the PIJ in a manner designed to influence or affect the conduct of the Israeli and United States governments by intimidation or coercion, and to retaliate against government conduct.''
The trial is expected to take jurors through the wreckage of at least 16 alleged Islamic Jihad attacks that killed more than 100 people, including three Americans, and wounded nearly 300, including at least five Americans. The attacks, happening between May 1989 and November 2002, included nine bombings, four shootings and two stabbings. One Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacker commandeered a bus full of people and sent it tumbling down a 400-foot ravine.
Designed to thwart the Middle East peace process, the attacks targeted military checkpoints, shopping centers, bus stations and a children's festival. Jurors will learn the names of places like Megiddo Junction, Karkur Station, the Mahane Yehuda Market and the Dizengoff Center shopping mall. They will learn the names of the Americans who were killed: Alisa Flatow, Shoshana Ben-Yishai and Rita Levine.
Defense attorneys argue that even if the Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attacks, the prosecution must prove through solid evidence that the organization was behind them.
Telling The Whole Story
Wiretaps and other evidence allegedly captured Al-Arian and others discussing and even bragging about some of the attacks after the fact, but the indictment suggests no evidence that Al-Arian planned attacks or knew about them ahead of time.
Al-Arian and his co-defendants are not accused of directly committing any violent acts.
The defense likely will point out that the attacks didn't happen in a vacuum, that the Israeli military killed Palestinians during that period.
In one 2004 court filing, for example, Al-Arian's attorneys wrote, ``While the indictment tracks the deaths of Israelis at the hands of Palestinians, it fails to discuss the corresponding deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israelis. ... By only telling one side of the story, the indictment makes it abundantly clear that the real motivation behind these charges is to punish those who disagree with the U.S. government ... .
``Just last year, the Israeli occupying forces have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians, including the deaths of civilians.''
Prosecutors trace Al-Arian's involvement in Islamic Jihad to his days in college in North Carolina in the early 1980s. In 1986, he moved to Tampa to teach at USF. Two years later, Al-Arian founded the Islamic Committee for Palestine.
The stated purpose of the committee, which hosted annual conferences on Palestinian issues, was to unite various organizations and mobilize the Muslim community in America. But federal prosecutors say Fawaz Damra, the cleric who introduced Al-Arian at the fundraiser in Cleveland, was correct when he called Al-Arian the head of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, the ``active arm of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine.''
Al-Arian's contacts with federal law enforcement go back at least to January 1991, two months before his appearance at the Cleveland fundraiser. The FBI knocked on his door as part of the government's campaign to question Arab Americans about potential terrorist activities during the Gulf War.
Al-Arian, who had lived in the United States for 16 years, told reporters the FBI asked him whether he knew of any security threats, and he assured the agents he did not.
Al-Arian spoke out against the 1991 war, telling a reporter that March that the United States may have won the war but wouldn't win in the political arena if it failed to address the demands of Palestinians.
That same year, Al-Arian founded a think tank, the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, which the government says was used as a front for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In April 1992, about the time Al-Arian was given tenure at USF, three Islamic Jihad members killed two soldiers and injured several others in what the indictment describes as a suicide attack near the town of Hula in southern Lebanon, an area occupied by Israel at the time. According to an account in The New York Times, three Arab attackers ambushed an Israeli army convoy with missiles and hand grenades. The attackers were killed by Israeli troops, the newspaper's account says.
Three weeks after the ambush, Al-Arian, his brother-in- law, Mazen Al-Najjar, and Ramadan Shallah, later an adjunct professor at USF, changed a computer file containing the wills of the attackers, according to the indictment.
Several months later, the Islamic Academy of Florida, a school Al-Arian helped found in Tampa, opened to students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The indictment alleges that Al-Arian and the other Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders used the school as cover to employ members of the group, including co-defendant Hammoudeh, who worked there as a teacher and assistant principal.
Lecturing Leaders
In May 1993, Al-Arian was a speaker at a symposium on ``Challenges to Security in Southwest Asia.'' hosted by U.S. Central Command on Davis Islands. Central Command is based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. He was on a panel with respected Islamic scholars, lecturing some of the planners of the Gulf War he had condemned as oppressive two years before.
The topic of his panel was ``Political Islam and its Impact on the Region.'' In the audience, according to a biography published by Al-Arian's supporters, sat one of the war's architects, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.
Another panelist, John Esposito, remembers Al-Arian had a national profile as an advocate for Palestinians. ``I had no reason to think ill of him,'' said Esposito, who teaches Islamic studies at Georgetown University. ``I knew he was passionately committed to peace in Palestine. I know he was very much pro-Palestinian, like a lot of people are pro- Israel.''
Two weeks after the symposium, the indictment says, Al- Arian wired $4,776 to bank accounts held in the West Bank by relatives of recently convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad members serving sentences in Israeli jails for killing three people in a terrorist attack.
In late 1993, U.S. intelligence operatives began recording Al-Arian's conversations and intercepting his faxes. Authorities never have publicly explained why the wiretaps began.
That December, Al-Arian filed an application to become a U.S. citizen.
According to the indictment, by January 1994, the wiretaps were bristling with evidence of Al-Arian's role in the operation of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He allegedly sent a fax to members, for example, suggesting that they set up an organization that didn't have terror as a stated purpose but would work covertly with the militants in the occupied territories. The indictment doesn't elaborate on how this was supposed to work.
Hours after sending the fax, Al-Arian talked to Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi, a co-defendant who has not been extradited from England. Al-Arian said he had discussed the fax with other Palestinian Islamic Jihad members and decided there was no need to create a political organization to duplicate the efforts of Hamas, according to the indictment.
On Nov. 11, 1994, a 17-year- old suicide bomber rode a bicycle to an Israeli military checkpoint, setting off an explosion that killed three Israeli soldiers and wounded about a dozen Israelis and Palestinians near Netzarim Junction, Gaza Strip.
In claiming responsibility, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said the attack was revenge for the death 10 days before of Hani Abed, a leader who was killed by a car bomb, according to news reports.
The day of the bicycle attack, Al-Arian allegedly wrote a note declaring his pride. According to the indictment, the note, which was later faxed to an unidentified recipient, asked for God's blessings for the ``martyrs'' and urged Palestinian Islamic Jihad members to be cautious and alert.
Jihad In America
Al-Arian's name first was publicly linked with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in a controversial public television documentary, ``Jihad in America.'' It was broadcast in Tampa on Nov. 21, 1994. After it was shown, Al-Arian told The Tampa Tribune he was the victim of an Israeli-backed smear. He said the program was ``a deliberate attempt to defame and distort the cause of Muslim organizations in the United States.''
On Jan. 22, 1995, 22 people, including 20 Israeli soldiers, were killed and several others injured in a double suicide bombing at a bus stop at Beit Lid, Israel. In a statement sent to news organizations, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad said the attack was ``general revenge'' for several killings of Palestinians by Israelis, a story in The New York Times said.
The day after the bombing, President Clinton issued an executive order naming the Palestinian Islamic Jihad a ``specially designated terrorist organization,'' and barring Americans from having financial transactions with it.
Two weeks later, according to the indictment, Al-Arian was taped talking to someone on the phone about the president's decree. Al-Arian allegedly belittled the order, calling it propaganda and nonsense.
Then, on Feb. 10, 1995, Al- Arian wrote a letter to a Kuwaiti legislator asking for money for the organization. In the letter, which the FBI seized 10 months later in a search of Al- Arian's home in Tampa, Al-Arian bragged about the Beit Lid bombing and cited the attack as an example of what the Palestinian Islamic Jihad could achieve.
``The latest operation carried out by the two mujahedin, who were martyred for the sake of God, is the best evidence of what the believing few can do in the face of Arab and Islamic collapse before the Zionist enemy and of the still- burning firebrand of faith, steadfastness and challenge,'' he wrote, according to a government translation.
About eight months later, on Oct. 23, 1995, Al-Arian sued the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in an unsuccessful bid for U.S. citizenship. Al-Arian had successfully completed his interview with the agency in September 1994 but never received the promised swearing-in date, the suit said.
A New Leader
Three days after Al-Arian filed his lawsuit, Palestinian Islamic Jihad founder and secretary general Fathi Shikaki was killed in Malta. The organization blamed Israel for the killing. Shallah, who had moved recently to Syria after leaving his employment at USF and the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, succeeded Shikaki.
A month later, the FBI searched Al-Arian's home and offices. Among other things, federal agents seized the letter he had written about the Beit Lid bombing, computers and videotapes of Islamic Committee for Palestine events. Al-Arian told reporters he had no knowledge of Shallah's ties to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian had sponsored Shallah's U.S. visa application and had hired him to be an administrator at the think tank.
The FBI also seized a tape of a 1992 Islamic Committee for Palestine conference in Chicago, where Shallah spoke, telling attendees, ``I say toppling the rulers and rubbing their noses in the dirt, and jihad against them is not terrorism.''
Another seized tape showed Al-Arian speaking at an Islamic Committee for Palestine conference in 1988. According to a government transcript of Al- Arian's remarks, Shikaki had been among the invited guests who could not make it because they couldn't get visas from U.S. embassies. Another was Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind sheik sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and destroy several New York landmarks.
On Oct. 8, 1997, the U.S. State Department designated the Palestinian Islamic Jihad a ``foreign terrorist organization.''
The vast majority of the evidence documenting Al-Arian's alleged participation in Palestinian Islamic Jihad predates the presidential and State Department terrorism designations by several years. But because he allegedly continued his involvement after the designations, prosecutors have persuaded a judge, over defense objections, to allow them to argue to jurors that the earlier activity was part of an ongoing crime.
Circling The Wagons
In March 2000, Al-Arian and his family were photographed with Texas Gov. George W. Bush during a campaign stop at the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City. A book published by Al-Arian's supporters says Al-Arian ``worked tirelessly to make Muslims count in the 2000 election. He used his newfound position of a national community leader to campaign for Bush on a large scale.''
That August, Al-Arian was captured on a wiretap directing Hatim Naji Fariz to arrange a newspaper interview with Abd Al Aziz Awda, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Jihad, according to the federal indictment.
According to a prosecution court filing, ``evidence shows that the PIJ Tampa cell circled the wagons for Al-Najjar's INS proceedings.''
On the wiretap, Al-Arian and Fariz allegedly discussed using unspecified newspaper articles about Awda in an upcoming immigration hearing for Al- Najjar, Al-Arian's brother-in- law, who was being held on secret evidence. According to the indictment, Al-Arian and Fariz wanted the stories to portray Awda as a religious figure with no relation to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Awda's status in the organization was of concern because Al-Najjar was videotaped at at an Islamic Committee for Palestine conference introducing Awda as ``the first of the deportees from Palestine for his primary role in the Jihadi mobilization against the occupation.''
Al-Najjar ultimately was deported and named a co-defendant in the Al-Arian case, along with Awda, who has been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government.
Awda's role is likely to be an issue in the trial. In court filings, the U.S. government acknowledged it had received information that Awda left the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in 1997 to join the Palestinian Authority, the official government in the Palestinian territories, and that he was recruiting other members to join the authority.
On Oct. 10, 2000, according to the federal indictment, Al- Arian faxed a hand-edited copy of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's charter to a Houston- area telephone number. Later, he received a fax containing the charter with the edits included.
That same day, Al-Arian was in immigration court in Bradenton publicly supporting Al- Najjar.
Al-Najjar's struggle to remain in this country propelled Al-Arian to campaign for laws against the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings and forged his ties with civil liberties advocates and high-ranking politicians, including Bonior.
In June 2001, Al-Arian was part of a group of Muslim leaders invited to a briefing reportedly given in a building adjacent to the White House by presidential adviser Karl Rove on the administration's faith- based agenda and other issues.
Then on Sept. 26, 2001, Al- Arian appeared on the Fox News program ``The O'Reilly Factor,'' where he faced rigorous questioning about the World and Islam Studies Enterprise and a 1991 speech at a rally in Chicago in which he said: ``Jihad is our path. Victory to Islam. Death to Israel.''
Al-Arian said the reference was to ending oppression and occupation, not killing people. Two days after the program, USF put him on paid leave for the second time, citing safety concerns after threats had been received.
On June 5, 2002, according to news reports, a 16-year-old boy drove a car filled with explosives into a commuter bus, killing 17 people, including at least 13 Israeli soldiers, and wounding about 45 at Megiddo Junction near Afula, Israel.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, saying, according to news reports, that the attack was ``a response to the crimes of the Israeli aggression'' and timed to mark the 35th anniversary of the 1967 war in which Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The attack came weeks after the Israeli military ended a sweep in the West Bank.
Later that day, Al-Arian talked on the phone with Fariz. The government's interpretation of their conversation likely will symbolize one of the key disputes in the trial. Defense attorneys are expected to argue that the prosecution took the exchange out of context.
According to the indictment, Fariz asked Al-Arian whether he knew about the bombing, and he and Al-Arian ``both laughed about it.'' |
