Sami Al-Arian Case

I suppose this is just another article by the press reporting more opinion than fact. They call it "news analysis" which seems to give it the look of news, but still retains the stench of opinion.

It was, by some accounts, the most important terrorism-related trial in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -— an ambitious undertaking that included dozens of government witnesses and hundreds of pages of transcripts of wiretapped phone calls dating to the 1990s.

But the Justice Department's case against a former college professor, Sami Al-Arian, and three codefendants for financing and promoting terrorism -— a case that had been in the works for more than a decade -— collapsed in a Florida courtroom this week with acquittals nearly across the board. After a recent string of victories, the verdicts cast a pall over the Bush administration's war on terrorism in the courts.

What happened?

Wrong question. My thoughts came to "how is that?" (Actually I think it came out as WTF?) How is it that a single fairly old case that was unconvincingly argued with vast volumes of old data placing a pall over the war on terror? How is it that a terrorist fund-raiser is suddenly raised to the upper eschlons of the terrorist elites? Now would you call those statements melodramatic?

"What this case shows is, when you cannot connect the dots until the dots are stale, people are not all that interested in the dots," said Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who represented the government in several major terrorism cases in New York.

The verdict also revives a debate over whether the government was too slow to act on intelligence gathered in the 1990s about Al-Arian and other suspects. "If everyone was playing off the same sheet of music, maybe this case gets indicted in 1997 instead of 2003," McCarthy said. "If that happens, it may be an entirely different result."

Old data isn't the same as inadmissable data. I really don't see any relevance to the age of the "dots." In fact, I would say that having sufficient information is what matters in this case. Then again, maybe the jury wasn't up to connecting dots that are tenuous and miles apart.

But despite the years of intense surveillance, U.S. officials did not seek charges at the time. Officials have long cited the mythical "wall" prohibiting intelligence agents from sharing information with prosecutors -— a barrier that was removed by the Patriot Act.

Yeah, that's a gem. Did you catch the opinion twisting? If the wall is "mythical" how could it be removed by the Patriot Act? The wall was well understood, especially with all of the bricks laid into it by previous administrations. Remember this is another one of those cases that information was obtained out of country by an intelligence service and concerned a party that was on American soil. Until the Patriot Act, sharing that information across service was strictly forbidden.

The part of the article that pushed me to write this is a quote that just strikes me as completely illogical.

"I do think it critical for the government to pursue those who raise money to fund terrorist activities in Israel and, indeed, just about anywhere else," said Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor and now a professor at Fordham University School of Law in New York. "But a jury confronted with a defendant not alleged to have plotted against the U.S. and who presented himself as merely an intellectual supporter of foreign groups might have found itself unwilling to convict on these charges."

"There was no murder weapon. There was no fingerprint. This is about a guy who raised money for a group, and that group went out and committed acts of violence, and they thanked him for giving them the money," said another lawyer involved in terrorism cases who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is close to the government team in the Al-Arian case. "That is different than shooting someone in the head with a pistol."

That is an interesting stand. So if I purchase a pistol and the cartridges and give them to a psychopath who kills someone, I'm not liable for providing the weapon. Now you can ask if Al-Arian knew what the money was for, but I'd guess that that was a part of the governments case. I also don't see it as disqualifying some liability in his actions.

Just another case of the "news" not providing full context and failing to provide alternate opinion in the analysis.