A promise not to disclose the existence of a secret? For example, if Jay Rockefeller says he can’t talk about what he knows about NSA wiretapping because it is classified, but he thinks it is illegal, has he violated his promise of secrecy?
Professor Turley has brilliantly positioned things re NSA wiretapping by arguing “The USG knew my client was such a bad dude that they must have been wiretapping him when he was making plans with Bin Laden’s sheik at 11 a.m. on September 16 and then again on September 19, 2001.”
Al-Timimi’s lawyer has said the FBI has suspected Ali in connection with anthrax. Now the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed the conviction and sentence of a former GMU student who was not forthcoming about what he knew about Ali upon questioning before the grand jury. The same AUSA who is handling the Ali case, with all its classified filings, argued this case before the Fourth Circuit. Here is an excerpt:
“An organization in Falls Church, Virginia, known as the Dar al-Arqam Islamic Center, has figured in no fewer than fourteen terrorism prosecutions so far. Some of those prosecutions centered on a group of young men who assembled at Dar al-Arqam and, in early 2000, started training together for violent jihad. The group escalated stepwise from an ideological attraction to religious violence to actually taking up arms against nations they saw as enemies of Islam: Russia in Chechnya, India in Kashmir, and the United States. They began by talking with some of the more militant leaders at Dar al-Arqam. They they started conducting quasi-military exercises with paintball guns in the Virginia woods and practicing marksmanship with AK-47 style rifles on Virginia shooting ranges. A few members traveled to Pakistan or Afghanistan to train at jihadist camps run by Lashkar-e-Taibe (a designated terrorist organization since December 2001).
Then came the attacks of September 11th and a schism at Dar al-Arqam between those who condemned and those who condoned the attacks. Within a few days, the leader of the violent wing, a Dar al-Arqam founder named Ali Al-Timimi (later convicted of solicitation to levy war against the United States), held a secret meeting at which the core of the paintball group formally dedicated itself to violence. More members went abroad to the jihadist camps. Some who went, upon returning to the United States, purchased sophisticated aerial surveillance technology to send to Lashkar-e-Taiba overseas. Then, in 2003, the group was arrested and eleven men indicted together.
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Benkhala was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2003, where he had been studying Islamic law and traveling with Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a friend from Dar al-Arqam and a member of al Qaeda (eventually convicted of conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States, among other crimes).
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Specifically, Benkahla stood accused of a set of false denials: that he had participated in a jihadist training camp somewhere in August 1999; that he had handled weapons while there and observed others doing the same; and that he knew about the various people he had communicated with about training for jihad (such as “Abdullah,” Ali Al-Timimi, and others of interest to the FBI in terrorism-related investigations.)”
One reason the USG is keeping quiet about anthrax is (1) fairness to defendants in pending matters, (2) the successful resolution of which might lead to leverage they would find useful in a prosecution relating to Amerithrax.