Pogy, Thanks, but never mind! This thread below has both the Tampa Tribune link in the post, and in reply #1 the last link is the St. Pete Times editorial I mentioned ["Behind the facade"]. Click HERE.
TEL AVIV - Sami Al-Arian, the professor being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for alleged ties to Middle East terrorists, helped found the governing council of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and then served on it, current and former senior Israeli intelligence officials say.
The panel is called the Majlis Shura and functions like a Jihad board of directors. It has an unknown number of members and offers advice on such matters as money and organization. It appears to have been formed in the early 1990s, about 10 years after the Jihad's birth.
In addition, the officials say, Al-Arian delivered computer equipment to the Jihad's leader en route to a 1994 meeting of the council in Tehran.
Their revelations for the first time lift the veil on the protracted and secretive investigation into Al-Arian and Tampa's ties to the violence in the Middle East.
Al-Arian denies any involvement with the Jihad, but the officials say they believe his role was in political ideology and fundraising - not in Jihad operations.
Israeli intelligence has provided this and other information tying Al-Arian to the Jihad to federal agents in Tampa, who have been investigating Al-Arian for the past seven years, the officials said. Israeli security agents have briefed U.S. officials on the material in Tampa, and a seven- member delegation of prosecutors and investigators from Tampa traveled to Israel in the fall of 2000 for briefings by the Israelis.
The Israelis say they are frustrated U.S. authorities have not indicted Al-Arian, who is a tenured computer science professor at the University of South Florida but has been suspended from teaching there since Sept. 28.
Al-Arian and his brother-in- law, Mazen Al-Najjar, have long been suspected by U.S. agents of running front organizations for the Jihad - in part through a think tank affiliated with USF that Al-Arian launched in 1991 called the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, or WISE. Federal agents raided WISE's offices and Al-Arian's home in November 1995 after a former WISE director emerged at Jihad headquarters in Damascus, Syria, as the Jihad's commander.
``This is pure nonsense,'' Al- Arian said of the Israeli allegations in comments made through his attorney, Robert McKee of Tampa.
Al-Arian said he was not in Tehran or Damascus in 1994, nor did he deliver any computer for the Jihad. He said he did travel to Saudi Arabia that year for the Hajj, a pilgrimage Muslims must make to Mecca at least once in their lives if they can afford it.
In February, then-interim U.S. Attorney Mac Cauley issued a statement saying Al-Arian remains the subject of ``an active and ongoing investigation.'' Cauley didn't elaborate, but the Israelis say its focus appears to be whether Al-Arian has violated federal racketeering laws.
The trip by U.S. authorities to Israel in the fall of 2000 included then-U.S. Attorney Donna Bucella. They returned with information about the Jihad's governing board and financial transactions involving the Jihad, the Israelis say.
``If these files were ever opened to the public, if they will do that, there are a lot of Americans who will be very, very disappointed in how the FBI behaved in this case,'' a senior intelligence official said.
Enough For A Conviction?
U.S. law enforcement officials disagree. The threshold for convicting people in terrorism-related cases is far higher here than in Israel, they say, and - while they understand the Israelis' frustration - this case may dwell in a legal gray area.
Such disagreement is fairly common when investigations in the United States require help from other countries, said Robert Blitzer, the FBI's former chief of domestic terrorism investigations.
``They can do more with less,'' Blitzer said of the Israelis. ``They have a tendency to read an awful lot into a piece of information to the degree that they view it as enough to do something. But we know here it's not enough to get a conviction.''
Al-Arian ``is a representative of the Islamic Jihad, a known terrorist organization, here in the United States doing his thing in support of that organization, trying to radicalize and bring into the organizational fold more and more Muslims,'' Blitzer continued.
But that doesn't necessarily mean he's broken U.S. law, Blitzer said.
``They are a part of a support infrastructure for the organization,'' he said. ``That's what this is all about. This is about supporting the political goals of the organization and to collect money and to propagate the organization through proselytizing.''
The investigation centers on whether money raised by Al- Arian in the United States was used to finance Jihad terrorism in Israel - in particular an April 1995 bombing attack on a bus that killed eight people in the Gaza Strip, the Israelis say. One of the victims was an American college student, Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old from West Orange, N.J., who was in Israel studying at a seminary.
Flatow's father, Stephen, said he testified about Alisa's death before a federal grand jury in Tampa in December.
Among other things, racketeering statutes allow prosecutors more flexibility linking criminals acts together even when they're widely separated by time or geography, according to Tampa defense lawyer Todd Foster, who previously served as major crimes chief at the U.S. attorney's office.
Analyzing Foreign Intelligence
Israel also claims Al-Najjar, who has been in federal prison since November pending a final order of deportation, served as a communications conduit between Jihad terrorists in the Israeli Occupied Territories and Jihad headquarters in Damascus.
As recently as 1994, an Israeli intelligence official said, suspects arrested in connection with terrorist attacks in Israel have had slips of paper with Al- Najjar's home telephone number in Tampa written on them.
The suspects said during subsequent interrogations they had been instructed to call the number to report on an attack, the official said. Before Al-Najjar was a contact, the Israelis say, the Jihad used Basheer Nafi, a former WISE director deported by the United States in 1996. Nafi has repeatedly denied any involvement with the Jihad.
It isn't clear whether this allegation is part of a package of secret evidence that was used by immigration officials to jail Al-Najjar as a national security threat in 1997. That evidence alleged an association between Al-Najjar and the Jihad. He spent 3 1/2 years in an immigration detention center in Bradenton.
An immigration judge ordered his release in December 2000 after a U.S. district judge ruled that using secret evidence to keep Al-Najjar behind bars violated his due process rights. His attorneys successfully argued he couldn't defend himself against evidence he couldn't see.
Agents rearrested Al-Najjar in November after the INS issued a final deportation order. His attorneys have sued for his release, arguing immigration law does not allow unlimited detention but gives the government six months to find a country willing to accept the detainee. As a stateless Palestinian, Al-Najjar says he has been unable to find a country willing to accept him.
David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who represents Al-Najjar, cautioned against accepting foreign intelligence at face value.
``Intelligence agencies try to gather up as much possible information as they can. They will take rumors and innuendos. Part of their job is to determine which are the more credible pieces of information,'' Cole said.
Undocumented intelligence information isn't good enough for American courts, Cole said.
``What we have been fighting since Day One in this is you have to have a forum where claims can be tested. When we had a forum where these claims could be tested, we convinced a Republican judge there was nothing here. It was a very lengthy rejection of every claim that the government made.''
Immigration Judge R. Kevin McHugh ruled that the government failed to present evidence showing Al-Najjar aided terrorists or that WISE, and a related charity called the Islamic Committee for Palestine, were fronts for the Islamic Jihad.
``There is evidence in the record to support the conclusion that WISE was a reputable and scholarly research center and the ICP was highly regarded,'' McHugh wrote.
Al-Najjar never served in any capacity with the Jihad, Al-Arian said through his attorney. These are old allegations that were refuted by McHugh's ruling, McKee quoted Al-Arian as saying.
``People just don't want to accept that,'' Al-Arian said.
Turnover, Ignorance Hinder Probe
Israeli officials also said the U.S. investigation has been hampered by interagency squabbling, turnover among case agents and a general ignorance about the Middle East conflict and its players.
One of the Israelis complained about a change in case agents that came shortly after the autumn 2000 trip. The case was progressing well, the official said, but bogged down as new players brought themselves up to speed.
``They knew nothing about the'' Jihad, the Israeli said. ``I sat with them for about four hours, and I had to review with them all the history that I told to the [previous investigators]. Every time they changed the team, they started from the beginning. They know nothing. They know nothing about the Middle East reality.''
At the request of U.S. investigators, the Israelis assembled a package of additional financial records that the Americans planned to come back for, the Israelis said. But the Americans postponed their return trip due to security concerns - first in December, then in March - and the package still awaits pickup. The Israelis said they wonder why the FBI hasn't sent one of its agents stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to retrieve the material.
``It could be very useful,'' one of the Israelis said.
The Israelis have not released any documentation to support their allegations against Al-Arian and Al-Najjar. However, the roles the Israelis ascribe to Al-Arian and Al-Najjar are detailed in a Jihad document agents seized in their 1995 raid on WISE's office. The paper diagrams the structure of the organization, but does not name anyone. The Israelis say this document - which according to an FBI translation was titled ``Internal Manifest'' - had never before been published and they weren't aware of it until its discovery in Tampa.
Prosecuting and convicting Al-Arian won't stem the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, said Reuven Paz, director of the Project for the Research of Radical Islam in Haifa. Most of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad's money comes from Iran, and its active core is in the occupied territories. Whatever has happened in Tampa was more about ideology and politics than directing operations, Paz said.
``Israel is confronting real terrorism and didn't pay attention to the political activity,'' Paz said. ``If they wanted, the Palestinian Authority could eliminate the whole group in one day. It wouldn't create such noise in the Palestinian population like the closure of even one social structure of Hamas,'' which runs schools, clinics and mosques in addition to orchestrating terrorist attacks.
Reporter Michael Fechter can be reached at (813) 259-7621.