DALLAS, 6 November 2007 — While the US Justice Department ponders how it will retry its troubled terrorism finance case against a now-defunct Muslim charity, debris from the recent mistrial here shows signs of piling up at the White House doorstep.
The nation’s biggest terrorism finance case ended so badly for the government, in fact, that it has thrown into question the Bush administration’s original order to shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development six years ago.
Then, President Bush accused the charity of aiding Palestinian terrorists. But the panel of eight women and four men failed to convict Holy Land or any of its five accused former officials on any of the 200 combined criminal counts of supporting terrorists.
It was the first time the administration’s view of the charity had been argued in court because the original executive order shuttering Holy Land was never subjected to full judicial review.
While attorneys and all five defendants in the case remain bound by a gag order, legal observers and two jurors say the recent trial exposed significant weaknesses in the government’s 15-year, multimillion-dollar investigation of Holy Land.
Before the mistrial was declared, vote tallies read in open court showed that the jury had acquitted one defendant on all counts, two others on many counts and was deadlocked on convicting the remaining defendants of anything. Jurors later interviewed by the Los Angeles Times said they were far from agreement on any convictions.
“I kept expecting the government to come up with something, and it never did,” juror Nanette Scroggins, a retired claims adjuster, said an interview. “From what I saw, this was about Muslims raising money to support Muslims, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
Fellow juror William Neal, an art director who said his father worked in military intelligence, agreed that the government never produced what he called “any clear evidence linking” Holy Land funding to the US-designated terrorist group Hamas.
“If the government can shut them down and then not convince a jury the group is guilty of any wrongdoing, then there is something wrong with the process,” Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said the criminal trial derailed the government’s long-publicized assertions about Holy Land. “From the beginning, the allegations were highly suspect and only got worse,” said Turley.
Indeed, Turley said, if the government had begun with the troubled criminal case, it might never have succeeded in closing down the foundation administratively because its disputed evidence would have come to light years ago.
Such criticisms echoed those of Holy Land lawyers who have long complained that the charity was railroaded out of existence without due process of law and based on secret evidence.
“Before a person’s domestic pet can be taken away for being vicious, they are at least entitled to a hearing. So what happened to Holy Land wouldn’t happen to a dog,” John Boyd, one of Holy Land’s lawyers, said in an interview more than a year before the court imposed a continuing gag order.
Ironically, the government’s decision to seek criminal sanctions might have succeeded most in exposing weaknesses in the administration’s overarching case against Holy Land. Georgetown’s Cole said prosecutors failed to produce evidence that the charity provided “one penny to support terrorist activities.”
And in the end, despite years of FBI surveillance, wiretaps and seized documents, the case presented in court largely came down to conflicting testimony between an anonymous Israeli security official and a former American diplomat over which neighborhood charities in the Gaza Strip and West Bank were or were not affiliated with Hamas.
The government’s allegations not only proved unpersuasive but engendered skepticism among some jurors.
“The whole case was based on assumptions that were based on suspicions,” said juror Scroggins, who added: “If they had been a Christian or Jewish group, I don’t think (prosecutors) would have brought charges against them.”
The Israeli government’s role in the case was criticized even before the trial opened. Long before the gag order was imposed, Boyd accused the Justice Department of prosecuting Holy Land “at the behest of Israel.”
Law professor Turley was among legal experts who warned that evidence provided by Israel could be seen as tainted, saying it was “dangerous to rely on intelligence” from a country at the center of a long-standing dispute with Hamas.
In the aftermath of the mistrial, Turley said, it was clear “this case was riddled with highly suspect evidence, some of it derived from Israeli intelligence.”
