Weekly Planet
August 5, 2004
By John Sugg

Link: Click here

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is an argument that has been espoused by the likes of George H.W. Bush, Oliver North and Margaret Thatcher. Now that thinking — on the part of the U.S. Justice Department — could result in freedom for Tampa’s best-known alleged terrorist (or freedom fighter), Sami Al-Arian, and three co-defendants scheduled to go on trial next January. Federal authorities prosecute some groups for terrorism while ignoring identical or similar activities by other groups, according to court documents filed on behalf of Al-Arian and Hatim Naji Fariz. The motions describe a long list of terrorist activities in the United States by Cambodian, Irish and Jewish groups that either have not been prosecuted by federal authorities or have received only slap-on-the-wrist attention. Many of the groups have direct links to bloodshed, while the government has stipulated that Al-Arian and his associates were not involved in violent attacks or any actions aimed at the United States.

Fariz’s federal public defender, Kevin Beck, said that “100 percent of terrorism prosecutions” he located under the same law that’s been applied to Al-Arian were of Muslims and Arabs. “Obviously this is not fair. The prosecution is driven by politics, domestic policy and a foreign government [Israel].”

Ironically, one alleged terrorism supporter who has escaped the interest of federal prosecutors is himself a federal prosecutor in Tampa. The Weekly Planet has reported that the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s chief criminal prosecutor, Robert O’Neill, is part owner of a Hyde Park bar, Four Green Fields, that has hosted fundraisers for Sinn Fein, which the U.S. State Department describes as a front for the Irish Republican Army. The IRA has murdered at least 650 civilians since the 1970s, and in recent years has built bombs for Palestinian groups and aided Colombian narco-terrorists.

“O’Neill appears to have been involved in doing the same thing as Al-Arian, all at a time when he was supposed to be investigating Al-Arian,” veteran federal prosecutor Jeffrey Del Fuoco wrote in a confidential Aug. 29, 2003, Justice Department memo that was obtained by the Planet. “I can think of several disastrous problems associated with this, to include defense allegations of ‘selective prosecution’.”

Terry Zitek, the lead prosecutor against Al-Arian, did not return phone calls or respond to detailed messages on the subject of selective enforcement.

Fariz and Al-Arian’s motions list a number of groups that are clearly terrorist but have not been prosecuted, including: * Kach and Kahane Chai. These are Israeli terrorist groups that openly operate and raise money in New York. “Law enforcement agencies rarely bother them and generally ignore their activities,” Fariz’s motion states.

* The IRA. Al-Arian’s motion states: The IRA “is a known terrorist group. Yet, due to the European composition of its membership and its close ties with Irish-Americans, the IRA has never been designated as a [foreign terrorist organization] despite the government’s acknowledgment of the historic evidence of the IRA’s terrorist activities.”

* Cambodian Freedom Fighters, based in Long Beach, California, which carried out a bloody assault on Phnom Penh in 2000.

A review of terrorist incidents in Florida shows that most were committed by Cuban-American terrorists in Miami during the 1960s and 1970s, when scores of political murders, bombings and other incidents occurred. Many of the terrorists were linked to the CIA, and there were seldom prosecutions. One of the most infamous terrorists, Orlando Bosch, was freed from prison by President George H.W. Bush after lobbying by his son Jeb, now Florida’s governor. Bosch was linked to a number of bombings, including one that killed 73 passengers on a Cuban passenger plane.

The only incidents of Middle East-related terrorism in Florida involved radical supporters of Israel.

In 1997, Harry Shapiro planted a bomb at a Jacksonville synagogue in an attempt to murder former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Robert Goldstein, a Seminole podiatrist, pleaded guilty last year to stockpiling an arsenal and planning the mass murders of Muslims. In 1996, Damian Hospital posed as an Arab and mailed threats to blow up a building at the University of South Florida and kill a professor.

Although Shapiro, Goldstein and Hospital were collared and convicted, federal authorities launched no widespread investigation of groups that might have supported them — as the FBI has with members of the Tampa Bay area Muslim community.

Al-Arian, while an engineering professor at USF, came under scrutiny when a self-described terrorism expert, Steven Emerson, attacked the academic in a 1994 video. Emerson has close ties to Israeli intelligence and has long been part of the far-right Likud effort to silence Arab and Muslim voices in the United States. (Emerson lost a libel suit against the Planet last year when he couldn’t produce proof of his allegations.)Two federal grand juries failed to indict Al-Arian during the late 1990s, and the then-head of the FBI’s national counterterrorism office, Bob Blitzer, told the Planet “no federal laws” were broken by the Tampa Muslims.

Al-Arian was indicted 17 months ago after Israelis claimed they had “intelligence” damaging to the Tampa academic. That assertion was first trumpeted by Michael Fechter, a Tampa Tribune reporter who has relied upon and echoed Emerson’s often-spurious claims, and by The New York Times’ Judith Miller, another reporter with close ties to Israel. Miller’s alarmist reports on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have been largely discredited in the last year.

Added to the “intelligence” was 21,000 hours of wiretaps whose use was allowed only after the passage of the PATRIOT Act.

Defense attorneys say they have not been allowed to examine or test the Israeli information. Nor have they had access to most of the wiretaps, but the lawyers say what little they have heard tends to exonerate their clients.

The defense attorneys, meanwhile, have exposed a series of misrepresentations by the federal prosecutors. These include false statements by the prosecutors that they did not use informants and that they didn’t have summaries of the wiretaps.

The government also lost a critical fight — unreported by the daily newspapers although their reporters were at the recent hearing. Al-Arian won a motion that requires the government to prove he intended to commit a criminal act in order to convict him. The prosecution has moved for a rehearing — and Al-Arian’s Tampa attorney, Linda Moreno, predicts the issue could go to the Supreme Court.

John Sugg, senior editor for the Creative Loafing/Weekly Planet group, can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@cln.com.