Miami Herald
August 6, 2004
By Jay Weaver
A federal judge has made the government’s terrorism case against a fired University of South Florida professor more difficult for prosecutors, ruling they must show his financing of a Palestinian charity group went specifically for murderous attacks on Israelis.

U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. said Wednesday in Tampa that he has ”grave concerns about the constitutionality” of the material-support law used by prosecutors in the indictment of former professor Sami al-Arian and three other defendants.

Moody said prosecutors must prove al-Arian and the others intentionally provided financial and other resources that were eventually channeled to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is blamed for the killings of more than 100 Israelis dating back to 1984.

Without that requirement, the judge said he was “concerned that ordinary people could not understand that innocuous conduct . . . would be prohibited by the statute.”

Moody’s ruling on the 1996 material- support law — the linchpin of the prosecution’s racketeering and conspiracy case against al-Arian and the other three — is likely to be appealed.

In the short run, the ruling could stall Al-Arian’s trial, scheduled for January. In the long run, the expected appeal could pose major problems for one of the federal government’s most commonly deployed legal anti-terrorism weapons following the 9/11 attacks.

Attorneys for al-Arian rejoiced over Moody’s 20-page decision, which they received late Wednesday. ”It makes the government’s case a little bit tougher, and I’m saying that with a smile on my face,” Washington, D.C., lawyer William Moffitt said.

Moffitt and Tampa lawyer Linda Moreno said prosecutors must now provide hard proof of al-Arian’s direct financial support for Islamic Jihad’s suicide bombings in Israel.

”We’ve been saying all along that the government’s prosecution in this case is baseless and dangerous,” Moreno said. “It criminalizes his political speech and paints him with the brush of terrorism to imply he is guilty by association.”

Al-Arian has maintained that he never condoned the violent activities of Islamic Jihad, a designated terrorist organization by the State Department. The government’s 2003 indictment, however, portrays him as the North American leader of Islamic Jihad.

Prosecutors have argued that Al-Arian and his brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar, who was deported to the Middle East, funneled money to terrorist groups under the guise of promoting scholarly work and helping orphans.

One group was a USF think tank named the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, or WISE, that al-Arian headed. The other was a related charity run by the pair named the Islamic Committee for Palestine, or ICP. They were started in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa declined to comment about the ruling. ”We’re still proceeding and preparing for the trial in January,” office spokesman Steve Cole said.

Moody’s ruling came after prosecutors asked the judge to reconsider his March decision that denied the defendants’ request to dismiss the 50-count racketeering indictment. Prosecutors wanted the judge to clarify his interpretation of the material-support law, which is part of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.