NYT : Bush Official, in Book, Tells of Pressure on ’04 Vote

Bush Official, in Book, Tells of Pressure on ’04 Vote

By PETER BAKER | August 20, 2009

WASHINGTON — Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”

“Given those facts,” Mr. Urbahn said, “it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

Mr. Urbahn said “the storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense.”

Mr. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Mr. Ridge’s account. “Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Mr. Bush’s homeland security adviser, said that “there was a fulsome debate” about the threat level but that “the politics of it were not ever a factor.”

Mr. Ridge’s book, called “The Test of Our Times” and due out Sept. 1 from Thomas Dunne Books, is the latest by a Bush adviser to disclose internal disagreements and establish distance from an unpopular administration. Mr. Ridge complains that he was never invited to National Security Council meetings, that Mr. Rumsfeld would rarely meet with him and that the White House pressured him to include a justification for the Iraq war in a speech.

He also writes that he lobbied unsuccessfully before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to replace Michael D. Brown as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and that the White House killed his proposal to open a homeland security regional office in New Orleans.

The most sensational assertion was the pre-election debate in 2004 about the threat level, first reported by U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Ridge writes that the bin Laden tape alone did not justify a change in the nation’s security posture but describes “a vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion” on Oct. 30 to do so.

“There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None,” he writes. “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’ Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president’s approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level.”

Mr. Ridge provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion. Until now, he has denied politics played a role in threat levels. Asked by Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times if politics ever influenced decisions on threat warnings, he volunteered to take a lie-detector test. “Wire me up,” Mr. Ridge said, according to Mr. Lichtblau’s book, “Bush’s Law.” “Not a chance. Politics played no part.”

IPS : GERMANY: Terror Plot Emerges as Secret Service Game

GERMANY: Terror Plot Emerges as Secret Service Game

By Julio Godoy | August 20, 2009

BERLIN, Aug 20 (IPS) - It was announced as a terror plot busted. German police had captured three young Muslim men in the small village Medebach-Oberschledor, some 450 km southwest of Berlin Sep. 4 in 2007. The police declared they had seized 730 kilograms of hydrogen peroxide, enough to make 550 kg of explosives.

The three men, and a fourth, who was captured a year later in Turkey, wanted to bomb U.S. military and other facilities in Germany, and to kill "as many U.S. soldiers as possible," one of the accused later confessed.

The four men told court their plans were in retaliation against the U.S. war on 'Islamic terrorism', especially the abuse of hundreds of Muslims detained at Guantanamo prison. German authorities and the media dubbed the four men 'the Sauerland group', in reference to the region where they were captured.

The Sauerland group were declared to be members of the Islamic Jihad Union, an alleged terrorist organisation based in Uzbekistan.

Almost two years later, the case is before the higher regional court in Duesseldorf, some 460 km southwest of Berlin, and should come to a close early 2010.

But now, the case has ceased to be "the serious terrorist threat" it was called. It is now a mysterious puzzle of secret service games, prosecutors' alarmism spread by the media, and basic failures of justice.

The supposedly dangerous group members have emerged as no more than some muddle-heads. They had no links whatsoever to international Islamic terror groups.

"No Islamic chief villain...in Pakistan or somewhere else influenced the group," says Hans Leyendecker, one of Germany's top investigative journalists. "Its members are dumb, narrow-minded young men who hate the U.S."

Moreover, the fifth member of the group, yet to be captured, has been described as a Turkish national known only as Mevlut K. He now appears as an informer of the Turkish national intelligence organisation (MIT, after its Turkish name). He was the key figure in the plot, according to confessions by other members of the Sauerland group.

"Without Mevlut, we would not have been able to go as far with the preparations as we did," Attila Selek, one of the accused, told the court. 'K' had procured 26 fuses for the bombs the group was supposed to make, Selek said. Only, the fuses were useless. German police investigations showed that all but two were too humid to work.

Fritz Gelowicz, another member of the terrorist group, said the four men were informed of K's links with the MIT. "We knew that Mevlut had links with several secret services," Gelowicz told the court. "We though that these links were good for us."

K apparently did not hide his links to the Turkish secret service. On at least one occasion K told the group they were being monitored by the German security agencies. "Then he told me he was stealing this information from secret services," Selek told the court.

Despite warnings that the German police were constantly informed of their actions, the four men continued their preparations until they were captured.

Numerous sources have confirmed that the German foreign intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) knew in 2004 that Mevlut K worked for the MIT. That year, the sources said, the MIT proposed to the BND that K be infiltrated into Islam movements in Germany. The BND reportedly rejected the Turkish plan.

Despite the confessions about K's involvement, German justice failed to order his capture for a long time. Mevlut K. is believed to be living in Turkey.

German authorities only issued an international warrant against Mevlut K. Aug. 13, several weeks after depositions by the other four members of the group had been widely circulated.

The Sauerland group could have been "an orchestration to make believe that a huge terrorist threat" was looming over U.S. military facilities in Germany, says Rene Hellig, leading commentator with the Neues Deutschland daily.

Former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray calls it a fake case orchestrated by Uzbek security services.

"I should make plain that regrettably it is a fact that there are those who commit violence, motivated by a fanatic version of their faith," Murray wrote in his personal blog. "Sadly the appalling aggression of the U.S. government and allied war policy has made such reaction much more frequent. They may or may not have been planning to commit explosions. But if they were, the question is who was really pulling their strings, and why?"

Murray says there is no evidence of the existence of Islamic Jihad Union, alleged to have been directing the Sauerland group, other than that given by Uzbek security services. "There are, for example, no communications intercepts between senior terrorists referring to themselves as the Islamic Jihad Union," he said.

Murray said the planned attacks the Uzbekistan government attributed to the group since the spring of 2004 "are in fact largely fake and almost certainly the work of the Uzbek security services, from my investigations on the spot at the time." (END/2009)

Tarpley : US-UK Intelligence Readies Turkestan Islamic Party Terror Gambit for Beijing Olympics

US-UK INTELLIGENCE READIES TURKESTAN ISLAMIC PARTY TERROR GAMBIT FOR BEIJING OLYMPICS

By Webster G. Tarpley | August 1, 2008

Washington, August 1, 2008 – Reliable Australian intelligence sources have issued a warning that US-UK intelligence is attempting to mount a false flag terror operation against China, quite possibly featuring a gaggle of patsies calling themselves the “Turkestan Islamic Party,” at the upcoming Beijing Olympics, where the eyes of the world will be concentrated next week. The goal of the operation will be to duplicate or surpass the bloodbaths the Mexico City 1968 and/or Munich 1972 summer games. Commandant Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) claims in a video tirade displayed by a US company’s website to represent the Turkish Moslems of Sinkiang province or Chinese Turkestan, where the Anglo-Americans have long sponsored an abortive separatist movement. Patsy leader Seyfullah and his Turkestan Islamic Party have been indirectly mentioned twice over the past two years by Ayman Zawahiri, the veteran British agent who functions as the real leader of “al Qaeda,” in effect sheep-dipping the little known TIP in the vast pool of “al Qaeda” notoriety. If the planned operation actually takes place, the current Chinese leadership will – in the hopes of the plotters -- loose face and forfeit the mandate of heaven, the prerequisites for continued rule. This could then be the prelude to the installation of a new Chinese government far less committed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and to cooperation with Russia. It might be a first step towards splitting the SCO and turning Beijing against Moscow, which is the current goal of Anglo-American grand strategy.

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald describing the general outlines of the danger is [linked]. The Turkestan Islamic Party claims to have already organized serious terror attacks in Shanghai, on the mainland coast opposite Taiwan, in Kunming in southwest China, and in Guangzhou (Canton in south China, near Hong Kong). Despite ample international attention to the Beijing Olympics by the controlled media, these considerable terror attacks have scarcely been reported, suggesting that some form of information management regime may be in place, as it was before 9/11.

The threatened Olympic terror event may have a second phase, designed to prevent a wave of world sympathy for the Chinese and other victims of whatever happens. An attempt to disrupt the world-wide operations of the internet may ensue, presented as the retaliation or riposte by the Chinese for what has been done to them by the foreign devils. Logic bombs or more sophisticated means could be used to disrupt the world-wide internet, shutting it down in whole or in part for days or weeks. International financial transactions might also become chaotic. Someone might begin dumping US Treasury paper, with the controlled western media blaming the Chinese government, even though the prospect of any direct or immediate Chinese government retaliation is remote. The massive hardships that can be inflicted by computer and cyber-based disruption would be used to whip up resentment and hatred in the west against the Chinese, changing the world strategic climate dramatically. Some patsy group calling itself a Chinese secret society might announce that it had finally become fed up with the arrogance, the interference, and the aggression of the Anglo-Americans, and that it had decided to strike back on its own. This would allow the US and UK to demanded that the Chinese government hand over these malefactors in a humiliating gesture, leading to an escalating diplomatic and strategic crisis. These are but a few crude hypotheses drawn from the immense pool of possibilities. In many of these we see that the scope of terror could suddenly become much larger, due to the immense strategic potential on the Anglo-American and Chinese sides.

The direct terror attack may also be supplemented by large scale provocations, chaos and confusion operations, and mass demonstrations by Falun Gong fanatics, by Tibetans loyal to the feudal latifundist and US-UK intelligence asset who calls himself the Dalai Lama, and/or by democracy and human rights activists assembled by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and various NGOs in the orbit of US-UK and NATO intelligence. But the vigilance of the Chinese regime may be enough to defeat these plans.

A POSSIBLE PHASE CHANGE OF TERRORISM

If any such attack occurs, it would represent the beginning of a whole new phase of false flag terrorism on a world scale. From the mid-1990s until about 2005-2006, patsy organizations like “al Qaeda” in many cases received the blame for false flag terror attacks carried out by the US-UK invisible government networks against their own countries or their own national assets abroad, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7/2005 attacks in London. The goal of these operations was to whip up hysteria in the western countries, and to provide pretexts for direct aggression under neocon auspices against Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also a parallel track of NATO-backed Chechen terrorist attacks against Russia. Henceforth, patsy groups like the TIP are to be used increasingly against “enemy states” like China and Russia, the two targets who have gone to the top of the list, displacing the earlier focus on the far less significant Iran and North Korea. Any attacks by the TIP on Chinese territory will of course represent acts of war by the US-UK against China, and could easily generate incalculable consequences over time. Under the Brzezinski Plan, the US-UK will be messing with the biggest country in the world, and one which comes equipped with ICBMs and H-bombs that can strike US territory.

Pentagon boss Robert Gates, a Brzezinski man going back to the Carter NSC in 1977-79, said this week that irregular warfare and soft power are the wave of the immediate future, and that may be exactly what we are about to get in spectacular form. This speech may well have been a signal that something big and very messy in the irregular warfare department is about to happen at the Olympics. “Al Qaeda,” the CIA’s Islamic Legion, traces its origins back to the Carter-Brzezinski years, just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski’s playing of the Islamic fundamentalism card against them.

A TOTALLY NEW HIT LIST FOR THE PRINCIPALS’ COMMITTEE

The new target list is being dictated by the Principals’ Committee, which currently rules in Washington. Among the Principals are Rice at State, Gates at Defense, Paulson at Treasury, and Admiral Mullen as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plus some others. This group is now running the US government. Bush and Cheney are little better than figureheads, lame ducks who have virtually ceased to influence government affairs as they fade away. The top neocons are either in jail, like Lord Conrad Black, or running for cover. The playbook for the Principals is the Brzezinski Plan, with its focus on working towards a global showdown with Russia and China. A US-UK attack on Iran is now virtually excluded, but instead large-scale bombing and preparations for a land invasion of northwest Pakistan are proceeding apace. The pretext cited here is the search for Bin Laden and the need to combat the Taliban, but the real goal is to start the breakup of Pakistan into five or six petty states – because Pakistan is a Chinese ally, and all allies and trading partners of China are presently being targeted for regime change, destabilization, and Balkanization, from Sudan to Zimbabwe to Burma to Venezuela to Pakistan. It is time for opponents of false flag terrorism to ditch their maps of the Persian Gulf in favor of much larger world maps, with special attention for the geopolitical features of the Eurasian landmass discussed by Obama backer Brzezinski in his book, The Grand Chessboard.

The atmosphere in Washington today is eerily reminiscent of the final years of Iran-contra, when many personalities who had become too openly compromised in these picaresque operations were liquidated. The Iran-contra networks had to be cleaned up, and many heads rolled. The past weeks have brought word that bacteriological warfare expert Dr. Steven Hatfill, the FBI’s former person interest in the October 2001 anthrax attacks, has been taken care of with a $6 million damages award. His former biowar colleague Bruce Ivins was found dead this morning near Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in what has been ruled a suicide. The death of Ivins comes in the wake of another purported suicide, that of Deborah Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam. Are these inconvenient persons in fact being suicided to keep them quiet? Tonight there is word that Ayman Zawahiri, the MI-6 man at the top of “al Qaeda” may be either dead or seriously wounded. If Zawahiri is dead or knocked out, this event may be comparable to the execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, which officially closed the era of terrorism under right wing anarchist cover in the US, just before a new phase of false flag operations began three months later, on September 11, 2001.

August 8, 2008, the formal opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing summer games, emerges as a possible date for some attempted action in the context described. In a paper which should be read in conjunction with this article, Gillian Norman makes a case for the occult significance of 8-8-8 in the irrationalist numerology which may be considered meaningful by certain rogue network factions. But the events in question could occur at almost any time over the next several weeks.

Those who mobilized in the spring of 2007 to stop Operation Bite, the planned Good Friday US-UK attack on Iran, or who spread the word of the Kennebunkport Warning in late August 2007, are urged mobilize now on a much larger scale to inoculate world publics against which may now be in the offing. The US, Europe, and Japan need good relations with China, the world’s largest country. Peaceful coexistence, not a new round of inter-imperialist rivalry, is required. No band of desperados can be allowed to initiate a Sino-American confrontation under cover of a new false flag provocation.

SMH : Muslim group declares war on Olympics

Muslim group declares war on Olympics

July 27, 2008

A CHINESE terrorist organisation has warned it will create havoc at next month's Olympics and has claimed responsibility for a deadly Shanghai bus bombing in May.

A group monitoring terrorism threats on the internet said Commander Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for several attacks in China less than a fortnight out from the Olympics.

"Through this blessed jihad in Yunnan this time, the Turkestan Islamic Party warns China one more time," Seyfullah said in a video dated July 23, a transcript from a US-based intelligence centre shows.

"Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he said.

The warnings come just a day after Chinese police claimed they cracked a terrorist cell planning to attack Shanghai Stadium where the Australian men's soccer team will open its Olympic campaign on August 7.

Seyfullah claimed responsibility for the May 5 Shanghai bus bombing, which killed three; another Shanghai attack; an attack on police in Wenzhou on July 17 using an explosives-laden tractor; bombing of a Guangzhou plastics factory on July 17, and bombings of three buses in Yunnan province on July 21.

Rolling Stone: Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts

Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts

A history of the Bush administration's most dubious terror scares — and the headlines they buried

TIM DICKINSON | January 22, 2008

"Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. There were times when some people in the administration were really aggressive about raising the threat level, and we said, 'For that?!'"
— Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, May 2005

The Bush administration has never shied from playing the fear card to distract the American public from scandal or goad them into supporting a deeply flawed foreign policy. Here a history of the administration's most-dubious terror alerts — including three consecutive Memorial Day scare-a-thons — all of which proved far less terrifying than the screamer headlines they inspired.

~~~

February 12, 2002

The Threat: Yemenite terrorist set to attack U.S. — today! "I want, to encourage... all Americans everywhere to be on the highest state of alert," warns Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The Reality: The threat hadn't been corroborated by U.S. intelligence agencies — and the evidence actually pointed to an attack not in the U.S., but in Yemen.

The Real News: Announced the same day that Enron CEO Ken Lay appeared before Congress, and a week after the White House was instructed not to destroy its Enron-related documents.

~~~

May 19-27, 2002

The Threat: Dick Cheney kicks off Memorial Day weekend by calling a new Al Qaeda strike "almost a certainty — it could happen tomorrow." FBI Director Robert Mueller adds, "There will be another terrorist attack." The FBI warns of strikes on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty.

The Reality: The administration "made a political decision" to make public all threats — even those from "hoaxers," says a retired CIA counterterrorism expert. "The amount of chatter hasn't changed in volume," adds a defense official. As for the New York threats, "There really isn't any hard information," declares the former head of the FBI bureau in New York.

The Real News: The administration's failures in preventing 9/11 were under the microscope: Bush acknowledged receiving a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." a month before the attacks; the FAA said it had failed to alert airlines of the arrest of would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui; the FBI admitted it had ignored a pre-9/11 warning that Al Qaeda had infiltrated American flight schools.

~~~

June 10, 2002

The Threat: U.S.-born Al Qaeda agent captured. John Ashcroft interrupts a trip to Russia to brag on live TV of bagging "a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a 'dirty bomb' in the United States."

The Reality: The suspect, Jose Padilla, had actually been in custody for a month. The "dirty bomb" allegations were so flimsy that they were dropped after the administration agreed to try the case in federal court rather than in a military tribunal.

The Real News: The threat was announced four days after FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley testified before Congress that 9/11 might have been prevented if the FBI flight-school warning had reached federal agents investigating Moussaoui.

~~~

September 10, 2002

The Threat: Bush personally announces the first nationwide Orange Alert. Cheney flees to a "secure location" as Ashcroft warns that Al Qaeda appears to be targeting "transportation and energy sectors."

The Reality: There was no specific threat against any American target.

The Real News: The heightened terror alert went into effect just in time for the president's address to the nation from Ellis Island on the first anniversary of 9/11.

~~~

February 7, 2003

The Threat: Orange Alert. CIA Director George Tenet calls the threat "the most specific we have seen" since 9/11; says Al Qaeda may use a "radiological dispersal device, as well as poisons and chemicals."

The Reality: The alert, accompanied by a warning to stock up on plastic sheets and duct tape, was debunked within days; the main source failed an FBI polygraph. Threat level remained stuck on orange for two more weeks.

The Real News: The alert followed less than forty-eight hours after Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which he falsely accused Saddam Hussein of harboring Al Qaeda and training terrorists in the use of chemical weapons.

~~~

March 17, 2003

The Threat: Orange Alert. FBI warns of terror strikes by Saddam or "allied or sympathetic terrorist organizations, most notably the Al Qaeda network."

The Reality: Claim debunked by future CIA director Porter Goss, then chair of House intelligence committee: No intel suggests new attack.

The Real News: Nation's third Orange Alert came three days before Bush invaded Iraq, opening what he called the "central front of the War on Terror."

~~~

May 20, 2003

The Threat: For a second Memorial Day in a row, country is placed on Orange Alert following warning that "Al Qaeda has entered an operational period worldwide."

The Reality: No specific threat ever cited; alert issued because of what the Department of Homeland Security calls "the heightened vulnerability associated with the Memorial Day holiday."

The Real News: Two weeks after Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, administration's plan to implement Iraq, self-rule was postponed "indefinitely" due to looting and lawlessness.

~~~

July 29, 2003

The Threat: Homeland Security warns that new, 9/11-like strikes are in the works: "At least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer."

The Reality: Not one of the alleged attacks ever materialized.

The Real News: Days earlier, the Bush administration revealed that the CIA forewarned the president about the lack of evidence for his claim that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa.

~~~

December 21, 2003

The Threat: Orange Alert for the holidays. Ridge warns that threat of attack is "perhaps greater now than at any point since 9/11." Six flights are canceled; several passengers match terror watch list.

The Reality: The supposed "terrorists" included a Welsh insurance salesman, an elderly Chinese woman and a kindergartner.

The Real News: The alert came after 9/11 Commission chair Tom Kean suggested the 9/11 attacks could have been thwarted. Bush is also under fire for failing to find weapons of mass destruction.

~~~

May 26, 2004

The Threat: Memorial Day again: "They are going to attack and hit us hard," warns a senior intelligence official. Ashcroft relays an Al Qaeda threat that "ninety percent of the arrangements for an attack in the United States were complete."

The Reality: The threat Ashcroft attributed to Al Qaeda was actually made by a discredited group that falsely claimed credit for the Madrid train bombings. This group "is not really taken seriously by Western intelligence," says one expert.

The Real News: The Abu Ghraib torture scandal has come to a full boil.

~~~

June 14, 2004

The Threat: A shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio, is threatened by Al Qaeda bomber. "The American heartland was targeted for death and destruction," Ashcroft declares.

The Reality: The Somali suspect whose indictment Ashcroft trumpeted had been in custody for seven months. The charges against him made no mention of a shopping mall.

The Real News: John Kerry leads Bush by seven points in early Ohio polling.

~~~

July 8, 2004

The Threat: Tom Ridge warns that "Al Qaeda is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process."

The Reality: The plot did not exist: Says a top European spy, "I am aware of no intelligence, nothing that shows there will be an attack before the U.S. presidential election."

Real News: Two days earlier, John Kerry tapped John Edwards as his running mate.

~~~

August 1, 2004

The Threat: Orange Alert. Citing "new and unusually specific" intelligence, Ridge details a threat to the Citigroup building and the New York Stock Exchange. Adds Bush, "We wouldn't be, you know, contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real."

The Reality: The president allowed his own daughters to do a photo-op at one of the targeted buildings. Perhaps that's because the "new" intelligence was actually three years old. "There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," says a senior law-enforcement official. Real News: Alert came three days after Kerry took the Democratic nomination at the party's convention in Boston.

~~~

October 6, 2005

The Threat: FBI warns of Al Qaeda subway bombing "on or about October 9th, 2005." Bush claims to have foiled ten terror plots since 9/11.

The Reality: A counter-terrorism official calls the warning unfounded: "There was no there there." None of the plots cited by Bush were operational.

The Real News: Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is failing.

~~~

June 23, 2006

The Threat: Miami-based terrorists plotting to topple the Sears Tower. "These homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al Qaida," says Alberto Gonzales.

The Reality: FBI Deputy Director John Pistole terms plot “more aspirational than operational.” Suspects armed to the teeth — with paintball guns — attempted to secure Al Qaeda funds at local 7-11.

The Real News: Abu Musab Al Zarqawi had been killed days earlier — removing the villain who was then America's poster boy of terror.

~~~

July 7, 2006

The Threat: New York Daily News breaks news of plot to bomb Holland Tunnel, flood Wall Street. FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon calls threat "the real deal."

The Reality: Suspect had been arrested three months earlier, after bragging about his planned exploits in an Internet chat room. Said one CIA officer, "The plot, if that is what we would call it, was not well conceived, and there was no possibility of flooding Wall Street. There was no connection to a cell in the US. Finally, professional terrorists generally do not discuss targeting on open channels."

The Real News: News of plot leaked to coincide with the first anniversary of the July 7, 2005 London bombings.

~~~

July 10, 2007

The Threat: Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff warns of his "gut feeling" that the U.S. is entering "a period of increased vulnerability" of attack from terrorists: “Summertime seems to be appealing to them.”

The Reality: Chertoff subsequently confessed, "We don't have specific intelligence about an attack, that is, a particular attack against the homeland, that is imminent or scheduled for the summer."

The Real News: Two days later, the intelligence community revealed Al Qaeda's strength was "undiminished" in spite of six years of the "War on Terror."

Rolling Stone : The Fear Factory

The Fear Factory

The FBI now has more than 100 task forces devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism. But is the government manufacturing ghosts?

GUY LAWSON | January 25, 2008

"So, what you wanna do?" the friend asked. "A target?" the wanna-be jihadi replied. "I want some type of city-hall-type stuff, federal courthouses."

It was late November 2006, and twenty-two-year-old Derrick Shareef and his friend Jameel were hanging out in Rockford, Illinois, dreaming about staging a terrorist attack on America. The two men weren't sure what kind of assault they could pull off. All Shareef knew was that he wanted to cause major damage, to wreak vengeance on the country he held responsible for oppressing Muslims worldwide. "Smoke a judge," Shareef said. Maybe firebomb a government building.

But while Shareef harbored violent fantasies, he was hardly a serious threat as a jihadi. An American-born convert to Islam, he had no military training and no weapons. He had less than $100 in the bank. He worked in a dead-end job as a clerk in a video-game store. He didn't own a car. So dire were his circumstances, Shareef had no place to live. Then one day, Jameel, a fellow Muslim, had shown up at EB Games and offered him shelter. Within hours of meeting his new brother, Shareef had moved in with Jameel and his three wives and nine children. Living together, the pair fantasized about targets in Rockford, a Midwestern city of 150,000, with a minuscule Muslim population and the lone claim to fame of being the hometown of Cheap Trick.

The fact that Shareef was a loser with no means of living out his imagination didn't stop his friend from encouraging his delusions of grandeur. On the contrary, Jameel continually pushed Shareef to escalate his plans. "When you wanna plan on doing this?" he asked Shareef, talking about the plot to go after a government building. "Because we have to make specific plans and dates."

"I wanna case one first," Shareef said. There was only one problem: Jameel's car was in the garage getting repaired. "We can case one when you get the car back."

"What about time frame?" Jameel prodded.

"I like the holiday season," Shareef said, displaying an ambivalence unusual in a suicide bomber hellbent on murdering civilians. "Hell, we ain't gotta hit nobody —just blow the place up."

Finding a meaningful target to blow up in Rockford isn't easy. A hardscrabble town in the middle of America, the place is not much more than an intersection of interstates and railway lines, with little of note that might attract the attention of terrorists. So Jameel suggested the main attraction in town: CherryVale Mall, a sad-sack collection of clothing stores and sneaker shops on the outskirts of Rockford. "The mall's good," he told Shareef.

"I swear by Allah, man, I'm down for it too," Shareef said. "I'm down for the cause. I'm down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man."

When Jameel got his car back from the garage, the two men went to case the mall.

"If you ever wanna back out . . . 'cause, you gotta let me know," Jameel said. "I'm checking your heart now."

"I'm down," Shareef said.

"We ain't gonna get caught," Jameel assured him. "Don't worry."

"I'm not worried about getting caught," Shareef replied. "Not alive."

For all his bluster, Shareef was, by any objective measure, a pathetic and hapless jihadist — one of a new breed of domestic terrorists the federal government has paraded before the media since 9/11. The FBI, in a sense, elevated Shareef, working to transform him from a boastful store clerk into a suicidal mall-bomber. Like many other alleged extremists who have been targeted by the authorities, Shareef didn't know that his brand-new friend —the eager co-conspirator drawing him ever further into a terror plot —was actually an informant for the FBI.

As Shareef cursed America and Jews, he was under almost constant surveillance by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for the Northern District of Illinois. Since 9/11, the number of such outfits across the country has tripled. With more than 2,000 FBI agents now assigned to 102 task forces, the JTTFs have effectively become a vast, quasi-secret arm of the federal government, granted sweeping new powers that outstrip those of any other law-enforcement agency. The JTTFs consist not only of local police, FBI special agents and federal investigators from Immigration and the IRS, but covert operatives from the CIA. The task forces have thus effectively destroyed the "wall" that historically existed between law enforcement and intelligence-gathering. Under the Bush administration, the JTTFs have been turned into a domestic spy agency, like Britain's MI5 —one with the powers of arrest.

The expenditure of such massive resources to find would-be terrorists inevitably requires results. Plots must be uncovered. Sleeper cells must be infiltrated. Another attack must be prevented —or, at least, be seen to be prevented. But in backwaters like Rockford, the JTTFs don't have much to do. To find threats to thwart, the task forces have increasingly taken to using paid informants to cajole and inveigle targets like Shareef into pursuing their harebrained schemes. In the affidavit sworn by an FBI special agent in support of Shareef's indictment, the co-conspirator who called himself Jameel is known only as "CS" (Cooperating Source). In fact, CS was William Chrisman, a former crack dealer with a conviction for attempted robbery who was paid $8,500 by the JTTF and dispatched specifically to set up Shareef. Like other informants in terrorism cases, Chrisman had been "tasked" by federal agents to indulge and escalate Shareef's fantasies — while carefully ensuring that Shareef incriminated himself.

"The hope is that they will nab an actual terrorist or prevent a putative jihadi from becoming one," says David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of Less Safe, Less Free, a new book detailing the ways 9/11 has transformed domestic law enforcement. "It makes sense in general —but when you're pressing people to undertake conduct they would have never undertaken without an informant pushing them along, there is a real question if you're creating crime, not preventing crime."

In Rockford, "Jameel" repeatedly urged Shareef to dream up gory details of the havoc they would cause at the mall. Chrisman had received a call, he told Shareef, from a man he called "Cap" —a contact willing to sell them weapons. They could buy "pineapples" —code for hand grenades —from Cap for fifty bucks each. Cap, of course, was an undercover agent. Eleven "pineapples" were available, Chrisman said. Walking around the mall —the Dippin' Dots, the Panda Express —Shareef suggested they toss the "pineapples" in garbage cans to create shrapnel. They would fast for three days beforehand. They would shave their bodies. They would meditate and pray.

"Don't forget, man, we should get the grenades sometime next week," Chrisman said. "So you should try to get as much flous [money] as you can get."

"I got a little change in the bank," Shareef said.

"All you need is, like, $100. That's two grenades."

But the resourceless Shareef couldn't even raise that much money. So with the JTTF determined to push the "plot" forward, Chrisman announced that Cap had agreed to exchange the grenades for some used stereo speakers Shareef owned. On the following Saturday, as snow blanketed Rockford, Chrisman and Shareef engaged in the ritual of suicide bombers, recording video statements of each other reciting their last wills and testaments. The JTTF's affidavit doesn't reveal whose idea it was to stare into the camera and swear vengeance against America, but the prejudicial impact it would have on a jury was huge.

"My name is Talib Abu Salam Ibn Shareef," Shareef said, using his self-created nom de guerre. "I am from America, and this tape is to let you guys know, who disbelieve in Allah, to let the enemies of Islam know, and to let the Muslims alike know that the time for jihad is now."

The next Wednesday, the two men met with Cap in a parking lot under the gaze of agents from the JTTF. As Shareef swapped the used speakers for four nonfunctioning grenades and a 9mm handgun with neutered ammunition, he was swarmed by law enforcement. News of the bust traveled the world over. "It had all the makings of a holiday bloodbath," Fox News breathlessly reported. Shareef was charged with the ultimate crime in the so-called War on Terror: attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.

The arrest of Shareef was yet another JTTF success, with the homeland again saved from a savage attack, this time from a man the government branded a "lone wolf."

Or it was an illusion, a fictional plot developed in a self-fulfilling and self-serving cycle of chasing ghosts.

For law enforcement, fear and the politics of fear have entwined to create a radical new paradigm. Even the term "law enforcement" has been rendered quaint by the Bush administration. These days, the term of art is "lawfare" —the confluence of police work and military tactics. With Joint Terrorism Task Forces set up across the country to coordinate the work of federal agencies and local cops, the FBI now devotes nearly two-thirds of its resources —some $4 billion —to waging war on terrorism. The approach today is not the traditional police work of investigating actual crimes but the far more slippery goal of preventing terrorist attacks before they occur.

To hear the Bush administration tell it, the JTTFs have been an unqualified success. The task forces have been credited with uncovering and busting up homegrown terrorist cells in Oregon, Seattle, Detroit, Miami, Buffalo and New Jersey. All told, the Feds have accused 619 people of "terrorist activity" since 9/11 —a record that the FBI insists has made America safer. In 2005 alone, more than 10 million terror inquiries were checked against the JTTF's Investigative Data Warehouse, a central repository for "terrorism-related documents." Such numbers create the sense that America is indeed under siege —and that the government is on top of the threat. "These extremists are self-recruited, self-trained and self-executing," FBI Director Robert Mueller declared in 2006. "These homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like Al Qaeda, if not more so."

But a closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges —a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America. "The government releases selective figures," says Karen Greenberg, director of the center. "They have never even defined 'terrorism.' They keep us in the dark over statistics."

Indeed, Shareef is only one of many cases where the JTTFs have employed dubious means to reach even more dubious ends. In Buffalo, the FBI spent eighteen months tracking the "Lackawanna Six" —a half-dozen men from the city's large Muslim population who had been recruited by an Al Qaeda operative in early 2001 to undergo training in Afghanistan. Only two lasted the six-week course; the rest pretended to be hurt or left early. Despite extensive surveillance, the FBI found no evidence that the men ever discussed, let alone planned, an attack —but that didn't stop federal agents from arresting the suspects with great fanfare and accusing them of operating an "Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American soil." Fearing they would be designated as "enemy combatants" and disappeared into the legal void created by the Patriot Act, all six pleaded guilty to aiding Al Qaeda and were sentenced to at least seven years in prison.

In other cases, the use of informants has led the government to flirt with outright entrapment. In Brooklyn, a Guyanese immigrant and former cargo handler named Russell Defreitas was arrested last spring for plotting to blow up fuel tanks at JFK International Airport. In fact, before he encountered the might of the JTTF, Defreitas was a vagrant who sold incense on the streets of Queens and spent his spare time checking pay phones for quarters. He had no hope of instigating a terrorist plot of the magnitude of the alleged attack on JFK —until he received the help of a federal informant known only as "Source," a convicted drug dealer who was cooperating with federal agents to get his sentence reduced. Backed by the JTTF, Defreitas suddenly obtained the means to travel to the Caribbean, conduct Google Earth searches of JFK's grounds and build a complex, multifaceted, international terror conspiracy —albeit one that was impossible to actually pull off. After Defreitas was arrested, U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf called it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable."

Using informants to gin up terrorist conspiracies is a radical departure from the way the FBI has traditionally used cooperating sources against organized crime or drug dealers, where a pattern of crime is well established before the investigation begins. Now, in new-age terror cases, the JTTFs simply want to establish that suspects are predisposed to be terrorists —even if they are completely unable or ill-equipped to act on that predisposition. High-tech video and audio evidence, coupled with anti-terror hysteria, has made it effectively impossible for suspects to use the legal defense of entrapment. The result in many cases has been guilty pleas —and no scrutiny of government conduct.

In most cases, because no trial is ever held, few details emerge beyond the spare and slanted descriptions in the indictments. When facts do come to light during a trial, they cast doubt on the seriousness of the underlying case. The "Albany Pizza" case provides a stark example. Known as a "sting case," the investigation began in June 2003 when U.S. soldiers raided an "enemy camp" in Iraq and seized a notebook containing the name of an imam in Albany — one Yassin Aref. To snare Aref, the JTTF dispatched a Pakistani immigrant named Shahed "Malik" Hussain, who was facing years in prison for a driver's-license scam. Instead of approaching Aref directly, federal agents sent Malik to befriend Mohammed Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who went to the same mosque as Aref. Hossain, an American citizen who ran a place called Little Italy Pizzeria in Albany, had no connections whatsoever to terrorism or any form of radical Islam. After the attacks on 9/11, he had been quoted in the local paper saying, "I am proud to be an American." But enticed by Malik, Hossain soon found himself caught up in a government-concocted terror plot. Posing as an arms dealer, Malik told Hossain that a surface-to-air missile was needed for an attack on a Pakistani diplomat in New York. He offered Hossain $5,000 in cash to help him launder $50,000 —a deal Hossain claims he never properly grasped. According to Muslim tradition, a witness is needed for significant financial transactions. Thus, the JTTF reached out for Hossain's imam and the true target of the sting —Aref.

At trial, the judge brushed aside questions about why the government was after Aref in the first place. "The FBI had certain suspicions, good and valid suspicions, for looking into Mr. Aref," he told the jury. "But why they did that is not to be any concern of yours." For their role in a conspiracy confected entirely by the FBI, both Aref and Hossain were convicted of attempting to provide material support to terrorists and sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison.

"I am just a pizza man," the bewildered Hossain said at his sentencing. "I make good pizza."

Despite the rapid and widespread proliferation of JTTFs, very little has been reported about what goes on inside the War on Terror's domestic front. The FBI building that houses the JTTF for the Northern District of Illinois has been moved from the middle of the city to a more spacious, fortresslike building on the industrial west side of Chicago, a place out of the city's Loop, literally and figuratively. The glass tower is surrounded by a tall metal fence, and layers upon layers of security inside and out add to the sense of siege. When Special Agent Robert Holley, who supervises the JTTF's Squad Counterterrorism 1, offers to escort me to his office on the eighth floor, we are stopped by his superior before we even reach the hallway. The entire floor, the supervisor declares, is considered secure — there are classified documents on desks —and therefore off-limits to outsiders.

Holley, an ex-military type who is built like a bullet, rolls his eyes but complies. There is no problem finding another room for a meeting. There are acres of empty offices and cubicles in the eerily futuristic building, the premises far larger than current requirements dictate but ready for expansion should the need arise with another terrorist attack.

Counterterrorism squads like the one overseen by Holley are assigned to monitor distant "Areas of Responsibility" —the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq. The six CT squads in Chicago are also divided into two categories: Five "substantive" groups like Holley's, which gather intelligence and conduct long-term investigations of specific individuals, and another squad that is charged with chasing down leads and determining the "threat profile" of suspects to decide if an investigation is merited. Holley's squad currently has some seventy-five open investigations — he won't give the precise number —in nearly every country under his purview. "A lot of our successes you don't see," he says. "We don't measure our success by the number of prosecutions."

When I ask what kinds of cases his CT squad has made, Holley cites the example of a local cab driver who came up on the JTTF's radar some time back —he won't say how or why. The man was East African, Holley says, a suspected Islamic extremist "connected to known bad guys overseas." After being interviewed by the JTTF, the cabbie decided to leave the country. Nothing criminal had occurred, and no charges were laid. The cab driver had simply come to the attention of the JTTF, and that in itself was enough to dispose of the matter.

"Can we consider that a success because we didn't put him in jail?" Holley asks. "Absolutely. This guy is no longer here. He is not a threat to one person in the United States."

"Was he ever a threat?" I ask.

"We opened up an investigation."

"But isn't that a circular argument?"

"Was he a bomb-thrower?" Holley concedes. "Probably not. Did he want to go into a mall and attack? No."

The next morning, I meet with three members of the Field Intelligence Group. The FIGs are designed to create a centralized approach to intelligence, both domestic and foreign. In northern Illinois, the group analyzes information from around the world, as well as that supplied courtesy of Operation Virtual Shield, the surveillance initiative designed to make Chicago one of the most-watched cities in the world. Thousands of cameras deployed on street corners, train platforms and buses now provide a nearly comprehensive visual record of all public movement in Chicago.

The unexceptional-seeming trio from the FIG dodge most of my questions on the grounds of national security. Mike Delejewski, a soft-spoken intelligence analyst, says that every call that comes into the JTTF is passed along to the FIG, which runs down every lead, no matter how improbable. Delejewski mentions a call received regarding the Sears Tower and three suspicious-looking men seen in the vicinity. That was all the report said. The FIG and CT squads responded. The men turned out to be Mexican tourists.

"We get a lot of those calls," Delejewski says with a laugh.

Many of the callers who contact the JTTF are intentionally misleading, hoping to take revenge against a boyfriend, neighbor or co-worker. Such hoaxes are so routine, in fact, that the JTTF's public-relations officer keeps a separate file stuffed with press reports of invented pipe bombs and unattended suitcases and lunch trucks packed with explosives.

None of the three analysts in the FIG have Arabic-language skills or extensive experience in the countries they are supposed to monitor. To keep informed, they read newspapers and intelligence reports. They then issue bulletins to police departments about perceived threats.

"What is the biggest threat?" I ask.

There is a long pause.

"I think it's very dangerous if we start to identify that," an analyst named Julie Irvine says.

"The enemy is listening," Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gregory Fowler adds later. "I drill that into my people's heads every day. Foreign-intelligence agencies and terrorists are listening. The FBI is on a war footing."

When I express skepticism at the nature of the cases being brought by the JTTF, and the wild-goose chases that seem to occupy its time, Fowler says people don't understand the "threat stream" facing the nation. There are two reasons, he insists, that cases brought by the JTTF end up being discounted. First, defense attorneys manipulate the public to create the impression that the accused are hapless —but since very few cases actually go to trial, this explanation is unlikely at best. Second, Fowler says, the FBI itself minimizes threats to prevent panic. As an example, he cites the case of "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, who pleaded guilty to terror-related charges. Reid, Fowler insists, was a much greater danger to America than is commonly appreciated —a refrain that requires the word of the JTTF be taken on faith.

"The public is never going to see the evidence we have," Fowler says. "We don't want to reveal our hand or tip our sources. You cannot judge the nature of the terrorist threat to the United States based on the public record."

"But with such strictures," I ask, "how does a citizen become informed about the threat?"

"I have access to the information," Fowler says. "I have a lot of faith in the judgment of the common citizen. A lot of people understand the nature of the threat."

To get a perspective on how the War on Terror is being waged by cops on the street, I meet with two local police officers assigned to the JTTF. Sgt. Paul DeRosa of the Chicago Police Department and Master Sgt. Carl Gutierrez of the Illinois State Police act as liaison officers for their respective forces. Both are on call 24/7 for 365 days of the year. Both are regularly summoned at three in the morning to investigate potential terrorist activity in Chicago.

"This weekend I had two calls," Gutierrez says.

When I ask what the calls were about, all Gutierrez will say is that they involved "suspicious incidents" which "could possibly have a terrorist nexus." An example: People traveling on a train see someone taking photographs and acting suspiciously, and phone the police. "You have to understand we take those sort of calls very seriously," Gutierrez says. "We have to. If we don't, and something happens, and it comes back to us and lives are lost, who's to blame?"

To illustrate the kinds of cases the JTTF generates, Sgt. DeRosa cites an incident from three years ago. Two Middle Eastern men boarded a bus on Lake Shore Drive. They were bearded, dressed in traditional Arabic garb and sitting next to each other. As they rode the bus, one man was clicking a counter — the kind used at nightclubs to keep track of the crowd size. A passenger on the bus called 911.

"A report was made, and our CT squad was notified," DeRosa says. "We went and got the film from that bus. We reviewed it. We could see them clicking. We ask ourselves, 'Are they clicking passengers? Are they clicking when they go past buildings? Are they clicking on how many cars?' We put out a 'Bolo' —Be on the Lookout. We found where they got on the bus, and we did a stakeout. Seven or eight cars set up on the bus stop. On the third day, we spotted the guy. We talked to him." No one was arrested. There was no crime alleged. But DeRosa says proudly that the JTTF succeeded in finding the Man With the Clicker.

"Why was the man clicking?" I ask.

"They had to say a Muslim prayer 50,000 times," DeRosa says. "At first, we thought that was nonsense. Since then we've had a few of these incidents. Are these guys terrorists? Probably not. But in three days, they were identified and interviewed by the power of the JTTF — city and state police, FBI, Secret Service. Does that send a message to their community?"

Chicago has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country —some 400,000, DeRosa estimates. "Experts say that between five and ten percent of Muslims are extremists. So you take it down to one percent. What's one percent of 400,000? Forty thousand? Technically there could be 40,000 —"

"You mean 4,000," I say.

DeRosa pauses. "Right," he says. "Four thousand." He forges on. "Most people who come to America who are Middle Eastern come for a good reason. But there's still a percentage that may be here that don't like us. They are with the extremists."

Gutierrez offers another instance of the JTTF at work. A man of apparent Middle Eastern background came into a Chicago police station and said he worked for the Department of Defense and he had top-secret documents in his truck, which had been stolen. He also said his roommate was a terrorist. The man appeared to be a kook. But an allegation had been made. The JTTF was contacted. Gutierrez was called out, and he interviewed the subject. He soon verified that the man was, in fact, nuts. But the matter didn't end there.

"We interviewed the roommate," Gutierrez says. "He was an Egyptian. We ran his name. He was here illegally. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] was there within two hours. I've never seen ICE react the way they did. They came out and took physical custody of the guy. They kept him until his court hearing, and he was sent overseas."

"Was there any evidence or suggestion that the man was actually a terrorist?" I ask.

"You never know," DeRosa says.

"Have you ever found a terrorist cell?" I ask.

"That's kind of a vague question," Gutierrez says. "There are certain things we can't talk about, because it leads to more."

"Do I believe there's a cell in Chicago?" DeRosa asks. "I bet you there is. Do I have any direct physical knowledge? No. But I think there is one, and that's why we're here."

The two officers tell me about a close call at the Taste of Chicago food festival last year. Millions attend the annual street feast, with Chicago-style sausage and pizza and tamales on sale in booths along the lakefront. As with all major public events, the JTTF helped plan the security profile. A JHAT —a Joint Hazardous Assessment Team —set up at the festival, dotting the area with devices that detect signs of a chemical or biological or radiological attack. Suddenly, one of the devices went off: There was a radiological hit on one of the sniffers near a row of porta-potties. For an hour, the JHAT frantically tried to determine if Chicago had been struck by a "dirty bomb" —a weapon that spreads lethal radioactive material mixed with conventional explosives. Finally, after an anxious hour, the hit was traced to a particular outhouse —and the cause of the positive alert was determined.

"Someone who had chemotherapy had just done a poop," DeRosa says.

There is considerable skepticism in local police departments in northern Illinois about the nature and extent of the threat posed by terrorism. There are 415 local law-enforcement agencies in the district, many of which remain unconvinced that the threat is as dire as the JTTF maintains. Many departments refuse to allocate even one or two officers to spend four hours on basic terror training. Rather than consider the idea that the cops closest to the ground might have a better perspective on their communities, the JTTF addressed the problem by forming a TLOC —Terrorism Liaison Officer's Committee. The point is to merchandise the menace of terrorism to the police.

"It's a matter of marketing strategy," says Mark Lundgren, a special agent who oversees the TLOC. "These terrorism acts are trending toward the homegrown, self-activated, self-radicalized — the sort of thing that could literally pop up in your back yard. The typical things we would use to detect terrorism don't work, because these people are off the charts, so to speak. Nine times out of ten, for the next decade, it's going to be the local cop who stops the terror attacks."

Lundgren, who resembles a young Gary Busey, fairly glistens with certainty about the value of his work. "What are you trying to sell to the local police departments?" I ask.

"Awareness. Motivation," he says. "It's a very hard sell. You walk into a chief of police in a crime-ridden district. The first thing he's going to tell you is, 'The guys in this area are killing people. The guys you're telling me about —it's not make-believe, I understand that — but they haven't killed anyone lately in my district.' "

"Or ever," I say.

"Exactly."

When Derrick Shareef was arrested by the JTTF, the police chief in Rockford complained that his force had been told very little about the investigation. The city has one of the highest murder rates in the state, as well as raging drug and juvenile delinquency woes. Dominic Iasparro is a senior investigator who is working the case of an addict found dead on the outskirts of town. He tells me he has no real leads. There is a small FBI outpost in Rockford, with ten or so agents, but it provides no assistance on a homicide. Local police have scant interaction with the JTTF, and Iasparro doesn't exactly see terrorism as a top priority in northern Illinois. "We're not a big enough target," he says.

A thirty-five-year veteran, Iasparro follows JTTF bulletins and updates online, and he doesn't doubt the good intentions of the agents involved in the task force. But he also understands that the pressure on the federal government to avoid another attack is enormous. To a local cop like Iasparro, the amount of resources the government devotes to the effort is staggering.

"Do you think the JTTF is jumping at ghosts?" I ask.

He shakes his head in wonder. "I have never seen anything like it in my career."

The attitude of local cops frustrates members of the TLOC. They want to train cops to watch out for "suspicious terroristlike behavior," without revealing what such behavior might look like. "We're teaching police how to approach a suspicious person in a public place," Lundgren tells me. "How to probe that person. How to look at the body language they exhibit, how they answer questions, to determine if they are a threat or not — in a way that doesn't leave that person feeling they've been ill-treated. There are detractors out there that think our cases are without merit. That's a philosophical question that's easy to ask until you're a body part.

"Without getting too philosophical, remember the whole Dick Cheney one percent solution," Lundgren continues. "If there is a one percent chance that a device can be constructed that will kill thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people, then we have to treat our response as if there were a 100 percent chance. That's a thing that gets lost in the view of the public when they see the intelligence-gathering of law enforcement. They get concerned about their civil liberties and the Constitution because of the way things are portrayed in the media."

In late November, Derrick Shareef pleaded guilty to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. Because of the video evidence against him, Shareef couldn't use a legal defense of entrapment. But in court, he said he had been "coerced into doing things and trapped into doing things." In Rockford, not long before his guilty plea, there was a "For Sale" sign on the small house where Shareef once lived. The house was empty, the furniture gone. Members of the JTTF told me that they wished they could reveal the rest of the story, to prove that Shareef was a true bad guy. According to the indictment of another accused terrorist, Hassan Abu-Jihaad, Shareef was involved in a larger conspiracy to attack a military base in San Diego. In pretrial proceedings, however, it emerged that Abu-Jihaad was egged on by none other than William "Jameel" Chrisman, the same informant who set up Shareef. Abu-Jihaad not only refused to participate in the alleged plot but on surveillance tapes can be heard dismissing Shareef as an idiot and a liar. "I ain't no jihadi," Abu-Jihaad told Jameel.

While real threats undoubtedly exist, what the Bush administration promotes as a nationwide pattern of terrorist activities is largely the result of its own policies in the age of lawfare. Last May, the FBI arrested the "Fort Dix Six," charging the men with conspiring to attack the New Jersey military base. The supposed terror cell was discovered when a clerk at Circuit City was asked to transfer to DVD a video of the men allegedly training for jihad in the Pocono Mountains and shouting, "Allahu Akbar!" [God is great!] As in other cases, the FBI itself proved to be the mastermind behind the plot. The men —who included three roofers, a taxi driver and a former delivery boy for Super Mario's Pizza — had little money and no connections to real extremists. All were in their twenties and spent their weekends playing paintball. Under the guidance of two informants for the JTTF, the men planned an assault on Fort Dix using rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s —none of which actually existed.

There are signs, however, that judges and jurors are getting fed up with such concocted "threats." In December, the prosecution of the "Liberty City Seven" ended in one acquittal and a hung jury for the rest of the accused. The supposed cell was accused of preparing a "full ground war" against America by bringing down the Sears Tower and other buildings. At trial, however, it emerged that the men had no operational abilities, that the plots were dreamed up at the exhortation of two paid FBI informants while smoking dope and that the group had been provided its camera, military boots and warehouse by the JTTF.

Despite 15,000 surveillance recordings of the men, including one in which they swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the jury refused to convict. "This was all written, produced, directed, choreographed and stage-designed by the United States government," Albert Levin, an attorney for one of the accused, said in his closing argument.

Undeterred, the government is taking six of the men back to court. The retrial was scheduled to begin on January 22nd.

Boston Globe : Judge declares mistrial in Fla. terrorism case

Judge declares mistrial in Fla. terrorism case

Government plans to retry suspects in Jan.

By Curt Anderson | Associated Press | December 14, 2007

MIAMI - In a stinging defeat for the Bush administration, one of seven Miami men accused of plotting to join forces with Al Qaeda to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was acquitted yesterday, and the case against the rest ended in a hung jury.

Federal prosecutor Richard Gregorie said the government planned to retry the six next year, and the judge said a new jury would be picked starting Jan. 7.

The White House had seized on the case to illustrate the dangers of homegrown terrorism and trumpet the government's post-Sept. 11, 2001, success in infiltrating and smashing terrorism plots in their earliest stages.

Lyglenson Lemorin, 32, had been accused of being a "soldier" for alleged ringleader Narseal Batiste. He buried his face in his hands when his acquittal was read.

Lemorin, a legal US resident originally from Haiti, was subject to an immigration hold and would not be immediately released, his lawyer said.

The jury gave up on the other defendants after nine days of deliberations on four terrorism-related conspiracy charges that carry a combined maximum of 70 years in prison.

The jury twice sent notes to the judge indicating they could not reach verdicts but were told to keep trying.

US District Judge Joan Lenard declared a mistrial after their third note, which she quoted as saying: "We believe no further progress can be made."

The group never actually made contact with Al Qaeda. Instead, a paid FBI informant known as Brother Mohammed posed as an Al Qaeda emissary.

The defense portrayed the seven men as hapless figures who were either manipulated and entrapped by the FBI or went along with the plot to con "Mohammed" out of $50,000.

The group never actually made contact with Al Qaeda and never acquired any weapons or explosives.

Prosecutors said no attack was imminent, acknowledging that the alleged terror cell was "more aspirational than operational."

But Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said after the arrests in mid-2006 that the group was emblematic of the "smaller, more loosely defined cells who are not affiliated with Al Qaeda, but who are inspired by a violent jihadist message."

And US Attorney R. Alexander Acosta of Miami said: "Our mission is to disrupt these cells if possible before they acquire the capability to implement their plans."

Outside the courtroom, jury foreman Jeff Agron said the group took four votes but was split roughly evenly between guilt and innocence for the other six men. They spent hours viewing and listening to FBI recordings of meetings and conversations involving Batiste and the others, he said.

"People have different takes on what they saw, on what was said and what that meant," said Agron, 46, a teacher and lawyer. "My personal belief is that there may have been sufficient evidence on some of them as to some of the counts."

Agron said the evidence was weakest against Lemorin, who had moved with his wife and children to Atlanta and gotten a job at a shopping mall after splitting with Batiste months before the group was arrested.

In a statement to the FBI, Lemorin said he never wanted to be associated with Al Qaeda and that he knew "nothing good would come from this."

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.

WaPo : Anti-Terrorism on Trial

Anti-Terrorism on Trial

Why the Government Loses Funding Cases

By David Cole | October 24, 2007

Nearly six years ago, the U.S. government shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, froze its assets and made it a crime for anyone to engage in transactions with it. The administration claimed that the foundation, the largest Muslim charity in the United States, was financing terrorism.

The government never publicly produced evidence to support that charge. Under an executive order that President Bush issued shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the government did not have to. It closed the charity without a hearing or trial or even a statement of reasons. When the foundation sued, a federal court in the District of Columbia refused to consider any evidence that the foundation submitted in its defense, relied on secret evidence that the government presented behind closed doors and rejected the foundation's assertion that taking its property on the basis of evidence that the charity had no opportunity to see or rebut was a violation of due process.

Monday brought a different result. In a criminal trial in Dallas in which federal prosecutors accused the Holy Land Foundation and its directors of 197 criminal violations related to funding terrorism, a jury issued not a single conviction. It acquitted one defendant on all but one charge and failed to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the other counts. The difference in outcomes could not have been more stark. In the first, one-sided proceeding, the government, not surprisingly, prevailed. In the second, when required to share its evidence and convince a jury, the government could not do so.

This failure wasn't the government's first. In 2005, a Tampa jury acquitted Sami al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor, of the most serious counts against him, involving alleged fundraising for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad; it voted 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal on the rest. This year a jury in Chicago acquitted two men of charges that they had financed Hamas. Thus far, the government has shut down and frozen the assets of seven Muslim charities in this country, but it has not obtained a conviction for financing terrorism against anyone involved in any of these charities.

Why is the government losing these cases? It is not because the laws are too narrow or the standards of proof too demanding. "Material support" laws make it a crime to give anything of value, including humanitarian aid or one's own volunteer services, to an organization the government has labeled a "terrorist" group. The government claims that it is no defense that the supporter had no intent to further any terrorist conduct or even that the support in fact furthered no terrorism. For all practical purposes, the law imposes guilt by association.

Yet federal prosecutors have sought to stretch liability even further. In the Holy Land case, for example, the government offered no evidence that the foundation had funded Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Prosecutors claimed instead that the foundation had supported humanitarian aid "zakat committees" in various West Bank towns and that these committees were fronts for or were associated with Hamas. But the law authorizes the government to designate front groups, and it does so regularly. To this day, the government has not designated any of the zakat committees. Yet it sought to hold Holy Land criminally responsible for providing humanitarian aid to groups that the government itself had never said were off-limits.

The government's failure in the Holy Land case suggests that the administrative processes for designating groups as terrorist organizations are flawed. The president has asserted the power to designate any organization or individual he chooses, here or abroad, without formal charges, a trial or hearing of any kind; without a statement of reasons; and on the basis of secret evidence. While full-scale criminal protections are not necessary, surely groups should be afforded a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves before they are shut down.

We've seen this kind of regime before. In the McCarthy era, the government, working behind closed doors, created lists of "subversive organizations" and then held individuals responsible for any association with such groups, often using secret evidence to support its charges. Such actions invited abuse, harmed innocents and infringed on the very rights the government claimed to be protecting. As the Supreme Court said in a 1967 decision belatedly declaring unconstitutional the "guilt by association" tactics of the McCarthy period: "It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties -- the freedom of association -- which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile." The administration seems to have forgotten that lesson; American juries, thankfully, still remember.

David Cole is a law professor at Georgetown University and co-author of "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror."

CBS 11 (Dallas) : Holy Land Juror Speaks Out About Trial

Holy Land Juror Speaks Out About Trial

by Clif Caldwell | Oct 23, 2007

(CBS 11 News) DALLAS One of the jurors from the Holy Land Foundation trial is speaking out today.

William Neal says there was turmoil on the jury and the government failed to prove its case. And he says he doesn't believe all members of the jury put their best effort into reaching a verdict.

Nobody won in the trial. The judge declared a mistrial on most of the counts after two months of testimony and 19 days of deliberations.

"Every 3 days," Neal said, "it felt like we came to a complete deadlock."

Neal was one of three people who objected yesterday when Judge Fish polled the jury. His complaint was that jurors didn't reach a verdict on all counts.

The jury voted not guilty on all counts for one man and not guilty on all but three counts for two others. There was no verdict for the remaining two defendants.

But everything was thrown out when juror number six told the judge she did not agree with the signed jury form. Neal says the juror complained of being bullied. He says she just wasn't fully participating in the deliberations.

Neal is the only juror to respond to our requests for an interview. The government says it intends to re-try the case.

LAT : Mistrial in Holy Land terrorism financing case

Mistrial in Holy Land terrorism financing case

The government's prosecution of a now-defunct Islamic charity collapses in confusion after initial verdicts are read.

By Greg Krikorian, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer | October 23, 2007

DALLAS -- The U.S. Justice Department suffered a major setback in another high-profile terrorist prosecution Monday when its criminal case against five former officials of a now-defunct Islamic charity collapsed into a tangle of legal confusion.

U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish declared a mistrial, but not before it became clear that the government's landmark terrorism finance case -- and one of its most-costly post-9/11 prosecutions -- was in serious trouble.

His decision came after jury verdicts were read to a packed courtroom indicating that none of the defendants had been found guilty on any of the 200 combined counts against them. Jurors had acquitted defendants on some counts and were deadlocked on charges ranging from tax violations to providing material support for terrorists.

However, during routine polling of the jurors to determine that their votes were accurately reflected in the findings, two said they were not. When efforts to reconcile the surprise conflict failed, Fish declared the mistrial.

The case presented to a Texas jury of eight women and four men relied heavily on Israeli intelligence and involved disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by federal agents over a span of nearly 15 years. Fish's order ended a two-month trial and 19 days of jury deliberations over allegations that Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its former leaders provided financial aid to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

President Bush announced in December 2001 that the Texas-based charity's assets were being seized, and in a Rose Garden news conference accused the organization of financing terrorism. Monday's outcome, however, raised serious questions about those allegations as well.

"I think it is a huge defeat for the government," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in 1st Amendment cases and terrorism prosecutions.

"They spent almost 15 years investigating this group, seized all their records and had extensive wiretapping and yet could not obtain a single conviction on charges of supporting a terrorist organization."

According to one juror interviewed Monday afternoon, the panel was evenly split on most of the disputed charges and not close to convicting anyone.

Juror William Neal, 33, who said his father worked in military intelligence, said that the government's case had "so many gaps" that he regarded the prosecution as "a waste of time."

It was unclear Monday whether the government would seek to retry all five defendants, but supporters viewed the outcome as vindication.

"My father was singled out for feeding, clothing and educating the children of Palestine," said Noor Elashi, the 21-year-old daughter of defendant Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land's former chairman. "I am the daughter of an American hero," she said.

Outside the courthouse in a pouring rain, jubilant supporters hoisted defendants on their shoulders. "I will let this speak for what happened," said defendant Shukri Abu Baker, the former president of Holy Land, waving from the shoulders of his backers. He declined to speak further because of a continuing court-imposed gag order.

The gag order also prevented prosecutors and defense attorneys from responding publicly to what is the most bizarre outcome of any of the government's post-Sept. 11 terrorist prosecutions.

It is not the only prosecution failure. In Florida two years ago, a former college professor was acquitted on eight counts of aiding Palestinian terrorists. A jury deadlocked on a ninth count and the defendant pleaded guilty to a lesser charge to avoid retrial. Earlier this year a federal jury in Illinois acquitted two men of operating a terrorist recruiting and financing cell.

When the Dallas verdicts were first read on Monday, it appeared the jury had deadlocked on all the charges brought against the now-defunct foundation and its two best-known officials, Baker and onetime board chairman Elashi. The two American citizens each faced 32 counts of supporting terrorism and four counts of tax-related crimes.

The verdicts, as originally outlined, also suggested the jury had found former Holy Land volunteer fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader not guilty on all 32 terrorism financing counts he was facing and either acquitted or deadlocked on the same 32 counts for another former foundation chairman, Mohammed El-Mezain, and Abdulraham Odeh, the foundation's onetime New Jersey representative.

As those verdicts were read, many of the defendants and their families broke into smiles. But minutes later, their relief turned to uncertainty during the jury poll.

The jury forewoman, who like the other jurors was not identified, told the court she could not explain the positions of the two panelists. "When the vote was [taken]. . . no one spoke up" about any differences, she said. "I really don't understand where it's coming from. . . all 12 made that decision."

The judge excused the jurors to work out the discrepancies. About 40 minutes later, they returned to court and the two female jurors both continued to maintain that their verdicts had not been tallied accurately.

As a result, Abdulqader's acquittal on all counts was set aside, forcing him to face a potential retrial with the others.

Both women had been noted dozing off during court proceedings, and juror Neal said one of them also fell asleep during deliberations. The latter, he said, voted guilty from the beginning, was confused by the evidence and much of the time declined to participate in deliberations.

Khalil Meek, president of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, echoed sentiments suggesting the government had overreached in pursuing the case. He called it "a huge loss."

"When the government brings all this ammunition to trial and cannot come away with one guilty verdict, what else can you call it?"

The Holy Land Foundation was created in Los Angeles in 1988 and later moved to Richardson, Texas, outside Dallas. By 2001 it had become the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. and is believed to have distributed about $56 million here and abroad.

The FBI first began investigating the foundation nearly 15 years ago. Court records show that it was periodically subjected to government surveillance. After the Bush administration ordered the charity closed, Holy Land officials fought unsuccessfully in federal civil courts to reinstate it.

In 2004, the government alleged that Holy Land and its officials funneled about $12 million to Hamas through local charities called zakat committees. The government argued that from its inception Holy Land was intended to be a fundraising tool for Hamas, a contention that was never documented in court.

Georgetown's Cole said Monday's outcome reflected flaws and overreaching in the government's long-running case against Holy Land.

"One is that the government's theory here was a real stretch under the law, because they were seeking to hold these individuals responsible not for funding Hamas, which is a designated [terrorist] group, but for funding non-designated groups that the government claimed were fronts for Hamas."

Additionally, he said, the case should raise questions about the administrative process that enabled the government to shut down Holy Land almost six years ago, long before criminal charges were brought.

"That was a summary process that involved no trial, permitted the government to rely on secret evidence and barred the defendants from ever introducing their own evidence in court. Now we see when they are required to put their evidence on the table, the government is not able to prove a single charge," Cole said.

In contrast to many other post-Sept. 11 terrorism cases, the Justice Department never accused Holy Land or its five defendants of plotting terrorist attacks or directly purchasing weapons or other materials that could be used by extremists.

As one Justice Department official said months before the trial began, "We have not alleged that Holy Land pulled the trigger or lit the fuse of a bomb. But they have facilitated those who pulled the trigger or lit the fuse."

To buttress that claim, which was the linchpin of the government's case, the U.S. called on a former FBI official who has written extensively about Hamas and an Israeli security officer who was allowed the extraordinary accommodation of testifying anonymously and in a closed courtroom.

The security officer, identified only as "Avi," was particularly crucial to the government's case because he testified that each of the zakat committees identified in the indictment was controlled by Hamas.

Key defense testimony came from career diplomat Edward Abington, the former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and the second-highest-ranking intelligence officer in the State Department before his retirement. He told jurors he was briefed daily by the CIA and was never told that any of the zakat committees were under Hamas' control.

Abington also recalled how he had personally visited each of the zakat charity committees named in the indictment and did not believe they were linked to terrorism.

Juror Neal said it seemed that the government "really used fear" to try to sway the panel, but in the end the case came down to weak evidence.

"There wasn't any clear evidence linking the [Holy Land fund] transfers to Hamas," he said.

greg.krikorian@latimes.com

Times special correspondent Sarah Junek contributed to this report.

Dallas News : Justice Interrupted: Clarity denied in Holy Land Foundation mistrial

Justice Interrupted: Clarity denied in Holy Land Foundation mistrial

October 23, 2007

What a disappointment yesterday's mistrial in the Holy Land Foundation federal trial was. What the public wanted was clarity and closure in this long-running case, which Dallas first began to learn details of years ago in the groundbreaking reporting of this newspaper's Steve McGonigle. What the jury delivered after 19 days of deliberation – and an additional four-day delay in unsealing the verdicts – was confusion.

So profound was the confusion that Judge Joe A. Fish seemed startled when he opened the sealed verdicts only to discover that the jury had left most counts blank. Even the jury seemed bizarrely unsure of what it had decided. Small wonder Judge Fish declared a mistrial.

Family members of the five defendants in the terror finance case – in which the government accused the defendants of covertly but consciously raising money for the outlawed Islamic terrorist organization Hamas – were jubilant after the judge declared the mistrial. But their joy may be premature. Prosecutors have pledged to retry the case. Four of the five defendants likely will have to return to federal court to begin the entire process over again.

The non-verdict on most of the counts was a serious blow to government prosecutors, who have had a decidedly mixed record in terrorist fundraising cases since Sept. 11, 2001. The Holy Land Foundation case was by far their most important prosecution to date. The feds swung for the fences – and missed.

Close observers of the proceedings saw this coming. The government did a poor job making a complicated white-collar case understandable to ordinary citizens who often seemed perplexed and overwhelmed by an avalanche of facts and data. As one trial watcher said, it was like seeing his rural East Texas grandmother struggle through a graduate-level seminar in modern Middle Eastern politics.

Despite the jury deadlock, the trial wasn't a waste of time. Whether or not a crime was committed, evidence from wiretaps and videotapes – for example, the Hamas fundraising skit in which defendant and former Dallas city engineer Mufid Abdulqader chanted, "Death to Jews is precious" – was morally damning for defendants who claimed to be humanitarians. More importantly, the government introduced evidence showing how the infrastructure of many major U.S. Muslim organizations ties together, and how they have their philosophical roots in the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

This newspaper's reporting, as well as the preponderance of the evidence, strongly suggests that the Holy Land Foundation was no mere charity. That does not – let's be clear – prove criminality. Going forward, the government must change its flawed strategy if it hopes to prevail.

It doesn't matter how many facts prosecutors marshal if they cannot produce a coherent, persuasive narrative that a jury of 12 regular people can understand – and pass clear judgment on. A hung jury does nothing to satisfy justice.

WaPo : Gov't Likely to Retry Muslim Charity

Gov't Likely to Retry Muslim Charity

By DAVID KOENIG | The Associated Press | October 23, 2007

DALLAS -- Prosecutors will likely retry the former leaders of a Muslim charity, as well as the organization itself, after the government's biggest terror-financing case since Sept. 11 ended in a mistrial.

Not one of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was convicted Monday, and many acquittals were thrown out after three jurors took the rare step of disputing the verdict.

Juror William Neal told The Associated Press that the panel found little evidence against three of the defendants and was evenly split on charges against Shukri Abu Baker and former Holy Land chairman Ghassan Elashi, who were seen as the principal leaders of the charity.

"I thought they were not guilty across the board," said Neal, a 33-year-old art director from Dallas. The case "was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence."

Some jurors were dead-set for convictions even before they began deliberating, Neal said.

"They brought up stuff that wasn't even in the case," he said. "They brought up 9-11."

The jury heard two months of testimony on charges that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funneled more than $12 million in aid to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Such aid was illegal after January 1995 because President Clinton branded Hamas a terrorist group.

After 19 days of deliberations, and a bewildering final day in court Monday, jurors returned no convictions against any of the five former leaders of Holy Land, the largest Muslim charity in the country when it was shut down in December 2001.

Former Holy Land chairman Mohammed El-Mezain was acquitted on all but one charge. The judge declared a mistrial on the remaining El-Mezain charge and all counts against the other defendants and the defunct charity itself.

Prosecutor James Jacks said the government would probably try the case again.

"This is a stunning setback for the government," said a former U.S. attorney, Matthew Orwig. "There is absolutely nothing positive in that verdict today for the government."

During the trial, prosecutors introduced bank records showing Holy Land sent money to groups in Gaza and the West Bank. A lawyer for the Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet, who testified under a false name, said those groups were controlled by Hamas, which has carried out suicide bombings in Israel.

Prosecutors also offered thousands of pages of documents, many of them translated from Arabic, and hours of videotape that showed Holy Land leaders consorting with Hamas figures. One showed defendant Mufid Abdulqader pretending to kill an Israeli in a skit.

Jurors finally indicated that they had reached verdicts last Thursday. But their decisions were sealed until Monday because federal District Judge A. Joe Fish was out of town.

As Fish read the results, it appeared that jurors had acquitted Abdulqader on all charges, El-Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh on most charges, and failed to reach decisions on any counts involving Baker, Elashi or Holy Land itself.

But even that partial result was precarious. When the judge polled each juror whether he or she agreed with the verdicts _ normally a formality _ things turned chaotic, as three jurors disavowed the vote.

Fish sent the jury back to resolve the differences, but after about an hour, they said they could not continue, and the judge declared a mistrial.

Interest in the case ran all the way to the White House. President Bush personally announced the seizure of Holy Land's assets in December 2001, calling the action "another step in the war on terrorism."

The mistrial followed two other high-profile terror-financing trials in Chicago and Florida that also ended without convictions on the major counts.

NYT : U.S. Prosecution of Muslim Group Ends in Mistrial

U.S. Prosecution of Muslim Group Ends in Mistrial

By LESLIE EATON | October 23, 2007

DALLAS, Oct. 22 — A federal judge declared a mistrial on Monday in what was widely seen as the government’s flagship terrorism-financing case after prosecutors failed to persuade a jury to convict five leaders of a Muslim charity on any of the charges, or even to reach a verdict on many of the 197 counts.

The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its backers, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East. President Bush announced he was freezing the charity’s assets in December 2001, saying that the radical Islamic group Hamas had “obtained much of the money it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States.”

But at the trial, the government did not accuse the foundation, which was based in a Dallas suburb, of paying directly for suicide bombings. Instead, the prosecution said, the foundation supported terrorism by sending more than $12 million to charitable groups, known as zakat committees, which build hospitals and feed the poor.

The prosecution said the committees were controlled by Hamas and contributed to terrorism by helping Hamas spread its ideology and recruit supporters. The government relied on Israeli intelligence agents, using pseudonyms, to testify in support of this theory.

But prosecutors appeared to have made little headway in convincing the jury.

The case involved 197 counts, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. It also involved years of investigation and preparation, almost two months of testimony and more than 1,000 exhibits, including documents, wiretaps, transcripts and videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.

After 19 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted one of the five individual defendants on all but one charge, on which it deadlocked. A majority of the jurors also appeared ready to acquit two other defendants of most charges, and could not reach a verdict on charges against the two principal organizers and the foundation itself, which had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government froze its assets in late 2001.

James T. Jacks, the first assistant United States attorney, said in court that the government would retry the case. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers have been barred from discussing the case in the press, and Chief Judge A. Joe Fish said that order continued in force.

The decision is “a stunning setback for the government, there’s no other way of looking at it,” said Matthew D. Orwig, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal here who was, until recently, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.

“This is a message, a two-by-four in the middle of the forehead,” said Mr. Orwig, who was appointed by President Bush and served on the United States attorney general’s advisory subcommittee on terrorism and national security. “If this doesn’t get their attention, they are just in complete denial,” he said of Justice Department officials, who he said might not have recognized how difficult such cases are to prosecute.

David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, said the jury’s verdict called into question the government’s tactics in freezing the assets of charities using secret evidence that the charities cannot see, much less rebut. When, at trial, prosecutors “have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything,” he said. “It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.”

And Jimmy Gurulé, who was an under secretary of the Treasury when that agency froze Holy Land’s assets, described the outcome as “the continuation of what I now see as a trend of disappointing legal defeats” in terror-financing cases. Two previous cases, in Illinois and in Florida, ended with hung juries and relatively minor plea deals, he said.

In the Holy Land case, defense lawyers told the jury that their clients did not support terrorism but were humanitarians trying to lessen suffering among impoverished Palestinians. Though their clients may have expressed support for Hamas, the defense argued, that was before the United States government designated it as a terrorist organization in 1995.

The outcome of the trial emerged during a morning of confusion for jurors and those on both sides of the case, who had been waiting to hear the verdict since the jury returned it on Oct. 18. It was sealed until Monday because Chief Judge Fish had been out of town.

In the verdict, the jury said it failed to reach a decision on any of the charges against the charity and two of its main organizers, but acquitted three defendants on almost all counts.

But in a highly unusual development, when the judge polled the jurors on Monday, three members said that verdict did not represent their views. He sent them off to deliberate again; after about 40 minutes, they said they could not continue.

In the end, one defendant, Mohammed El-Mezain, was acquitted on all but one charge, involving conspiracy, on which the jury failed to reach a verdict. A mistrial was declared on that count, and on all the other counts involving the other defendants.

The exact nature of the jurors’ disputes, and their reasoning in the cases, remained unclear after the verdict. Chief Judge Fish barred reporters from trying to contact the jurors, although he said he would provide jurors with reporters’ telephone numbers if they wanted to discuss the case.

One juror said the panel had found little evidence against three defendants and was evenly split on charges against Shukri Abu Baker, the former charity’s president, and Ghassan Elashi, its chairman.

“I understand there’s no magical mystery check with ‘Hamas’ written on it, but over all the case was pretty weak,” said the juror, William Neal, 33, an art director from Dallas. “There really was nothing there for me, no concrete evidence.” Mr. Neal said the government should not retry the case — a call picked up by Holy Land’s supporters, who packed the courtroom during the trial, and who carried some defendants around on their shoulders outside the courthouse chanting “Praise God” in Arabic.

“The government spent 13 years and came back empty-handed,” said Khalil Meek, who is president of the Muslim Legal Fund of America and spokesman for an alliance called Hungry for Justice. “I would call that a victory — an overwhelming defeat for the government.”

Lawyers for some defendants said their clients were being prosecuted because of their family ties to Hamas leaders. One defendant, Mufid Abdulqader, is the half-brother of Khalid Mishal, a Hamas leader who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States government.

Another Hamas official and designated terrorist, Mousa abu Marzook, is married to a cousin of Mr. Elashi, who was sentenced last year to almost seven years in prison for having financial dealings with Mr. Marzook and for violating export laws.

Mr. Elashi’s daughter Noor, who was in the courtroom every day during the trial, said she considered her father a hero. “He was singled out for feeding and clothing and educating the children of Palestine,” she said. “Giving charity to the Palestinian people has become a crime in this country.”

Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting from Dallas.