Word: arians
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...began investigating al-Arian shortly after he came to U.S.F. in 1986 and started making speeches like one in 1988 calling for "death to Israel!" He fell under scrutiny in 1995, when Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a Palestinian economist who had helped direct the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a Muslim think tank co-founded by al-Arian at U.S.F., turned up in Syria as head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian maintained that he hadn't known of Shallah's involvement in the terrorist group and kept building an image of himself as an "enlightened Islamist" who led interfaith projects...
Things changed after 9/11. When the Fox Network's Bill O'Reilly had al-Arian on his show and questioned him about the FBI probe, al-Arian condemned the 9/11 attacks but affirmed his support for the intifadeh, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation--hardly a statement marking him as a terrorist. But U.S.F. president Judy Genshaft, buckling under pressure from conservative trustees, eventually fired al-Arian despite his being tenured. Congress had just passed the USA Patriot Act expanding federal powers to investigate terrorism suspects, which Attorney General John Ashcroft seized on as a tool to nail al-Arian...
...intelligence showed that al-Arian was funneling thousands of dollars to Islamic Jihad figures and advising Shallah on issues such as how to make Iran a "strategic partner" and how to handle the wills of two suicide bombers. Still, it offered no real links between al-Arian and terrorist acts. Nonetheless, says a former FBI supervisor involved in the case, in late 2002 word came down from Ashcroft to build an al-Arian indictment. "We were in shock, but those were our marching orders," says the supervisor, who felt that the Justice Department was rushing to indict before...
...says the supervisor. The federal judge in the case, James Moody, seemed to agree. Last year he ruled that prosecutors were using too broad an interpretation of a 1996 law that makes it illegal to provide "material support" to designated terrorist groups; they would have to prove that al-Arian knowingly funded Islamic Jihad terrorist activities. Jurors told reporters after last week's verdict that the feds simply didn't get that done. But the government was also hamstrung by the fact that most of its evidence focused on al-Arian's activities before the U.S. branded Islamic Jihad...
Jurors indicated that most of them favored acquittal on the deadlocked counts against al-Arian. After the verdict, he told the St. Petersburg Times that he was "very confident the worst is over." But the government may simply deport him on pending immigration charges. For now, his wife Nahla says the verdict is vindication "not only for Sami but for our children, who are Americans. It matters to me that they have faith in this country...