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| Home Front: WoT |
| Key evidence unveiled in Holy Land case |
| 2008-09-29 |
| Prosecutors have begun walking jurors through what they consider some of the most provocative and damaging documents that the government has amassed against the five accused Holy Land Foundation charity organizers. FBI Special Agent Lara Burns continues her testimony today on the web of connections she says the agency found between the former Richardson-based foundation – once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. – and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian-based Islamist group that the government says is the parent organization of Hamas. Last year, the government failed to secure any convictions against the defendants on charges that they funneled more than $12 million to Hamas after the U.S. declared it a terrorist group in 1995. Last year's three-month trial ended in a hung jury after 19 days of deliberations on what was widely considered a mountain of disjointed evidence. During the first week of the retrial, for which the government has pared the number of charges against the defendants, prosecutors appeared to be taking more time to surround the testimony with context, even asking Ms. Burns to spell difficult Arabic names for jurors, most of whom are taking notes. Last week, Ms. Burns told jurors that Hamas political leader Mousa Abu Marzook – whom the U.S. has designated a terrorist – lived in this country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She said he led a committee of Palestinians that answered to the Muslim Brotherhood. The group was tasked with marshaling "media, money and men" to support the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation, according to prosecution court documents. Prosecutors reopened what they characterize as a trove of Muslim Brotherhood archival material seized primarily from the home of unindicted co-conspirator Ismail Elbarasse. The government says those documents prove that Holy Land was founded to be the primary fundraising arm of Hamas. Among the documents prosecutors showed jurors last week was what they said was a 1991 Muslim Brotherhood strategy paper describing its plans for the U.S. The Brotherhood sought "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions," the document states. Mr. Elbarasse allegedly was a confidant of Mr. Marzook. Prosecutors last week showed jurors a $100,000 check they said was signed by Mr. Marzook, written out of the joint account he shared with Mr. Elbarasse to the fledgling Holy Land Foundation about two months after it relocated from California to Richardson in 1992. Mr. Marzook is related by marriage to defendant and Holy Land co-founder Ghassan Elashi, already serving prison time for business-related crime in connection with Mr. Marzook. Mr. Marzook is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case but faces other federal charges in Dallas and Chicago. He is believed to be living in Syria, where he is Hamas' No. 2 political leader. The government says some of its evidence came from a covert search the FBI performed at the Virginia home of unindicted co-conspirator Abdelhaleem Ashqar. Documents obtained from his home were not acquired with a traditional search warrant, but were secretly photographed, with permission from then-U.S. Attorney Janet Reno, by agents gathering intelligence on Hamas activities. Mr. Ashqar, formerly an assistant business professor at Howard University in Washington, was acquitted in early 2007 on charges of supporting Hamas. But he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for refusing to testify before a Chicago grand jury about his alleged Hamas ties. Jurors last week also saw a video of a fiery speech from defendant Mohammad El-Mezain, advocating violent jihad by Palestinians against Israelis. Some of the tapes in the government's possession had to be refurbished after they were dug up from the back yard of a Virginia home once lived in by another unindicted co-conspirator, Fawaz Mushtaha. Prosecutors say a man who bought the home after Mr. Mushtaha left found a cache of tapes when he dug up the yard for a home improvement project. When neighbors told the homeowner that immigration officials had previously raided the house, he contacted federal authorities and turned over the videos. Mr. Mushtaha was a member of the same Palestinian folk band Al Sakhra, or "the rock," as defendant Mufid Abdulqader. The band played at several Holy Land fundraisers, some of which allegedly included fiery speeches by Islamic clerics. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #2 Not enugh proof. (Yet) |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2008-09-29 09:48 |
| #1 I'm sure there must be some strategy involved, but why are there so many unindicted co-conspirators? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2008-09-29 07:01 |