Al-Arian and bin Laden?

Here is what the jurors in the third week of the trial of former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian and three other Palestinians accused of terrorism-related crimes did not hear:

An expert on Middle East terrorism was prepared to testify about links between Al-Arian, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

But jurors did not hear that. And daily newspapers didn't write about it. Only Channel 28's Don Germaise reported the potential testimony of former FBI agent Matthew Levitt. Everyone else reported only what he was allowed to testify about: "Expert tries to explain PIJ link" was the title of the St. Petersburg Times account, which emphasized Levitt's failure to draw a direct connection between the defendants and terrorist killings. The Tampa Tribune's "Prosecutors Of Al-Arian Portray 'Economic Jihad'" also made no mention of the bin Laden link.

Channel 28's website text of the report touted that "Action News has obtained government documents on Levitt's testimony." Well, you can "obtain" it, too, by downloading a summary of what he was prepared to testify about filed online in the case at www.flmd.uscourts.gov/Al-Arian/8-03-cr-00077-JSM-TBM/docs/2184705/1.pdf.

Levitt is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has spent graduate research time at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Exposing Hamas: Funding Terror Under the Cover of Charity set for publication next year.

Levitt's proposed testimony twice invoked al-Qaida. First, he wrote how the management structure of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was identical to that of al-Qaida. Both use a leadership structure called Majlis al-Shura, or governing council.

He would have drawn a more direct link with his second point, regarding Al-Arian's close association with Fawaz Damrah, a speaker at conferences in the 1990s sponsored by Al-Arian's Islamic Committee for Palestine. It is Damrah who says on a tape of that organization's 1991 conference, "A brief note about the Islamic Committee for Palestine: It is the active arm of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. We preferred to call it the 'Islamic Committee for Palestine' for security reasons."

Then Levitt could have gone on to detail how Damrah served as an officer in the Afghan Services Bureau, "a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, founded by Osama bin Laden and the radical Palestinian sheikh Abdullah Azam that later served as a critical part of the global jihadist network now known as al-Qaida."

Al-Arian and co-defendant Ghassan Ballut, among others, "maintained intimate contacts" with Damrah, according to the outline of Levitt's proposed testimony.

From Al-Arian to Damrah to bin Laden.

That could have been powerful testimony - or inflammatory and prejudicial, given your belief in the defendants' guilt or innocence. The prosecution has agreed that the defendants did not directly plan terrorist killings, but linking Al-Arian even obliquely to the architect of the 9/11 attacks (which Al-Arian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, by all accounts, had nothing to do with) would have stoked jurors' emotions.

After hearing objections from defense attorneys who sought to block the testimony for just those reasons, Judge James S. Moody ruled against any mention of bin Laden or his organization.

That left Levitt's overarching theory for the jury to hear, that Al-Arian and co-defendants Sameeh Hammoudeh, Hatem Fariz and Ballut undertook "economic jihad" and raised money that enabled the violent acts in Israel and the occupied territories. It is an often circumstantial theory, since the money was raised under the flag of charity, aimed at improving life in occupied Palestine for refugees whose poverty and squalor is truly deep.

Damrah's remarks at various conferences, however, can be viewed as supporting the economic jihad theory. At 1991 fundraisers he said, "You may not be able yourself to go on a jihad, but fight the good fight with your wealth" and "the one who supports a mujahid, a raider … it is as if he himself has raided."

Now, there are lots of debates over the meaning of jihad and whether it automatically means violence. There is also the fact that raising money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad before 1995, when it was declared a terrorist organization, was legal. Levitt's objectivity (he worked on the Al-Arian case while at the FBI) can also be debated. Even the hint of Al-Arian knowing somebody who once knew or served bin Laden is the worst kind of guilt by association. But it also shows the kind of company that the former professor kept in his ardent advocacy for the Palestinian cause.

The trial is now in its fourth week and is expected to last six to nine months.

wayne.garcia@weeklyplanet.com