Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 28, 95, 123

Special Report

U.S. Government’s “Secret Evidence” Against Mazan Al-Najjar Has Yet to Produce Indictments

By John Sugg

“The legal records of the case, and above all the actual charge-sheets, were inaccessible to the accused and his counsel, consequently one did not know in general, or at least did not know with any precision, what charges to meet.”—Franz Kafka, The Trial

On May 7, President Clinton spoke to almost 800 Arab Americans at a Washington dinner. University of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian, clutching an envelope addressed to Clinton, sat in a front row. The speech ended, and the president began working the crowd. For a few seconds, the professor had his arm around Clinton, and Secret Service agents politely took the package of letters and articles.

“Mr. President, help us,” pleaded Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla. “My brother has been in jail for a year on secret evidence.”

“Clinton asked where we were from, and I said, ‘Tampa,’” Sami Al-Arian recalls. “The president pointed to the package and promised, ‘I’ll get back to you on this.’”

If you believed the Tampa Tribune’s reports on terrorism, that would have been a frightening moment. Dr. Sami Al-Arian has been labeled the mastermind of “one of the world’s most lethal terrorist factions” by the Tribune’s Rasputin-like mentor on terrorism, Steven Emerson, whose persistent, sensational charges against U.S. Muslims and Arab Americans are largely ignored or discounted by other journalists in his home base of Washington, DC.

Nevertheless, for three years, the Trib has relentlessly insisted that an insidious terrorist cabal lurks at the University of South Florida. You’d think, therefore, that G-men would be tripping over themselves watching Al-Arian’s every blink and twitch. Certainly someone so “lethal” would never be allowed to get near the president.

If you believed the Trib and Emerson.

A lot of people don’t believe them—including a large grassroots Tampa coalition, journalists from across the nation, members of the intelligence community, and—on some very telling issues—even the U.S. Justice Department.

The Trib’s reports are based on:

 Emerson’s allegations. Grossly mistaken accusations, questionable translations, unsubstantiated claims, and a self-evident bias against Muslims and Arabs mar Emerson’s work.

 Claims and testimony contained in affidavits by federal agents. Many of the agents’ allegations are based on secret information, and much of that bears uncanny similarity to Emerson’s spewing. In any event, cops’ unsubstantiated affidavits aren’t proof.

 Characterizations of evidence that are occasionally deceptive, demonstrably out of context in terms of timing of events, often uninformed and sometimes just plain wrong.

 Biased sources. Virtually the only alleged experts used by the Trib are those supporting the terrorism thesis.

The Trib’s articles have prompted federal agents to investigate Tampa’s Muslims.

The nationally circulated Miami Herald recently concluded that the Trib ignored innocent interpretations of events in favor of only those explanations that suggested “extremely dark forces were on the prowl in Tampa.”

Valid or not, the Trib’s reporting has caused real human suffering. Court documents show the newspaper’s articles prompted federal agents to investigate Tampa’s Muslims. Then, a year ago on May 19, Mazen Al-Najjar, another USF academic and Sami Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, was jailed by the agents. The government refused to grant Al-Najjar bail while he appealed a deportation order. The agents claim they have “secret evidence” that he is linked to Palestinian terrorists.

Secret evidence: An outrage against the Bill of Rights’ guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, association, due process, the right to confront accusers and know the evidence against you. Its use against U.S. citizens is illegal.

However, Al-Najjar, who is not a U.S. national, languishes in a cramped Bradenton cell with a dozen other men. Bare concrete floors and two open toilets are the decor. Deeply religious, he is constantly assaulted by inmates’ profanity. The food is offensive—“the same vegetable soup every day for more than 100 days,” he sighs. Worst, he has been allowed to see his three young daughters only twice in the last year.

“I am on the edge of a nervous breakdown,” Al-Najjar says. “Here, people are reduced to just their biology, and even that’s not managed very well.”

The Hillsborough Organization for Progress and Equality (HOPE), an alliance of religious groups, on April 15 made an appeal for Al-Najjar to U.S. Justice Department officials. The activists believe they were taken seriously.

A Kafkaesque Ordeal

Meanwhile, Sami Al-Arian’s citizenship application is in limbo. He is on forced paid leave from USF. A federal investigation has ground on for three years. No charges have been filed, but no one will tell Al-Arian when his Kafkaesque ordeal will end.

A senior Justice Department lawyer, who would comment only if assured anonymity, says: “If we knew what they [Emerson and the Trib] claim to know, our job would be easy. We’d just start making arrests. But maybe the system does work. Maybe sometimes you look at the evidence and there isn’t proof of a crime. I’m not going to say that’s the case here. I’m not allowed to do that. But the lack of activity should tell you something.”

This tragedy began in 1994 with Emerson’s PBS documentary, “Jihad in America.” The Trib in May 1995 relied largely on Emerson for a series, “Ties to Terrorism,” and numerous follow-up articles that depicted a USF Islamic think tank called WISE as a nest of terrorists.

After the Trib series came federal search warrants and documents emanating from Al-Najjar’s immigration hearings. That gave Emerson and Trib reporter Michael Fechter ammunition to claim they have proof for their assertions. In a threatening letter he wrote trying to derail a debunking article before The Herald printed it, Emerson depicted the documents as “unambiguously showing the existence and operation of the Islamic Jihad in Tampa.”

I’ve examined the same files and volumes of other material. Stacked up, the papers would climb to about five feet. I’ve also read Emerson’s articles and letters, and I’ve talked to 14 journalists who know him. I’ve consulted intelligence sources and Middle East experts.

My conclusion: The proof, the smoking gun, just isn’t there.

Others agree. Joe Mahon, who spent 30 years as an executive in the Middle East, studied all 2,000 pages of Al-Najjar’s immigration hearing transcript. “I couldn’t find a single crime,” Mahon says.

I’ve also reviewed translations of the proceedings at Islamic conferences. I didn’t find a blueprint for bringing terror to the United States. I did find strident language. But I bet the Americans at Lexington and Concord, the abolitionists at Harper’s Ferry, the French at the Bastille, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, the blacks in Soweto, and the Irish in 1916 Dublin weren’t polite about their oppressors.

The shout of “Death to Israel” makes me recoil. But it is a political statement about a government Palestinians claim shackles them with apartheid, torture and state terrorism. Expressing opposition to Israel is not synonymous with being anti-Semitic, and it is clearly protected by the First Amendment.

Here are just a few of the problems with the Trib’s and Emerson’s reporting:

In October 1996, the Trib alleged the documents revealed the “Tampa office of an Islamic think tank was used to ferry messages to a Palestinian terrorist leader.” Emerson goes further, recently telling U.S. senators about “tactical directives, often forwarded from Tampa, to…forces in the field.”

Not quite. Amid 60 boxes of seized material and 280 megabytes of computer files, investigators found two such messages. Did they order bombings or attacks? No, they concerned a death in a family, which the Trib doesn’t explain until 15 long paragraphs into its account.

The Trib reported that “Jihad communiqués” were found in WISE files. Emerson, in his letter to The Herald, calls them “original” communiqués, falsely implying they originated in Tampa. Not noted was the obvious explanation: WISE was a group of scholars collecting volumes of information on the Middle East. “We received material from all sorts of groups from all over the world,” Al-Arian says.

“Biographies of radicals” were also found, the Trib panted. Sinister? No, ludicrous. An inch-thick magazine, Maalomat (Information), published by Christians and Muslims in Beirut, contained dozens of biographies of Middle East leaders of all stripes. The feds selected and translated a few, giving the impression the Tampa think tank may have authored or endorsed the material. The context of where the material came from was not acknowledged. And, what if the Tampa scholars had written the biographies? Remember the First Amendment?

In April 1996, the Trib ominously observed: “Agents found a variety of records pertaining to the U.S. Central Command, headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base.” Were spies unmasked? Hardly. Al-Arian attended two conferences at Central Command, and in 1993 made a speech to hundreds of military and intelligence officers. “This was the hand-out material from the conferences,” he shrugs.

The Trib, Emerson and federal agents claim WISE brought “terrorists” to the United States. One WISE employee, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, did take over Islamic Jihad in 1995 after he left Tampa. Yet, there’s never been a shred of solid proof offered that anyone at USF knew of his ties to Islamic Jihad. Other visitors labeled “terrorists” are highly regarded leaders—except in Israel—some of whom met with congressmen, prestigious institutes and newspapers on their visits.

Guilt by Association

Many Trib allegations insinuate guilt by association. In the vast majority of the rest, the newspaper gives an alarming interpretation to activities covered by the First Amendment.

Let’s examine Emerson’s veracity—the linchpin for his reporting and the Trib’s articles.

Two Associated Press reporters relate an incident where Emerson gave them a document on terrorism supposedly from FBI files. One reporter thought he’d seen the material before, and in checking found a paper Emerson had supplied earlier containing his own unsupported allegations. The two documents were almost identical, except that Emerson’s authorship was deleted from the one purported to be from the FBI. “It was really his work,” one reporter says. “He sold it to us trying to make it look like a really interesting FBI document.”

A Washington, DC AP editor says that while no source is ever absolutely banned from being utilized, “we would be very, very, very leery of using Mr. Emerson.”

Still another AP reporter, Richard Cole, authored a terrorism series last year. He says: “We were not clear on the origin or authenticity of his [Emerson’s] material.” Because of that, Cole recalls, much of Emerson’s information was sliced from the series. Emerson retaliated—as he has done with numerous journalists around the nation—with “a multi-page rant,” Cole says. “Pathetic.”

Emerson did not return a phone call.

Robert Friedman, a reporter who bested Emerson in a 1995 fight in The Nation magazine over the validity of “Jihad in America,” comments: “He gets it wrong all the time. Emerson has no credibility left. He can’t get on TV and most publications won’t pick him up.”

Says Vince Cannistraro, a retired CIA terrorism expert who now works for ABC:

“Word has got around on what he is, that he’s a paid polemicist, not a journalist.”

Who pays Emerson? Good question. A large part of the funding for his much-criticized PBS documentary, “Jihad in America,” came from a foundation controlled by ultra-right-wing Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife. Emerson now writes articles for a Scaife-owned newspaper implying that White House meetings with Muslims constitute coddling terrorists.

Emerson’s favorite sources are two ex-federal agents, Steven Pomerantz and Oliver “Buck” Revell. They, in turn, write letters praising Emerson. All three are constantly congratulating each other on what marvelous terrorism experts they are. They operate behind at least two “institutes.” Revell was a key player in Emerson’s “Jihad.”

In short, the three are sort of a troika pulling someone’s sled.

Whose sled? Pomerantz and Revell are officers of one institute. There is a third member of the institute, and a fourth member of their little band of terrorism “experts.” That person is Yigal Carmon, a ranking member of Israel’s intelligence and military establishment. Carmon is considered to the right of even the current Likud government. The Nation reported (and was never disputed by Emerson) that Carmon was part of the “gang of three” that spent much time lobbying Congress to derail the Middle East peace process—and Carmon even stayed at Emerson’s home on his visits to the United States.

Carmon is part of Revell’s and Pomerantz’s institute—its “Mideast regional director.” Emerson, who has quoted Carmon as a source, also shuttles the Israeli around to introduce him to journalists as an “expert” on the Middle East, according to reporters who have been so introduced.

Victor Ostrovsky is a former Mossad—Israeli intelligence—officer. After he published Mossad’s secrets, the Israelis branded him a traitor. Ostrovsky said during a November visit to Tampa that FBI evidence against Al-Najjar almost certainly was provided by Israelis. “Was this a Mossad operation? Duh. Of course it was.”

Cannistraro says: “Mossad has passed on information about people, sometimes directly to the FBI, in other cases through the CIA. I don’t know it happened in that case.” But, referring to specific sources cited by Emerson and the Trib, Cannistraro adds: “I do know they’re Israeli-funded. How do I know that? Because they tried to recruit me.”

The real question, then, is: Were there really “ties to terrorists” in Tampa, or just “ties to spies”?