Trial shows anti-terror power

WASHINGTON – For a decade, FBI agents covertly monitored every telephone call and fax sent and received by Florida university professor Sami al-Arian as he communicated with alleged top leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group about its suicide bombings of Israelis, shaky finances and high-level turf struggles.

Starting Monday, many of those 20,000 hours of phone calls and hundreds of faxes will be revealed in a courtroom in Tampa, Fla., where al-Arian and three other alleged members of the group will be tried on charges of conspiracy to commit murder via suicide attacks in Israel and Palestinian territories.

The trial, expected to last at least six months, will provide a rare view of what the government contends are the clandestine operations of a terrorist group. It is the first case in which vast amounts of communications monitored under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) will make up the bulk of evidence in a prosecution of alleged terrorists – demonstrating the power the government now wields under that counterterrorism law.

The wiretaps, approved in 1993 through 2003 on as many as 10 phones by a secret FISA court, were originally intended for use only by FBI agents conducting open-ended “intelligence” probes, and not for use in criminal trials. But after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the enactment of the USA Patriot Act and a ruling by the supersecret FISA court of appeals allowed much greater use of intelligence material in investigations such as this one.

Many civil liberties experts express concern about U.S. officials’ introduction into criminal court of years of wiretaps approved by FISA judges under a lower standard of proof than that demanded by criminal-court judges. But U.S. District Judge James Moody has rejected defense attorneys’ arguments that the information should not be heard in court.

U.S. officials say al-Arian and three associates who worked with him at institutes affiliated with the University of South Florida in Tampa were secretly top leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, sharing duties with other leaders in Syria. Attorneys for al-Arian, a professor until he was fired in 2003, and the other defendants contend their clients don’t condone the group’s tactics and prosecutors are criminalizing their opposition to Israeli policies.