Holy Land Foundation defense begins rebutting prosecution
Monday, November 3, 2008
By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
KEY POINTS: HOLY LAND TRIAL
The allegation: The federal government says Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation and seven organizers illegally sent at least $12 million overseas to the militant Palestinian group Hamas. The U.S. declared Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995.
On trial: Ghassan Elashi, former Holy Land board chairman; Shukri Abu Baker, former Holy Land CEO; Mohammad El-Mezain, the foundation's original chairman who became director of endowments; Mufid Abdulqader, a top fundraiser and a former city of Dallas public works supervisor; and Abdulrahman Odeh, Holy Land's New Jersey representative. Two others are fugitives.
Possible sentence: The counts carry from three to 20 years in prison, and each defendant faces multiple counts.
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Last year, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation case told jurors during closing arguments, "Don't get hung up on the names."
For the retrial, following a hung jury in the first case, the government has tweaked its message.
Prosecutors are taking great pains to make sure jurors absorb all the details – including the blizzard of unfamiliar Arabic names – central to their allegations that five charity workers used the former Richardson-based foundation to funnel money to Hamas after it was banned by the U.S. in 1995.
Among the changes:
•Adding new witnesses aimed at plugging holes in their case that were expertly exploited by defense attorneys last year.
•Drumming names and connections into jurors through often exhaustive repetition.
•Rolling out new and more learning aids and charts designed to help jurors access relevant documents – often down to the page number – during what is sure to be extended deliberations.
Prosecutors have been "much more mindful" of how they are "telling the story to the jury," said Donna Diorio, a pro-Israeli blogger who is a regular trial watcher.
"In my view, the prosecution has the defense on the ropes," Ms. Diorio said.
But for Holy Land supporters, it's still the same old evidence.
Noor Elashi, daughter of defendant and Holy Land co-founder Ghassan Elashi, regularly points out what she says is government anti-Muslim bias and juror boredom, on her blog, freedomtogive.com.
"Some jurors sighed, yawned and constantly glanced up at the clock," she wrote after a particularly tedious day of testimony.
This year, prosecutors added six witnesses to their lineup of 10 from last year. Still they managed to shave about two weeks from their presentation, which began the week of Sept. 22 and ended Friday.
Treasury official
Key among the new witnesses was Robert McBrien, with the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees terrorist designation.
He testified that not every Hamas front group is individually outlawed and doesn't have to be for it to be illegal to send it money. This counters the defense argument that the defendants broke no laws because the Palestinian charity groups, known as zakat committees, to which Holy Land gave more than $12 million from 1995 to 2001, are not individually labeled as terrorist affiliates.
A subtle change the government made from last year was recategorizing its more than 500 pieces of evidence, much of which details the defendants' often virulent anti-Semitism and connections to top Hamas officials.
Last year, documents, videos and bank records were identified by a series of numbers. This year, for example, evidence is referred to by the location in which it was found, such as the Holy Land offices, or by the name of the co-conspirator from which it was confiscated. This means names are repeated over and over throughout the case.
To aid jurors during deliberations, prosecutors and federal agents this year also crafted a series of charts to help jurors pinpoint evidence of the most crucial aspect of the case – Hamas control of the zakat committees.
Charity work
For their part, defense attorneys kept the pressure on government witnesses through aggressive cross-examinations.
They routinely elicited testimony from the government's witnesses about Holy Land's aid to desperate Palestinian families caught in the Arab-Israeli conflict, bolstering their points with photos of charity work and thank-you letters from aid recipients.
More than once, they have reminded jurors that much of the government's case dates to the early 1990s.
The defense began presenting its case Friday and has several new witnesses on its roster, too.
Mohamed Elibiary, president of the Freedom and Justice Foundation, a Muslim group based in Plano, said that the government's tweaks mean little to Holy Land's backers.
"The prosecution this time around has presented its case in a more visually friendly and succinct manner. But at the core, there's still the same problem," he said. "The charges are much grander than the evidence is there to prove. What the government has presented, frankly, in the eyes of the [Muslim] community, are associations over past years," not crimes.
