Published on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 by Inter Press Service
Trials of Muslim Charities Likened to a Witch-hunt
By William Fisher
NEW YORK - The U.S. government’s anti-terrorist financing programmes are
based on the “guilt by
association” tactics of the McCarthy era and have had a widespread
negative impact on U.S.
charities, critics say.
That is the view of Kay Guinane, director of the Nonprofit Speech Rights
Programme for OMB
(Office of Management and Budget) Watch, an independent not-for-profit
government watchdog
group. Guinane told IPS that government actions have resulted in programme
cutbacks and
increased fear of speaking out on im****tant public issues.
The organisation accused Congress of continuing “an unfortunate pattern of
insufficient
congressional oversight of anti-terrorist financing programmes, neglecting
to address the
unnecessarily harsh impacts the programmes have on U.S. charities and
philanthropy.”
As an example of insufficient congressional oversight of charities’
alleged sup****t of
terrorist organisations, OMB Watch cited a recent hearing before the
Senate Finance Committee
in which the only witness was a government official. The witness was the
under-secretary of the
treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, Stuart Levey, who plays
a lead role in
identifying charities that the Treasury Department claims are sup****ting
terrorist causes.
OMB Watch asked the committee for an op****tunity to testify, but was not
invited.
The McCarthy era refers to a 1950s Cold War campaign led by then
Republican Senator Joseph
McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy charged that communist “subversives” had
infiltrated the U.S.
government and were undermining national security and disclosing secret
information. He accused
the administration of President Harry S. Truman of sheltering such
subversives rather than
investigating and ousting them.
Hundreds of citizens were eventually “blacklisted” and lost their jobs.
Congress made
member****p in the Communist Party a criminal offence, in a statute known
as the Smith Act.
In his opening statement at the Senate hearing, committee chair Max
Baucus, a Montana Democrat,
referred to failed criminal prosecutions of charities suspected of having
ties to terrorism,
asking if the prosecutions “were off base” or if the government should “do
a better job of
monitoring these organisations?”
Baucus was referring to the government’s prosecution of the Holy Land
Foundation (HLF), the
largest and best-known organisation sup****ting Muslim causes.
In December 2001, the group was designated as a sup****ter of terrorism,
shut down and had its
assets frozen. At that time, President George W. Bush, accompanied by then
Attorney General
John Ashcroft and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, charged that “Hamas has
obtained much of the
money that it pays for murder abroad right here in the U.S., money
originally raised by the
Holy Land Foundation.”
But by the time of the trial, in 2007, prosecutors no longer claimed HLF
provided sup****t to
Hamas or paid for violent acts. Instead, prosecutors admitted all the
money went for charitable
aid but said the local charities that delivered the aid to Palestinians
were controlled by Hamas.
In October 2007, a federal jury in Texas deadlocked on all charges against
HLF and most of the
charges against five of its leaders. The former board chair and endowment
director, Mohammed
el-Mezain, was acquitted of 31 of 32 charges against him, with the jury
deadlocking on the
remaining charge.
The government has indicated that it will retry the case. But, according
to OMB Watch, it will
again face the problem of secret evidence that unraveled when subjected to
scrutiny and the
fact that none of the charities HLF was accused of funding are on
government lists of terrorist
organisations.
In his Senate testimony, Levey noted that Treasury has “designated
approximately 50 charities
worldwide as sup****ters of terrorism, including several in the United
States, putting a strain
on al Qaeda’s financing efforts.”
But OMB Watch says, “Witnesses from charities and foundations could have
provided the committee
with a full picture of the real damage the financial war on terror is
causing charities,
foundations, and the people we serve. Instead, the public record is left
incomplete, which will
likely lead to continuation of flawed programmes that do little or nothing
to stop terrorism.”
Georgetown University law school professor David Cole, one of the U.S.’s
preeminent
constitutional scholars, told IPS, “The ‘material sup****t’ principle is
‘guilt by association’
in 21st-century garb, and presents all of the same problems that
criminalising member****p and
association did during the Cold War.”
In the name of cutting off sup****t for terrorist organisations, the
government has adopted the
“paradigm of prevention”, Cole says. “That term, coined by former Attorney
General John
Ashcroft, describes an amalgam of tactics in which the government employs
highly coercive and
intrusive measures against groups and individuals based not on proof of
past wrongdoing, but on
necessarily speculative fears about what they might do in the future.”
In a chapter of a forthcoming book, “Counterterrorism: Democracy’s
Challenge”, to be published
later this year, Cole writes, “The United States law now makes it a crime
to provide anything
of sup****t — from dues to volunteer services — to any organisation or
individual that the
government has labeled ‘terrorist’. The prohibition is not limited to
those who intend to
sup****t the illegal or terrorist acts of so-called terrorist
organisations. It criminalises any
and all sup****t — including sup****t that is otherwise entirely lawful,
peaceful, and nonviolent.”
“Hundreds of individuals and groups have been placed on this ‘terrorist’
list since 2001,” Cole
says, adding, “Remarkably, there is no definition in federal statutes of a
’specially
designated terrorist’ or a ’specially designated global terrorist’. Thus,
the president and the
secretary of treasury can apply this label to literally anyone or any
group.”
He told IPS that the problem requires fundamental changes in the
terrorism-financing law. He
recommends that the Treasury Department be required to permit closed
charities to direct their
collected funds to charities mutually approved by the frozen charity and
the government.
He also says that Congress should enact a statutory definition of a
“specially designated
terrorist”.
“Right now the Treasury Department makes such designations entirely on the
basis of an
executive order, and accordingly Congress has given the president
essentially a blank cheque,”
Cole told IPS.
Treasury should allow designated entities to use their own funds to pay
for their own defence,
he argues. “Treasury not only shuts down charities in a secretive
one-sided process, but then
bars the charities from using any of their own money to defend themselves
against the
designation,” according to Cole.
And the criminal material sup****t statutes should be amended to require
proof that an
individual sup****ted a proscribed group with the intent to further its
illegal activities.
“Today,” according to the government, “even aid intended to discourage
terrorist activities is
a crime under the material sup****t laws,” Cole says.
OMB Watch says the “material sup****t” effort has resulted in the
government shutting down
charities that were not on any government watch list before their assets
were frozen.
The organisation says the result is that Muslims have no way of knowing
which groups the
government suspects of ties to terrorism. “Organisations and individuals
suspected of
sup****ting terrorism are guilty until proven innocent,” it says.
OMB Watch told IPS, “A group could comply 100 percent and still be shut
down ‘pending an
investigation’.”
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/22/8448/
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com
**
|
