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But Did They Break the Law?

Prosecutors face legal hurdles in proving their case against the men accused of establishing an Al Qaeda sleeper cell in Buffalo

Friday, September 20, 2002
By Stuart Taylor Jr.
Newsweek Web Exclusive



Taylor is a NEWSWEEK contributing editor,
and a columnist for the National Journal

Bill Claus, defense attorney for one of the six alleged members of an al Qaeda sleeper cell, outside the Buffalo federal court on Wednesday.
Image Credit: Getty Images.

In the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Congress made it a crime to provide a designated terrorist group with “material support or resources,” no matter what the defendant’s intent. “Material support” is defined to include money, “lodging, training, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications, equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel, transportation and other physical assets, except medicine or religious materials.” The Lackawanna defendants appear to have provided al Qaeda nothing except “personnel” -- themselves -- and may say they did not do that willingly.

Yes, some of them have told the FBI that they were there. But at least one says he went only to see what the camp was about -- and tried to leave as fast as he could. So how much of a case do prosecutors really have against the six Buffalo-area men arrested for allegedly receiving training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan?

The biggest legal hurdle facing the authorities -- who believe that the young men were part of an al Qaeda sleeper cell in Lackawanna, N.Y. -- is a two-year-old ruling that a critical part of the 1996 antiterrorism law under which they have been charged is unconstitutionally vague. That was the view of a federal appeals court in an unrelated California case.

Another likely defense: a freedom-of-association claim echoing those raised by communist defendants back in the 1950s. The issue then was whether people could be prosecuted for being members of -- or associating with -- the U.S. Communist Party without proof of specific intent to further its illegal goal of violent revolution. The issue now is whether people can be prosecuted for providing “material support” to a foreign terrorist group without proof of specific intent to further its illegal terrorist activities.

Defense lawyers claim that the six had had no terrorist intent and had wanted only religious training when they traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2001. And “our law generally requires that some kind of individual culpability be proven” to warrant criminal punishment, says civil-liberties lawyer and Georgetown law professor David Cole, author of a new book entitled “Terrorism and the Constitution.”
(More: MSNBC News Source)
2002 © Newsweek.

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