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U.S. Faces Challenge in Sleeper-Cell Case
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
By John Riley
Newsday

After investigating the six for more than a year, the government admits that aside from a single e-mail from one defendant that the government considers suspicious, it has no evidence they were planning anything. It has offered no evidence that members of the group acted like or viewed themselves as a cell after leaving Afghanistan and has not even contended that they are al Qaeda members. If Alwan's statement -- a centerpiece of the government's case -- is true, he visited al Qaeda but never joined.

On Sept. 12, Sahim Alwan, a cleanshaven youth counselor, a husband and father of three, and a prayer leader at his mosque in Lackawanna, N.Y., admitted to FBI agents that he of all people had detoured to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in mid-2001 during a trip to Pakistan for religious training.

''My purpose,'' he told the agents, according to a statement read in Buffalo federal court last week, ''was to see what it was all about.'' When he found out, he said he was quickly turned off by the ''crazy radical mentality.'' He eventually faked an ankle injury and got out after 10 days.

Did he commit a crime just by being there? That issue is at the legal core of the prosecution of six suburban Buffalo men charged with providing ''material support'' for a terrorist group by allegedly training at the al-Farooq camp in 2001 and then coming home to form a ''sleeper cell.'' The outcome could provide a road map for the war on terror's future pursuit of hidden domestic al Qaeda supporters and sympathizers.

The 1996 law prosecutors are relying on includes ''personnel,'' along with categories such as money, safe houses and weapons, in the definition of ''material support.'' In the John Walker Lindh case, the government contended that you could provide ''personnel'' by providing yourself -- but conceded that because of the constitutional right to free association, ''personnel'' had to mean that you subjected yourself to a terror group's control.

* STANDARD FOR GUILT
* HARD EVIDENCE SCANT
* SIMILAR ARGUMENT
* FAILURE TO DISCLOSE
(More: The Miami Herald News Source)
2002 © Newsday.

This is part one of our tax money at work. Part two will be the settlemnet for wrongful prosecution. I wonder who authorized this.

There oughta be a law...
Dan