Danger Among US, Part 3: The Holy Land Foundation Five
By Omar Mansour/ Arab America Contributing Writer
In December 2001, the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), then the nation’s largest Muslim charity, was shut down when it was designated a terrorist organization by the Bush administration, charging it with using its charity activity as a ruse to provide monetary support to Hamas, through the very charities they worked with. This, of course, was never shown to be the case.
At precisely 7:00 am central time on July 27th, 2004, the homes of Shukri abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad Elmezain were raided by local and federal law enforcement. All five men, who became known as the HLF-5, were taken into custody, and after two trials, all were sent to deferral prison, serving terms of 15-65 years in one of the most embarrassing and outrageous cases of legal injustice in the last 20 years.
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development:
During the First Intifada, Mohammad Elmezian, Ghassan Elashi and Shukri-Abu Baker established the Occupied Lands Fund, focusing on getting medical care and humanitarian aid to impoverished Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan via “Zakat” committees. In 1990 the name was changed to the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The HLF was incorporated as a non-profit charity with tax-exempt status. The charity grew from raising $300,000 in 1989 to close to $13 million in 2000 and 2001, making it the largest Muslim charity in the United States. The HLF helped people and communities all across the United States and around the world, responding to as many humanitarian calls as they could handle.
Smear Campaigns:
Ironically, but not unexpectedly, it was this very work for Palestine that had them targeted. Shukri explains why their charity work placed a target on their back:
“The pro-Israeli groups led by the ADL felt that the HLF challenged the monopoly they had on the narrative on Palestine. They felt that we had become so powerful that we could actually tip the balance of public perception about the plight of Palestinians under occupation, Also, it worried them that America’s largest Islamic charity organization was led by Palestinians”
Shukri Abu-Baker, Injustice: The Story of the Holt Land Foundation Five
This informed the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) attack on the reputation of the HLF, sabotaging their public relations efforts, campaigns and status as an organization. They published reports that the HLF was connected to Hamas – which would only be labeled a terrorist group in 1995. Miko Peled, author of Injustice: The Story of the Holt Land Foundation Five simply lays it out, “Anything that is Palestinian needs to be connected to terrorism” otherwise, the whole narrative falls apart. In 1994, the ADL along with the American Jewish Congress launched a campaign to demand the IRS revoke the HLF’s tax-exempt status.
By the Books:
In February 1995, the HLF and other Muslim and Arab groups requested a meeting with US Treasury department officials. In attendance were a number of senior officials who decide whether groups are engaging in transactions with designated terrorists. The Arab and Muslim groups hoped to obtain some guidance so as to not violate any transaction laws. However, during later trails for the HLF, it was revealed that (suspiciously) no official record of the meeting existed. The guidance never came until 2002, after the HLF was already shut down. The HLF did not worry at the time, however, as they were meticulous with their numbers and who they worked with – they only worked with organizations in Palestine that had Israeli approval.
Terrorist Designation:
Their confidence in their dealings was not enough, unfortunately, to stop a government agenda. On December 4th, 2001, Bush declared the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development a terrorist organization, ordered it to be shut down, and under Executive Order 13224, targeting financiers of terrorism, all their assets were to be frozen.
President Bush declared 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…The Holy Land Foundation claims that the money it solicits goes to care for needy Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Bush said. Instead, he said, the funds were “used by Hamas to support schools and indoctrinate children to grow up to be suicide bombers” and to “recruit suicide bombers and to support their families.”
The entire thing was a sham. The Treasury has created a group to tackle the “financial war on terror”. The first thing the new group had to do was set up a legal structure allowing the government to freeze assets on the basis of evidence that, according to Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the education of Paul O’Neil, would never hold up in court. In order to do that, they needed to seize some assets quickly. Bush was already set to announce the executive order, and in order to combat financial terrorism, needed to show that it existed.
David Aufhauser, head of the Treasury group tells Suskind “We just listed out as many of the usual suspects we could and said, ‘Lets go freeze some of their assets.'” The Holy Land Foundation was, of course, one of the “usual suspects”. Everything was made up to satisfy policy the president was already going to make. The choice of the HLF being designated a terrorist organization later that year was also most definitely connected to Palestine – why else would Ariel Sharon himself ask Bush to shut down the HLF during his visit after 9/11? According to one senior official the time, when asked by Sharon to move against the HLF the president “speedily obliged”. “We — bam — did it.”
The Trials:
The government never produced evidence to support President Bush’s accusations. By the time of the 2007 criminal trial, the prosecution had walked back its claims that the HLF provided direct support to Hamas. Nor did The U.S. government allege that HLF intended to support terrorism or that its funds were actually used for that purpose. They actually did admit that all the money went to charitable aid, but with a twist. At the trail, the prosecution charged the HLF with providing funds to local charitable groups called ‘Zakat’ committees that delivered humanitarian aid in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Zakat committees were not designated terrorist organizations, and so the government did not argue that the HLF directly supported terrorist groups.
Instead, the government argued that while the local charities were not themselves designated terrorist organizations, they were controlled in whole or part by Hamas, and distributed aid to recipients who would then associate Hamas with this social outreach. This was an admirable display of legal gymnastics, and even if true, doesn’t amount to anything. The problem is that it was not true at all.
At trial, defense attorneys presented documentary evidence and testimony (from a former U.S. diplomatic official) that some of the same Zakat committees HLF is charged with supporting have received aid from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the European Commission, and United Nations agencies including the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
In addition this this, Edward Abington, the former consul general at the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem and the State Department’s second-highest-ranking intelligence official, testified that when he was employed and working in the region, he would receive daily CIA briefings an personally visited each of the named Zakat committees, yet never received information suggesting that the Zakat committees aided by HLF were controlled by Hamas.
There are many examples of how ridiculous this trial was, but this is more than enough to show how baseless it all was even from the start.
Nobody thought that this would be the “first trial” – it ended in a mistrial; there was nothing to find them guilty of. The nightmare was over and there was celebration.
Conclusion:
The mistrial, however, was not the end of the story. The government was not going to let this go, and on November 24, 2008, after a three-month retrial, the HLF and the HLF-5 were convicted on 108 criminal counts, including charges of material support for terrorism. The retrial resulted in convictions even though prosecutors again admitted that all funds went to local charity committees that were never on government watch lists, and exhibits that had been declared hearsay in the first trial were admitted into evidence.
Nancy Hollander, a lawyer from Albuquerque who represented Mr. Abu-Baker, states the blatant issues with the trial, “Our clients were not even allowed to review their own statements because they were classified statements that they made over the course of many years that the government wiretapped,” Ms. Hollander said. “They were not allowed to go back and review them. There were statements from alleged co-conspirators that included handwritten notes. Nobody knew who wrote them; nobody knew when they were written. There are a plethora of issues.”
Even with a different judge and new witnesses, the prosecution’s basic arguments were the same as the first trial, and it of course, was all stacked against the Five from the start – they were always going to be found guilty because they had been declared guilty by the President of the United States himself, years before. Former Dallas federal prosecutor Tom Melsheimer told the Dallas Morning News after the convictions, “I think this case proves that, with enough effort, the federal government can convict nearly anyone.’”
On May 27, 2009, the defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 to 65 years. Shukri Abu Baker was sentenced to a total of 65 years in prison; Mohammad El-Mezain was sentenced to the statutory maximum of 15 years; Ghassan Elashi was sentenced to a total of 65 years; Mufid Abdulqader was sentenced to a total of 20 years and Abdulrahman Odeh was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Check out our blog here!
