Transcript Demonstrates Discrepancies in Case Against Islamic Charity

When the Bush administration shut down the nation’s largest Islamic charity five years ago, officials of the Dallas-based foundation denied allegations that it was linked to terrorists and insisted that a number of accusations were fabricated by the government.Now, attorneys for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development say the government’s own documents provide evidence of their claim.In recent court filings, defense lawyers disclosed striking discrepancies between an official summary and the verbatim transcripts of an FBI wiretapped conversation in 1996 involving Holy Land officials.The summary attributes inflammatory, anti-Semitic comments to Holy Land officials that are not found in a 13-page transcript of the recorded conversation. It recently was turned over to the defense in an exchange of evidence by the government.Citing the unexplained discrepancies, defense lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Joseph Fish in Dallas to declassify thousands of hours of FBI surveillance recordings, so that full transcripts would replace government summaries as evidence.The demand could force government prosecutors to either declassify evidence that it has fought to keep secret or risk losing a critical portion of evidence in its case.In December, the judge denied a defense request to declassify the documents so they could be examined by defendants in the case. Seven former foundation officials, six of them American citizens, have been charged with funneling money to overseas charities controlled by Hamas, which has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the American government. The defendants have denied the charges.While defense attorneys have government clearances that allow them to review the material, they have been prohibited from sharing it with their clients under the federal Classified Information Procedures Act. And unless the CIPA rules are declared unconstitutional in the case, defense attorneys argue, the defendants will have no way of proving that the statements attributed to them were misconstrued or never made.The recently declassified summary of an April 15, 1996, surveillance asserts that during a conversation wiretapped by the FBI, Holy Land’s former executive director Shukri Abu Baker told two associates there was no need to worry about the foundation being unfairly targeted because American courts were not under the control of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee or its sponsor, he said, “the government of the demons of Israel.”The summary portrays Mr. Baker as raging against “the Jews of the world” and as claiming that Jews have no allegiance to anything but “their pockets and to preserving the illegal Zionist state of Israel.”Additional anti-Semitic comments the FBI summary attributed to Mr. Baker or Ghassan Elashi, Holy Land’s former board chairman, included:• “Their [Jews’] only purpose here in the U.S. is to purchase as many politicians as possible and to warp the way the American Christians feel and think not just about the Christian religion but mainly about the Palestinian people … and to rob as much money as possible from American taxpayers for the illegitimate excuse of protecting and preserving the chosen people of God.”• “Even Jesus Christ had called the Jews and their high priests as the sons of snakes and scorpions.”• “I am confident that in the end justice, and not the Jews, will prevail. I believe that there is still justice in America.”None of those quotes was contained in the transcript of the conversation, defense lawyers said in their motion to expand access to classified evidence.“Throughout the run-up to trial, the government has insisted that the defendants can learn what is contained in the [surveillance] intercepts by reading the socalled ‘summaries’ of those intercepts,” defense attorneys said in their papers.But the recently disclosed transcript, attorneys said, show that, “Not only are the summaries so inaccurate and misleading as to be useless [but the] author of the attached summary has cynically and maliciously attributed to the defendants racist invective and inculpatory remarks the defendants never uttered.“It is appalling that such summaries even exist, much less that the government represented that this is all our clients need to know in order to defend themselves.”Defense lawyers declined comment about their motion. A federal prosecutor said the government would respond with its own filings to the court.

Transcript Demonstrates Discrepancies in Case Against Islamic Charity

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