Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing. Having retired as a special agent of the Immigration and Naturalization service, I’m now free to enjoy those First Amendment rights as a private citizen – and comment on a public issue about which I have some direct knowledge. The issue is the U.S. Senate primary race in Florida, wherein Betty Castor, who served as president of the University of South Florida during the mid-1990s, is a candidate for the Democratic nomination. Ms. Castor was the university president when the case of Sami Al-Arian, the USF professor now under federal indictment for being the America-based leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization, appeared on the public scene.

When I retired last year, I was the chief of the national security section in the INS’s Miami district office, which covers the whole state of Florida. After watching the PBS special “Jihad in America” in November 1994, taking notes, running various immigration checks, and reviewing immigration files, I launched the criminal investigation against Sami Al-Arian in late 1994 focusing on suspected immigration fraud violations. That effort – which came to involve the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Customs Service in Tampa – evolved into the complex, contentious, multiyear counterterrorism case that is now pending trial on a 50-count indictment. I was also the affiant for the November 1995 search warrants that led to the searches of Mr. Al-Arian’s residence, his university office, and the office of his organization, World Islam Studies Enterprises, which was also affiliated with the University of South Florida via a cooperative studies agreement at the time. Barry Carmody of the FBI also signed a separate affidavit for another search warrant a few weeks later.

Mr. Al-Arian and seven other defendants were indicted in February 2003, with Mr. Al-Arian and three others arrested in America and four others remaining at large outside the country. During the investigation, Mr. Al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, was arrested, detained, released, re-arrested, detained again, and deported for immigration violations over a five-year, highly publicized legal battle. In fact, the entire Tampa Islamic Jihad case was notably unusual in that it was a counterterrorism investigation played out in the national press.

In the mid-1990s, when this matter became public, just what could the president of the University of South Flordia, Ms. Castor, reasonably have been expected to know from open-source information? That Mr. Al-Arian, one of her tenured professors, was suspected by federal law enforcement authorities to be involved in support activities directly linked to an international terrorist organization and that he was being investigated for those activities.

It was known that Mr. Al-Arian, via World Islam Studies Enterprises, had arranged conferences – or “round-tables” – to which he invited foreign Islamic speakers, some of whom were known to the American government as suspected terror leaders. Mr. Al-Arian and associates including Mr. Al-Najjar and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah – who became the worldwide leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the fall of 1995 and who had, as a result of his involvement with WISE, been an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida for a time – arranged fund-raising conferences under an organization called the Islamic Committee for Palestine. The committee was not officially incorporated in Florida, but was linked to something called the Islamic Concern Project, which was incorporated in Florida with Mr. Al-Arian as a founding corporate officer. Those fund-raising conferences featured a variety of speakers, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheik” who was indicted and convicted in New York in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing and for plotting attacks against other New York landmarks. Sheik Abdel Aziz Odeh, the founding spiritual leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, was another speaker.

The ICP conferences consisted of vitriolic speeches supporting violent action against Israel and Jews as well as fund-raising activities. Even at that time, there was evidence available to Ms. Castor that indicated that the funds might have gone to support terrorism. This information was not only available in press reports and open-source government records, but was identified in the report commissioned by Ms. Castor herself and prepared by attorney William Reece Smith, a former USF president, in 1996.

Here is a quick overview of the case:

November 1994

PBS aired “Jihad in America,” produced by Middle East terrorism expert Steven Emerson. Mr. Al-Arian and his links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad were identified in the documentary. Ms. Castor was USF president at this time.

May 1995

The Tampa Tribune published a series of articles detailing Mr. Al-Arian’s involvement with WISE and ICP and describing various conferences and fund-raising activities on behalf of suspected Middle East terrorist groups.

June 1995

Ms. Castor issued an internal memo to her senior staff concerning the Al-Arian matter.

October 1995

Ramadan Abdullah Shallah publicly emerged in Damascus, Syria, as the new leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

November 1995

Federal search warrants were executed at Mr. Al-Arian’s residence, his USF office, and the WISE office in Tampa. The searches were widely reported in the press.

February 1996

Ms. Castor commissioned Mr. Reece Smith to “investigate” the Al-Arian matter and the relationship between USF and WISE.

May 1996

Mr. Reece Smith completed his report, which included INS and FBI search warrant affidavits as public record attachments.

May 1996

Ms. Castor suspended Mr. Al-Arian with pay.

Summer 1996

The deportation case against Mr. Al-Najjar commenced, including a hearing in July 1996 involving publicly reported testimony about WISE and ICP support activities for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Mr. Al-Najjar had earlier worked for USF as an Arabic instructor.

May 1997

Mr. Al-Najjar was ordered deported by the Immigration Court and was arrested and detained by the INS and FBI, with a subsequent detention hearing involving both publicly reported testimony and classified evidence that resulted in Mr. Al-Najjar being detained without bond as a national security risk.

Ms. Castor now claims the FBI and other law enforcement agencies refused to give her any information. At a June 2004 debate, she said, “I was unable to get one iota of information from the FBI or any other law enforcement agency.” Yet Ms. Castor did have access to both my search-warrant affidavit and a subsequent FBI search-warrant affidavit, both of which were attachments to the Reece Smith report and were also provided to her by her own general counsel. Moreover, shortly after Mr. Shallah emerged as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader in October 1995, FBI officials in Tampa met with Ms. Castor and her staff to advise her that the new leader was her former adjunct professor. According to Mr. Carmody, now retired but who served as the FBI agent in charge of the bureau’s part of the criminal investigation, he brought photos of Mr. Shallah to convince Ms. Castor that newly appointed head of Islamic Jihad was the same person who had been on the USF payroll. “We brought photos to show Castor that Shallah had been at USF. But I distinctly remember that Castor remained skeptical that Shallah was the same person,” Mr. Carmody told me recently.

In hindsight, Ms. Castor’s skepticism about Mr. Shallah was consistent with the attitude she evinced from the moment she was apprised of the problem. Following the November 1994 broadcast of the “Jihad in America” documentary, in which Mr. Al-Arian’s Islamic Jihad leadership was unambiguously demonstrated and shown through video, the university had nothing to say about the fact that one of its professors was a leader of one of the world’s top terrorist groups.

The Reece Smith report is also worth noting. It was Ms. Castor’s primary investigative response to the whole Al-Arian affair. Mr. Reece Smith is a prominent Tampa attorney. He has significant ties to the University of South Florida community. His report is a lengthy and detailed summation of the background of the case, but derived mostly from interviews of various USF staff and people affiliated with Mr. Al-Arian, and a review of available documents from USF and other open sources. Messrs. Al-Arian and Al-Najjar, on advice of their lawyers at the time, refused to be interviewed by Mr.Reece Smith. Law enforcement officials, of course, said little to Mr. Reece Smith. In his report, Mr. Reece Smith admitted that his inquiry had limited investigative ability, since he was acting essentially as a private attorney.

The Reece Smith inquiry was conducted from February until May 1996. I was not interviewed by Mr. Reece Smith nor even approached by him for his inquiry. Nor were other key federal law enforcement personnel involved in the case. There was no apparent attempt by Mr. Reece Smith to go beyond the scope of any information-gathering other than what was available to him from USF, the press, and public records – the very sources to which Ms. Castor always had access anyway – and he gave little consideration to notable open source information such as “Jihad in America,” the search warrant affidavits, the details contained in the Tampa Tribune series, and the fact that Mr. Shallah, a former USF professor directly linked to Mr. Al-Arian, was the new head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.The Reece Smith report was nothing more than a compilation of selected open and public sources of information. For this, Mr. Reece Smith was paid nearly $20,000. Apparently, Ms. Castor got what she paid for: The report concluded that Ms. Castor and the university really didn’t do much wrong.

Even with this whitewash, Ms. Castor did take some action against Mr. Al-Arian. She placed him on paid suspension status. Ms. Castor has claimed that this was the most she could have done under the circumstances. “As president of USF, I did everything within my power to deal with al-Arian. I worked closely with the FBI and suspended him from his post for two years. Despite our repeated requests for information to help us fire al-Arian, who was a tenured professor, the university was unable to get the information we needed from the FBI, U.S. Justice Department, or any other investigative agency,” she wrote in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of June 21, 2004.

Ms. Castor did order USF’s local Office of Inspector General to look into the USF/WISE financial relationship, which resulted in the termination of the USF/WISE cooperative agreement. Mr. Al-Najjar, who was an illegal alien, lost his employment at USF as an Arabic instructor because he did not have the proper visa status, as determined by an inquiry conducted by the USF provost at Ms. Castor’s request. So Ms. Castor did order administrative inquiry and action against two easy targets: the WISE organization, which was defunct after the November 1995 raids, and Mr. Al-Najjar,an illegal alien under deportation proceedings. But she chose to place Mr. Al-Arian on a paid suspension, ordering an inquiry conducted by a private lawyer who was a former university president. Ms. Castor reinstated Mr. Al-Arian in August 1998.

She now says that was the most she could have done, but there were other options available. Florida’s Inspector General Act of 1994 established an Office of Inspector General in each agency of the state government, including the Florida Department of Education. The mission of each OIG is to investigate and prevent waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement within their respective agencies, and the inspectors general report directly to the agency heads. During the Al-Arian affair at USF, the Florida Education Department had an Office of Inspector General.

The publicly known facts concerning the Al-Arian matter, as they related to the University of South Florida, indicated potential misconduct, abuse, mismanagement, and fraud committed by one of its professors, particularly in relation to the WISE organization. Even putting aside the alleged connections to terrorism, the fact that Mr. Al-Najjar, an illegal alien, and Mr. Shallah, who also did not have legal immigration status to work at USF, had both been employed at the university as instructors because of their affiliation with WISE and Mr. Al-Arian, it would have been natural for Ms. Castor to request a full investigation from the state-level Office of Inspector General at the Florida Education Department.

Such an official OIG investigation, conducted by professional state investigators, may well have discovered more than Mr. Reece Smith. OIG investigators could have enlisted the assistance of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement when criminal issues arose. Even in the mid-1990s, the FDLE participated with the FBI in Joint Terrorism Task Force matters. The OIG would not necessarily have had access to classified or sensitive case information, but it’s likely that the Feds would have been more open with them than with Mr. Reece Smith. In fact, official state investigators would probably have been granted access to some of the evidence seized during the November 1995 searches, such as the jihad fundraising letter referenced in Mr. Carmody’s affidavit. If Ms. Castor’s intent was to initiate an inquiry to justify the firing of Mr. Al-Arian, and to learn what else went wrong at USF, a statewide OIG inquiry would have stood a better chance of doing so than Mr. Reece Smith ever could.

Which leads to the question: Why didn’t Ms. Castor request a statewide OIG inquiry? A June 1995 memo she wrote to her senior staff indicates her approach to the Al-Arian case. “I am deeply concerned by implications that the University should ‘investigate’ entities or people and be the arbiter of what political, social or religious ideology is ‘good’ or ‘evil,'” she wrote.

More recently, however, Ms. Castor told Channel 10 News in Tampa, “We worked with the FBI, we did everything we could to insure the safety of the campus. We reached out to the law enforcement community. I even suspended this guy.” It’s a curious shift from June 1995 when she was concerned about investigating or arbitrating anything to touting her cooperation with the FBI. As someone who actually did work with the FBI on the case, I can say that whatever assistance Ms. Castor might have provided to the Al-Arian investigation amounted to very little.

It appears there were a number of choices available to Ms. Castor, ranging from taking no action, which obviously was not a real option, to trying to fire Mr. Al-Arian. Firing a tenured professor at a state university is no easy task, nor should it be. However, such a process exists under state law and regulations, and the appropriate initiation of that process with regard to Mr. Al-Arian is what the controversy is all about. Requesting a statewide OIG inquiry would have removed the investigation from the university itself, but still kept the matter within the Education Department administrative system. The university would have lost control over the issue, which might have resulted in a genuinely independent commission finding fault with USF for turning a blind eye to an Islamic Jihad terrorist cell in its midst.

Ms. Castor chose not to even initiate the process, chose not to even ask her own Education Department’s professional internal investigators to investigate whether there might be grounds to initiate termination action. Instead, she chose to send Mr. Al-Arian on a long paid vacation. That was a safe, neutral decision. One worthy of a politician. Whether it’s worthy of a leader is now a question for the voters.