Trial of Holy Land Foundation Breaks Ground in Secrecy

In the trial of Holy Land Foundation, formerly of Richardson, TX - just north of Dallas - groundbreaking limitations of the evidence through grounds of security has prevailed. A witness for the prosecution who is an agent of Israel was cloistered from view by all but immediate parties, and trial attenders sent into a separate room where they could not see the Israeli secret agent. This procedure will be repeated for a further Israeli secret service agent set to appear later in the trial. Defense moved for mistrial to be declared Monday, when their cross-examination of a U.S. FBI special agent was limited.

These precedent-setting methods are not promising for judicial proceedings. The Holy Land Foundation is being accused of sending funds for charitable purposes, which freed up Hamas to use more of its assets for terrorism.

Lawyers for Muslim charity leaders accused of aiding Middle East terrorists scored a rare win in court Tuesday when a federal judge blocked some evidence seized by Israeli soldiers during raids of Palestinian organizations.

The evidence included memos indicating that the governing Palestinian Authority believed the militant group Hamas controlled Muslim social agencies supported by the Texas charity, according to a court filing by prosecutors.

Defense lawyers had objected that some of the documents were not signed or dated, and they cast doubt on Israel's handling of the evidence.

Five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development are charged with funneling millions of dollars to Hamas, which the U.S. government designated a terrorist organization in 1995. The trial is in its fourth week of testimony.

Federal District Judge A. Joe Fish has ruled in the prosecution's favor on a wide range of issues, from allowing the government to call Israeli secret agents as witnesses to denying defense requests for a mistrial.

On Tuesday, however, Fish ruled against prosecutors and blocked the jury from seeing 12 documents that prosecutors contended linked Hamas to charities called zakat committees that were funded partly by the Holy Land Foundation, or HLF.
(snip)
A lawyer for one of the men got an FBI agent to admit that the man's name did not appear on a list of Muslim Brotherhood activists or a Hamas official's phone book. Some of the other defendants' names did appear.

The defendants are charged with aiding a terrorist group, conspiracy and money laundering. The men could be sentenced to life in prison if found guilty and if deaths resulted from their actions.

This trial has a lot of questionable elements, one being that the transcript of some taped conversations contained statements that were never made, (see earlier post "Funding Charity or Terror?")

As I noted at the time, results of this trial are most likely to include the conviction on the part of the Muslim community that it is the object of undisguised official discrimination. That new ground is being broken in sequestering witnesses who have official standing in another country, Israel, does not portend well for unbiased findings.