When Terror Charges Just Won't Stick

(2 of 3)

The FBI began investigating al-Arian shortly after he came to U.S.F. in 1986 and started making speeches like one in 1988 calling for "death to Israel!" He fell under scrutiny in 1995, when Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, a Palestinian economist who had helped direct the World and Islam Studies Enterprise, a Muslim think tank co-founded by al-Arian at U.S.F., turned up in Syria as head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian maintained that he hadn't known of Shallah's involvement in the terrorist group and kept building an image of himself as an "enlightened Islamist" who led interfaith projects in Florida, gave women leadership positions at his Tampa mosque--and in the 2000 presidential campaign, stumped for George W. Bush because he found Bush more attuned than Al Gore to Arab-American issues. By then the FBI had told U.S.F. administrators it had nothing to charge al-Arian with, and the next year he attended an Arab-American gathering at the White House.

Things changed after 9/11. When the Fox Network's Bill O'Reilly had al-Arian on his show and questioned him about the FBI probe, al-Arian condemned the 9/11 attacks but affirmed his support for the intifadeh, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation--hardly a statement marking him as a terrorist. But U.S.F. president Judy Genshaft, buckling under pressure from conservative trustees, eventually fired al-Arian despite his being tenured. Congress had just passed the USA Patriot Act expanding federal powers to investigate terrorism suspects, which Attorney General John Ashcroft seized on as a tool to nail al-Arian. The act, which Congress is working to extend another four years, allowed FBI investigators access to FBI intelligence, which had been off-limits for building criminal cases. The intel files include wiretaps and other surveillance of al-Arian carried out abroad by Israeli agents, who had also taken an interest in the professor and had shared their findings with the FBI's intelligence branch.

The intelligence showed that al-Arian was funneling thousands of dollars to Islamic Jihad figures and advising Shallah on issues such as how to make Iran a "strategic partner" and how to handle the wills of two suicide bombers. Still, it offered no real links between al-Arian and terrorist acts. Nonetheless, says a former FBI supervisor involved in the case, in late 2002 word came down from Ashcroft to build an al-Arian indictment. "We were in shock, but those were our marching orders," says the supervisor, who felt that the Justice Department was rushing to indict before it had really appraised the evidence.