A Chicago grocer accused of providing material support to terrorists heads to court on Thursday to fight charges that he helped funnel millions of dollars to Hamas.
Muhammad Salah spent nearly five years in an Israeli prison in the mid-1990s after admitting he committed a number of crimes on behalf of Hamas, which swept to power in January elections this year but remains designated by the United States as a terrorist organisation.
Prosecutors allege that Salah continued to launder money when he returned to the United States in 1997.
Salah's lawyers tried to suppress his confessions to Israeli security forces by arguing they were obtained under torture. Prosecutors accused them of trying to put the state of Israel on trial and flew two Israeli intelligence officers and an Israeli police officer to Chicago to refute the charges. It was the first time members of the General Security Service, or Shin Bet, had testified in a US court, but the public was not allowed to witness it. The agents used code names and disguises when testifying in a closed courtroom; only an edited text of their testimony was provided to reporters.
Federal judge Amy St. Eve ruled that Salah's allegations of sleep deprivation and other forms of physical and psychological torture were not credible. She noted that case law gives testimony a higher weight than sworn statements and that Salah did not take the stand.
Avoiding a potentially damning cross-examination was a gamble that could cost Salah his freedom. The evidence in the confession is damning and includes detailed descriptions of his alleged crimes. His lawyers are hoping a jury will be more willing to accept that the confession was coerced.
"The question is, what was his intent?" said defence attorney Michael Deutsch, who argues that Salah was delivering humanitarian aid and that it the United States had not designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation until years after Salah's arrest and confession in Israel.
The mild-mannered devout Muslim is seen by some Arab-Americans as the victim of a post-911 witch hunt and a skewed understanding of the situation in the Middle East.
"For many, he is a symbol of a larger Palestinian struggle," said Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "Nobody sees Salah in a vacuum."
He is seen by others as a cold, calculating supporting of killers. "I wanted to reach across the table and strangle him. He was sitting there, making himself so innocent," recalled Joyce Boim, who was awarded 156 million dollars in damages from Salah and several Muslim charities after her 17-year-old son, David Boim, was killed by Hamas gunmen at a Jerusalem bus stop.
Salah's 2004 arrest was hailed by the US government as a triumph of the controversial US Patriot Act.
"Today, terrorists have lost yet another source of financing and support for their bombs and bloodshed," then US Attorney General John Ashcroft said when unsealing the indictment against Salah, Abdulhaleem Ashqar of Virginia and Hamas leader Mousa Marzook, who is considered a fugitive living in Syria.
A victory in the case would help the battered reputation of the Bush administration's legal response to the war on terror following recent high-profile failures, such as a ruling by the Supreme Court that the administration overstepped its authority in setting up military tribunals to try war on terror detainees held at a US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Prosecutors have had significantly more luck with cases involving those accused of funnelling money to terrorists, said Bobby Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University Law School in North Carolina and an expert in terror cases.
"Although there have been some prosecutions that have not won out, by and large the government has prevailed in its material support prosecutions," he told AFP in a telephone interview.