Tampabay: Staunch Al-Arian supporter now says he was deceived

Terror Indictments

Staunch Al-Arian supporter now says he was deceived

By SUSAN ASCHOFF, Times Staff Writer

Arthur Lowrie, one of Sami Al-Arian's staunchest supporters for more than a decade, said Wednesday that he was deceived.

"He (Al-Arian) duped people like me," Lowrie said. "I feel personally betrayed."

Lowrie, a former University of South Florida adjunct professor, said his "position changed drastically" when he read the indictment released after Al-Arian's arrest last week.

"Whether they violated the law is still to be proven, but there is no question whatsoever that they violated the trust of the university and their supporters," he said of Al-Arian, his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, and Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the current head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The men repeatedly denied any connection with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both publicly and to USF professors and officials, Lowrie said.

The government, in its 121-page indictment, lists dozens of alleged conversations about membership in the group.

"It's just irrefutable," Lowrie said of the charges. "I don't think the government could fabricate all the wiretaps, all the telephone calls, all the faxes."

Lowrie is a retired Foreign Service officer who once served as Mideast adviser to the commander at U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base.

The members of the World and Islam Studies Enterprise Inc., "built a kind of firewall" between their academic work at WISE and their connections with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Lowrie said.

"The journals they (WISE) published, the conferences they conceived, were all legitimate," Lowrie said. "I'm still proud of all that."

In the early 1990s, Lowrie was involved in partnering USF and WISE to sponsor academic roundtables on Middle East issues.

Lowrie was a member of the Committee on Middle Eastern Studies at USF, formed to broaden discussion on the region's politics and religion. He worked closely with Shallah, Al-Najjar and Khalil Shikaki, WISE's first director. Al-Arian was not active in WISE's daily operations, nor did he attend most meetings with USF professors, Lowrie said.

The charges

USF accuses Sami Al-Arian of the following terrorist activities:

-- Being the leader of the Islamic Jihad in the United States.

-- Using USF as a cover to bring faculty and students into the country for terrorist activities under the guise of academic conferences and meetings.

-- Soliciting and raising money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its illegal goals.

-- Using the World and Islam Studies Enterprise Inc., which he promoted as a university organization, to conceal terrorist activities.

-- Using university equipment to further the operations and management of a terrorist group.

-- Assisting terrorists by causing others to make false, misleading and evasive statements about their roles at USF but in other venues, such as before the INS.

-- Using the USF federal credit union to launder money to carry out terrorist activities.

-- Filing a false application with the INS to become a U.S. citizen.

Employment violation

-- USF said it fired Sami Al-Arian for allegedly violating his employment contract by:

-- Engaging in activities outside the course and scope of his employment that harmed the university.

-- Creating a conflict between his private interests and the public interest of the university.

-- Allowing those activities to interfere with the full performance of his institutional responsibilities and obligations.

-- Failing to properly report these activities to the university.