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Prosecutor's witness tells another point

A former math professor close to Sami Al-Arian says discussing the PIJ is like "watching CNN or Fox."

By MEG LAUGHLIN
Published October 4, 2005

TAMPA - A moment of unexpected high drama in the trial of Sami Al-Arian left a government witness in tears and a federal prosecutor furious.

Prosecutor Terry Furr hoped to nail down incriminating evidence against Al-Arian and two other defendants Monday by questioning a former University of Mississippi math professor who has known Al-Arian for years.

But the prosecution's witness backfired, repeatedly challenging Furr's understanding of how information spread among Palestinians and what support of the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad among Palestinians often meant.

The witness, Abdul Raouf Dabus, received government immunity to testify about a 1994 phone conversation he had with Al-Arian. The two men talked about how much Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization were participating in, or shunning, peace talks. Furr focused on the conversation as evidence that Al-Arian was an insider in the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

But Dabus repeatedly said the information in their conversation was "public information" and that Palestinians needed the charitable "benefits of the PIJ" and Hamas and the PLO, "because that was all there was to help them" when Al-Arian and he talked in 1994.

In a quiet voice, he told Furr, "You don't understand."

Dabus likened the phone conversations between Palestinians about PIJ and Hamas activities, violent or charitable, to "watching CNN or Fox."

"You get one part of the story from one place and you keep asking because you want to get the truth. The information keeps going back and forth," he said.

Furr asked Dabus if he was a member of the PIJ. Dabus said he was not but that he supported the PIJ's charitable work in Israel's occupied territories. He likened the community work of the PIJ, Hamas and the PLO in the mid '90s to groups in New Orleans now.

"They are refugees who need help," Dabus said. "It doesn't matter if the help comes from Jews, Muslims or Christians. They need help and every Palestinian has this support in his heart."

At one point Furr, who was getting increasingly annoyed with his own witness, said to Dabus, "You said you thought you knew Mr. Al-Arian pretty well. Well, do you know if he sent money to the families of terrorists?"

Dabus responded that the money he knew about, which came through Al-Arian's co-defendant Sameeh Hammoudeh, "went for a bookstore and an ambulance."

During cross-examination from a defense attorney, Dabus said he feared Palestinians could no longer speak their minds in the United States about the occupied territories. He worried aloud, "There is no longer any security for the dog that barks in this country."

He said he asked himself what it meant if someone as prominent as "Sami Al-Arian, who had been to the White House and who had the support of so many people in Congress, could suddenly be put in jail?"

Bill Moffitt, Al-Arian's attorney, seizing the moment, asked Dabus if the answer scared him. In response, the government witness, whom the prosecution has put on at the end of its case, answered that it did scare him and explained, as his voice cracked with emotion, "Our kids, will they have a future here? I don't know."

The courtroom fell silent, as several jurors and onlookers stared at him, then wiped their eyes.

Furr's last question on redirect: "Did Sami Al-Arian raise money to send the PIJ?"

Dabus replied that the only money he knew about went to charity, "for a good purpose."

[Last modified October 4, 2005, 06:37:44]