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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
From Day 1, Al-Arian, while never shying away from his militant support for the Palestinian cause, has denied supporting terrorism or terrorist activities. "I have never raised a cent for Islamic Jihad," he said. He has acknowledged that ICP helped raise funds -- $20,000 or $30,000 a year -- for Palestinian charity organizations, and suggested in a letter to a friend that anyone looking to help Palestinians should send money to Hamas, the radical Islamic resistance group. Hamas, whose members have staged numerous terrorist attacks against Israel, has a political wing that distributes money to Palestinian widows and orphans of men killed in the conflict with Israel. It can certainly be argued that money raised for Hamas, regardless of its intentions, could end up supporting its terrorist activities. But it was only in 1996, after anti-terrorism legislation was passed, that it became a crime to send money to foreign groups classified by the State Department as terrorist organizations, such as Hamas.
In fact, what Fechter uncovered, and the rest of the media piled onto, was not a dangerous terrorist but a fairly mainstream -- that is, pro-intifada -- Palestinian, who in his hot-headed youth made regrettably inflammatory comments about Israel, but who has never been tied to any terrorist groups. What's noteworthy here is how eagerly the post-9-11 media conflated the Palestinian cause with bin Ladin and al-Qaida, when in fact there is little actual connection, beyond a shared anger at Israel, between the two.
In a July, 10, 1997, article, Fechter tried mightily to prove a local Muslim travel agent was somehow involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing because one year before the blast he booked a flight for one of the suspects. Fechter wrote that the travel agent "advocated violence abroad against the enemies of Islam."
A correction in the next day's Tribune conceded that accusation was false.
In October of 1995 the Al-Arian story took on added urgency when Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, the former head of WISE who had returned to the Middle East months earlier, suddenly emerged as the head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a radical group that has engaged in many acts of terrorism against Israelis. The USF community expressed shock at the turn of events, and to this day there's been no proof that anyone in Tampa knew of Shallah's connections, if any, to the organization when he was at USF, or any proof that he was involved in terrorist activities at that time or subsequently.
That didn't deter Fechter, who on Aug. 7, 1997, reported matter-of-factly that "Shallah now says he served as the terrorist group's second in command" while working in Tampa. The Tribune subsequently retracted that assertion.
At one point Fechter quoted an obscure Jordanian newspaper, al Urdun, that suggested that even if Shallah hadn't been tapped to run Islamic Jihad, another WISE researcher, Basheer Nafi, was next in line. Al Urdun later retracted the story, but Fechter continued to make the assertion in print.
Why? Fechter today insists, "If the article was untrustworthy, the retraction was, too."
While Fechter had no qualms about quoting from obscure Middle Eastern papers to support his charges, he was less willing to cite experts. Fechter has never quoted this November 1995 passage from Israeli journalist Ze'ev Schiff, generally acknowledged to be the nation's leading commentator on military affairs, who informed readers that Shallah "does not have a previous experience in terrorist actions. His background is predominantly political. ... Nor is he considered a religious fundamentalist."
The saga took its second major turn when Al-Arian's WISE colleague and brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, was arrested for deportation. Although he had clearly overstayed his student visa, Al-Najjar appealed. Rather than release him on bond, the government submitted secret evidence to the court, insisting that Al-Najjar had terrorist ties. A judge ordered Al-Najjar held without bond.
In a move that turned traditional journalism ethics on its head, Fechter, who had already been criticized by area Muslims for being biased in his reporting, was allowed to write a Sunday commentary for the Tribune, where he derided the "public sympathy campaign" being waged on Al-Najjar's behalf.
For more than three years Al-Najjar sat in jail without knowing what the evidence against him was. Finally, in 2000, a federal judge ruled the use of secret evidence had violated Al-Najjar's constitutional rights and ordered a new bond hearing. After sifting through all the government evidence that, like the Tribune reporting, tried to tie WISE and its associates to terrorist activities, Judge R. Kevin McHugh, a former military judge, ordered Al-Najjar set free.
In his decision, McHugh set aside space to address the activity at USF: "Although there were allegations that ICP and WISE were 'fronts' for Palestinian political causes, there is no evidence before the Court that demonstrates that either organization was a front for the [Islamic Jihad]. To the contrary, there is evidence in the record to support the conclusion that WISE was a reputable and scholarly research center and the ICP was highly regarded."
To this day, the judge's passage, which knocked down the entire premise of Fechter's crusade, has never been quoted in full by any Tampa Tribune reporter. Readers only saw the whole quote when Al-Arian himself penned an Op-Ed for the paper, one year after the ruling was issued.
That court decision, combined with an independent investigation launched by USF whose final 200-page report also found no proof of terrorist ties to WISE or USF, seemed to signal the logical conclusion of the Al-Arian saga. But the irrepressible Fechter returned last June with another in his series of "Tampa's a hotbed for Islamic radical" stories. "Tampa Links Cited in Bombing Trial," was the headline to the 1,800-word, Page 1 Tribune story.
Fechter reported that the name of Tariq Hamdi had come up during the trial of four men convicted of conspiring to destroy U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where 224 people were killed in 1998. That's because Hamdi, now a journalist, had been hired as a consultant by ABC News to help secure an interview with Osama bin Laden in 1998. Prosecutors contended Hamdi delivered to bin Laden's network a replacement battery for a satellite telephone. Hamdi was never charged with any wrongdoing.
What were the "Tampa links" that led the Tribune to play the story on Page 1? It turns out that Hamdi, a former grad student who left USF a decade ago, once served as ICP's office manager.
This past December, Fechter wrote another excited, Page 1 story about a document found in Al-Arian's home that detailed a "vast covert intelligence and training operation spread throughout the United States."
After reading all 1,400 words, readers learned the document was A) written 20 years ago by B) an unknown person C) seized by investigators in 1996 who D) confronted Al-Arian with it one year earlier and then took no action.
