Prosecutors Should Stop Wasting Money on This Witch Hunts
By AHMAD AL-AKRAS
CounterPunch
"After years of investigations and wiretaps, after three months of court arguments and a record 19 straight days of jury deliberations, the jury could not return a single guilty verdict on the nearly 200 charges in a case against the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation (HLF) an American-Muslim charity.
The prosecution asked the jury for justice and sure enough, they got it.....
Many observers in this country and abroad viewed these charges as an attempt to block humanitarian aid to Palestinians suffering under a brutal Israeli occupation. They were also seen as a means to chill the First Amendment rights and charitable giving of American Muslims and other people opposed to our nation's one-sided policies in the Middle East. In essence, this was an Israeli trial tried on American soil in which guilt by association was used as a substitute for actual evidence.
The use of surveillance gathered by illegal means and by spying on citizens, guilt by association, and anonymous foreign witnesses and evidence threatens the foundation of our rule of law.
Edward Abington, the U.S. Consult General to Jerusalem, former ambassador and the second ranking intelligence officer for the U.S. State Department during the mid-1990s said that the evidence presented by the prosecutions in this case was a "propaganda exercise by the Israelis." Describing the thousands of pages presented in this trial, he testified that "you don't know where they came from, how they are related to each other. If you are an American analyst, you can't rely on those documents as showing a true picture."....."
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