http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-terror8dec08,1,7754277.story?coll=la-headlines-nationNEWS ANALYSIS
The Patriot Act Can't Make Up for a Weak Case
By Richard B. Schmitt, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — It was, by some accounts, the most important terrorism-related trial in the United States since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — an ambitious undertaking that included dozens of government witnesses and hundreds of pages of transcripts of wiretapped phone calls dating to the 1990s.
But the Justice Department's case against a former college professor, Sami Al-Arian, and three codefendants for financing and promoting terrorism — a case that had been in the works for more than a decade — collapsed in a Florida courtroom this week with acquittals nearly across the board. After a recent string of victories, the verdicts cast a pall over the Bush administration's war on terrorism in the courts.
What happened?
Prosecutors are still picking up the pieces, but the verdicts Tuesday suggest an aversion by jurors to convict those who may be only indirectly involved in violence, especially when the targets are not U.S. citizens. Prosecutors may also have made strategic blunders presenting evidence to the jury; days spent reading transcripts of translated phone calls in the five-month-long trial struck some observers as overkill.
But the outcome also reflects a paradox of the Patriot Act, the terrorism-fighting law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks that the Justice Department said was instrumental in bringing charges against Al-Arian. The law breathed new life into an old case by allowing the government to combine the work of intelligence and criminal investigators, but the case turned out to be so old and tenuous that jurors were ultimately unmoved.
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