“I kept expecting the government to come up with something, and it never did”

…said the juror.

It was the nation’s biggest terrorism finance case ever—but after fifteen years and millions of dollars spent to shut down and prosecute the Holy Land Foundation, the criminal case ended in a mistrial two weeks ago in law-and-order Dallas. [Find that story here] .

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The charity’s guilt was presented as a sure thing back in December of 2001 when George Bush announced at a Rose Garden news conference that the Holy Land Foundation was raising money in the U.S. that “pays for murder abroad,” and that the Treasury Department was freezing Holy Land’s assets and seizing its offices.

Now it appears that the then-secret evidence for closing the foundation was flimsy at best, and based almost primarily on the word of Israeli agents who had a not-so-objective interest in seeing Holy Land shut down.

At present, although defendants and attorneys are bound by a gag order, jurors and others others involved are not, reports the LA Times’ Greg Krikorian. And they are talking up a storm:

“If the government can shut them down and then not convince a jury the group is guilty of any wrongdoing, then there is something wrong with the process,” Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the criminal trial derailed the government’s long-publicized assertions about Holy Land.

“From the beginning, the allegations were highly suspect and only got worse,” said Turley, who has handled a number of national security cases.

Indeed, Turley said, if the government had begun with the troubled criminal case, it might never have succeeded in closing down the foundation administratively because its disputed evidence would have come to light years ago.

Such criticisms echoed those of Holy Land lawyers who had long complained that the charity was railroaded out of existence without due process of law and based on secret evidence.

“Before a person’s domestic pet can be taken away for being vicious, they are at least entitled to a hearing. So what happened to Holy Land wouldn’t happen to a dog,” John Boyd, one of Holy Land’s lawyers, said in an interview more than a year before the court imposed a continuing gag order.

There’s a lot more, so read the rest here.

And, as you do, remember that four out of the five defendants who had their work, reputations, and long-time charity trashed by the government without due process…..were American citizens.

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PS: I’m in the midst of working on unrelated project, but I’ll be back with another post later today.