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St. Petersburg Times - May 18, 2004
Al-Arian's lawyer: Translations 'sloppy'
Sami Al-Arian's attorney told a judge Monday that he has found numerous discrepancies in the translations of secretly taped conversations prosecutors used to indict his client on terrorism charges. Even some of the government's own versions of particular conversations do not match, Bill Moffitt said.
"It becomes clear that the government was very sloppy in making this indictment," he said.
Federal agents arrested Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor, and three other men in February 2003 on charges that they supported and raised funds for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group.
Agents had taped thousands of telephone conversations over the past decade - most of them in Arabic - while Al-Arian was under surveillance.
Moffitt's allegations arose Monday as he asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas McCoun to order prosecutors to turn over the names of the translators who listened to the conversations. Moffitt said he feels he should be able to question the translators at Al-Arian's trial - scheduled for next January - about how they arrived at their translations.
As an example, Moffitt pointed to one paragraph from the indictment that states Al-Arian "sarcastically" chided fellow defendant Hatem Fariz in 2002 for sounding upset about a suicide bombing that was in the news. Moffitt said that the government's own transcript reveals that the conversation was not sarcastic, and that the two men were not even talking about the suicide bombing.
Moffitt did not want to give any other examples because he feared prosecutors would "sanitize this whole situation" by filing a cleaned-up indictment. Moffitt wants to use what he has found at trial. He said he was willing to provide the judge with his findings, as long as they remained for his eyes only.
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