Sunday, September 16, 2007

Co-founder of Al-Haramain `Charity' Ordered Held In Custody

A federal judge reversed a local Oregon magistrate and ordered that a former fugitive involved in the Al-Haramain case remain behind bars until his hearing next week.

Pirouz Sedaghaty, alias Pete Seda, was one of the co-founders of the notorious Saudi-funded Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. He was supposed to have been freed Friday under an order Monday by a federal magistrate judge in Eugene who ruled that Seda is neither a public danger nor a flight risk, even though he's facing charges of tax fraud, conspiracy and money laundering and originally left the US when the Feds closed in on al-Haramain as a front for laundering money for Islamic terrorism.

Al- Haramain's other co-founder, Soliman Al-Buthi who also faces conspiracy charges, is living free as a bird with our `eternal friends' in Saudi Arabia, which has no extradition agreement with the United States.

As regular members of Joshuas Army know, there is a trial now being heard before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that has major implications in our ability to fight Islamic terrorism here at home...and of course, the dinosaur media is almost entirely ignoring it.

For those of you who are unaware of the implications of the al-Haramian Islamic `charity' trial, the above link gives the details. To summarize things very briefly, the trial concerns whether the United States Government has the right to conduct secret surveillance of terrorism suspects on American soil.

Al-Haramain, an Islamic `charity' came under investigation by the US government, who allegedly tapped their phones and heard evidence that they were helping to finance terrorist activities. Based on this and other evidence, the U.S. government declared Al-Haramain a "specially designated global terrorist organization" and froze their assets.

When al-Haramain challenged this in court, the lawyers were mistakenly given top secret logs of the tapped phone conversations as part of a stack of documents.

At that point, al-Haramain hooked up with high powered Leftist lawyers who decided to turn this into a test case to challenge the very legality of the surveillance, and by extension the legality of all secret surveillance. Their idea is to set a legal precedent to stop the Federal government from conducting surveillance on anybody, to prevent any similar surveillance in the future, and to make inadmissible any evidence gathered by surveillance in the past.

The entire case now revolves over whether the plaintiffs even have the legal right to sue the government. In order to prove they have a right to sue, they have to prove they were under surveillance and the only evidence of that is the top secret logs the feds claims are Top Secret, and thus not admissible evidence. So al-Haramain's lawyers want to proceed with the case based on the memories and descriptions of the document, using testimony from the various people that saw it before it was given back to the government.....while the attorneys for the government are claiming that the document and its contents are classified and secret, and as such cannot even be discussed in court,even as memories.

If al-Haramain's lawyers get away with this, the implications are staggering.

Regardless of how this case goes (and given that the three judges consist of two Clinton appointees and a particularly whacko Carter appointee, it will probably go in favor of al-Haramain) this case will end up in front of the Supreme Court and mark a watershed moment in the War Against Jihad.

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