This series at Salon is excellent!
Blacklisted by the Bush government
Spying on Americans without warrants, charges based on secret evidence, a small town divided by fear. Welcome to the world of Bush's "specially designated global terrorists."
Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.By Tim Shorrock
May 19, 2008 | RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, and ASHLAND, Ore. -- One day in March 2004, Soliman Hamd Al-Buthe, a former member of Saudi Arabia's national basketball team and a government official in the city of Riyadh, picked up his phone for an urgent call with two American lawyers in Washington, D.C. Most of the call concerned a growing confrontation between the U.S. government and the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Ore., the U.S. branch of a global Saudi Arabian charity organization under investigation for possible links to terrorism. Al-Buthe had been an advisor to Al-Haramain from 1995 to 2002 and was a member of the Oregon foundation's board of directors. Just weeks prior to the call, the foundation -- a respected fixture in the Ashland community run for years by an Iranian-American Muslim named Pete Seda -- had been raided by U.S. law enforcement agents.
Because of their involvement with Al-Haramain, Al-Buthe and Seda were also entangled in a lawsuit filed against dozens of prominent Saudis by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. During the call, Al-Buthe and his attorneys talked about the funds needed for his legal defense. "We had a problem of transferring money," he says, "so we were thinking of new ways" of getting funds to Washington.
The phone call proved fateful. Unknown to its three participants, the conversation, and at least one other between them in April 2004, was monitored by officials from the National Security Agency at the behest of senior Bush administration officials. The surveillance that day -- apparently conducted without a warrant and later exposed when the government accidentally released a highly classified document to Al-Haramain's attorneys -- would become a key piece in the sprawling debate over extrajudicial spying inside the United States after 9/11. The surveillance would also have profound consequences for Al-Buthe -- who is considered a terrorist supporter by the Bush administration -- and others connected with the Al-Haramain Foundation in Oregon.
Ever since a New York Times report uncovered warrantless domestic spying by the Bush administration, the issue of NSA surveillance and the 1978 law governing it has been intensely scrutinized and debated. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to dubious activities directly connected with the domestic spying. The Bush administration has used expanded national security powers to undermine the legal rights of people in the United States who are identified as al-Qaida supporters, but who are not charged with terrorist-related crimes. The U.S. Treasury Department and other agencies investigating domestic organizations and U.S. persons rely on the NSA to spy and collect evidence for them -- a fundamental shift from the past, when the NSA's vast eavesdropping powers were used only for foreign intelligence gathering. And in the name of protecting national security, the Bush administration has regularly withheld what it claims is key evidence against those accused -- insisting, essentially, that the public accept without question its private conclusions about the suspects' guilt.
Tons and tons more at:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/19/al_haramain/?sid13
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