Posted on 06/24/2002 4:18:03 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
federal judge has dismissed the Justice Department's case against seven people accused of funneling charitable donations to an Iranian military group deemed partly responsible for the 1979 takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran and still labeled a terrorist threat.
After deliberating for months, Judge Robert M. Takasugi of Federal District Court in Los Angeles ruled on Friday that a 1996 law passed by Congress to classify foreign groups as terrorist organizations is "unconstitutional on its face," and thus cannot be used as the basis of criminal charges.
That antiterrorism law, a cornerstone of the government's case against John Walker Lindh, the American accused of aiding a foreign terrorist group, makes it a crime to provide "material support" to any foreign organization that the State Department deems a threat to national security. But the law gives these groups "no notice and no opportunity" to contest their designation as a terrorist organization, a violation of due process, Judge Takasugi ruled.
"I will not abdicate my responsibilities as a district judge and turn a blind eye to the constitutional infirmities" of the law, Judge Takasugi wrote.
Because the government made its list of terrorist organizations in secret, without giving foreign groups a chance to defend themselves, the defendants "are deprived of their liberty based on an unconstitutional designation that they could never challenge," he said.
The Justice Department said yesterday that it had not decided whether to appeal the ruling.
Wearing badges and flashing pictures of starving children, the seven defendants stopped "unwitting travelers" at Los Angeles International Airport for years, filling buckets with donations from passers-by, federal prosecutors charged.
While the group presented itself as a legitimate charity, the government charged that it took orders from the People's Mujahedeen, an organization the administration blames for the murder of at least six United States citizens in the 1970's.
Instead of sending money to the needy, the government contended, the defendants wired more than $1 million into overseas accounts to sustain People's Mujahedeen military camps in Iraq, where the group trains under the protection of Saddam Hussein.
The defendants, some of whom were born in Iran but are now American citizens, denied the charges.
Started in the 1960's by educated, middle-class youth, the People's Mujahedeen, much like the Iranian fundamentalist movement that arose alongside it, sought to expel the shah and purge the country of what it considered pervasive Western influences.
Shortly after the Iranian revolution, the secular Mujahedeen movement found itself at odds with a government ruled by clerics. Since the early 1980's, the State Department says, the group has waged a sporadic war against the Iranian government, attacking its embassies around the world, bombing its oil pipelines and assassinating some of its high-ranking officials.
The Clinton administration listed the People's Mujahedeen as a terrorist organization in 1997, making it illegal to raise money for the group. Yet hundreds of members of Congress have balked at the label and embraced the Mujahedeen as a viable opposition to the Iranian leadership, arguing that the organization's only objective is to overthrow one of America's staunchest foes.
The Mujahedeen "are not our enemies, they are our allies," Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey, one of about 30 senators and 230 representatives to publicly defend the organization in the last five years, wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell last August.
Since Sept. 11, however, many of the Mujahedeen's former advocates in Washington have withdrawn or tempered their support, saying that their tolerance for the Mujahedeen's tactics, even though they were directed at one of the nation's adversaries, has waned.
A year ago, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the State Department had sidestepped the Constitution by listing the People's Mujahedeen as a terrorist organization without giving it a chance to argue otherwise.
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