Free Republic

Howls of rage went up after the Joint Terrorism Task Force, guns drawn, arrested Maher Hawash in the parking lot of an Intel Corporation facility in March, 2003, and placed him in solitary confinement. The protests intensified as prosecutors detained him without charges for more than a month in an Oregon jail while they pored over the evidence. Given Maher Mofeid "Mike" Hawash's biography, this all came as a particular shock, for he personified the American success story. A Palestinian born in Nablus in 1964 and reared in Kuwait, he arrived in the United States in 1984, earning degrees in...

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- The leader of Portland's biggest mosque sits on the board of an Islamic charity that's being investigated for terrorist links, federal tax records show. The Oregonian reported Tuesday that Alaa M. Abunijem has served on a three-person board in charge of the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America since at least 1999, according to federal documents reviewed by the Portland newspaper. An FBI agent testified in an Idaho federal court last week that the bureau's evidence "clearly points" to the Islamic Assembly's role in promoting terrorism. Abunijem and other directors of the Islamic Assembly have not...

PORTLAND, Ore.--Attorneys for two American Muslims charged with conspiring to wage war against the United States have asked a federal judge to throw out evidence gathered under the FBI's new spy powers in the Patriot Act. The attorneys could not offer specific arguments for why the evidence should be dismissed, because the government has classified affidavits that explain its reasons for collecting the information. The attorneys asked to suppress 36 secret warrants that allowed the FBI to electronically intercept 271 conversations and bug the Portland-area home of at least one of seven defendants. FBI agents arrested the members of the...