A few days ago I picked up this story from the JTA, claiming that an appeals court had removed the unindicted co-conspirator designation from CAIR and several other Hamas-linked groups. It turns out that the story was false.
The actual ruling is here, and it doesn’t bear out the JTA’s story, or the story from the Leftist pseudo-news site Politico, upon which the JTA relied. Here is an explanation from Z Street: “Still tainted by terrorism ties,” from Z Street, October 25:
[…] You see, the courts did NOT decide that CAIR or its fellow-terrorist-travelers are not actually terrorists or not actually terrorist enablers.
What the courts did was rule that the government should not have made public a document it attached to a brief in May, 2007, which the government then referred to as a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. The case determined that the so called Islamic Charity actually existed almost exclusively to support Hamas, the Arab Palestinian terrorist entity.
In fact, thank you so much to CAIR and to ISNA and to NAIT. In the course of trying to get the courts to clear their “good” names, those organizations gave the courts and the government lawyers nearly half a dozen opportunities to point out that the government presented evidence during the trial of the organizations’ connections to Hamas. In other words – the fact that there was a violation of the organizations’ Fifth Amendment rights because the organizations were publicly named as having close connections to terrorist entities in a document – and the organizations had no opportunity to defend themselves in that document – really didn’t amount to a hill of beans because evidence was introduced at trial of those same connections. In fact, the government witness, testifying under oath, referred to CAIR as a Hamas front group….
Pamela Geller has more analysis here.