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<h1><font size=4 color="#FF0000"><b>This is from corporate
media!<br><br>
</font>A Prosecutor Is Called
'Relentless'</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.nysun.com/national/a-prosecutor-is-called-relentless/82727/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nysun.com/national/a-prosecutor-is-called-relentless/82727/</a>
<br><br>
<b>By <a href="http://www.nysun.com/authors/Josh+Gerstein">JOSH
GERSTEIN</a>, Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 28, 2008<br><br>
</b>A federal prosecutor who has led a series of investigations into
Islamic militants and Muslim groups based in
<a href="http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Virginia">
Virginia</a>, Gordon Kromberg, may soon be facing a trial of sorts
himself, if defense lawyers get their way.<br><br>
Attorneys for a former Florida college professor who pleaded guilty two
years ago to aiding Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
<a href="http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=Sami+Al-Arian">
Sami Al-Arian</a>, are asking a federal judge to hold a hearing on
whether anti-Muslim bias led to the government's decision to obtain a new
indictment of Al-Arian in June for contempt for refusing to testify
before grand juries pursuing the Virginia organizations.<br><br>
While the motion claims Muslim terrorism suspects are generally treated
unfairly by the
<a href="http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=U.S.+Department+of+Justice">
Justice Department</a>, Al-Arian's lawyers argue that Mr. Kromberg, 51,
has a particularly egregious record of intemperate statements and actions
in a series of terrorism-related cases and investigations.<br><br>
"Defense attorneys have objected for years that Mr. Kromberg, the
lead counsel in many of these cases, has been using the Eastern District
of Virginia to mete out his own brand of justice for Muslim terrorism
subjects, often openly displaying his personal animus," Al-Arian's
lead counsel, Jonathan Turley, wrote. "This long and controversial
record forms the backdrop for the allegation of selective and malicious
prosecution in this case."<br><br>
Al-Arian's lawyers claim that in 2006, when Mr. Kromberg moved to obtain
new testimony from the former professor following his guilty plea in
Florida, the prosecutor "became agitated" in response to a
defense lawyer's request that the testimony be put off until after the
Muslim holy month of Ramadan. "They can kill each other during
Ramadan. They can appear before the grand jury; all they can't do is eat
before sunset," Mr. Kromberg responded, according to a declaration
written by one of Al-Arian's attorneys, Jack Fernandez. Mr. Fernandez
said the prosecutor described the request for a postponement as "all
part of the attempted Islamization of the American justice system."
Mr. Fernandez wrote that he viewed the comments as exhibiting
"apparent bias against Muslims."<br><br>
Mr. Fernandez also said Mr. Kromberg called the 57-month prison sentence
Al-Arian received "a bonanza" for the Palestinian Arab
activist. He had faced the potential of life in prison for acting as the
leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in
<a href="http://www.nysun.com/related_results.php?term=United+States">
America</a>, but a trial in 2005 resulted in his acquittal on eight
counts and a mistrial on nine others where jurors could not reach a
verdict. Al-Arian's lawyers contend that the dogged pursuit of their
client is retribution for the outcome of the Tampa trial, which was
widely seen as a failure for the government.<br><br>
The new motion also asserts that Mr. Kromberg joked about the torture of
a Virginia man then being held in Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Abu Ali. The
suspect's lawyer, Salim Ali, said that when he asked Mr. Kromberg about
the possibility of returning the young man to America, the prosecutor
"smirked and stated that 'he's no good for us here, he has no
fingernails left.'"<br><br>
In a court declaration, Mr. Kromberg said that he had no recollection of
making the statement and that he was arguing an appeal in another city
when the comment was allegedly made.<br><br>
Al-Arian's lawyers are also pointing to the arguments Mr. Kromberg made
in the trial of a Virginia cancer researcher and Muslim preacher, Ali
al-Timimi, who was accused of exhorting others to wage war against
America by joining the Taliban. In the case, Mr. Kromberg argued that the
religious beliefs of the defendant and other witnesses made it acceptable
to lie to kaffirs, or nonbelievers in Islam. "If you are a kaffir,
Timimi believes in time of war, he's supposed to lie to you," the
prosecutor told jurors. Al-Timimi was convicted of treason and sentenced
to life in prison.<br><br>
"Kromberg argued to the jury that Timimi and the other Muslim
witnesses their testimony should be disregarded just on the basis of
their religion," al-Timimi's defense lawyer, Edward MacMahon Jr.,
said. "I think it's an outrageous thing to argue in the courtroom.
Imagine that directed at any other religion."<br><br>
Mr. Kromberg declined to be interviewed for this article and said a
written response to Al-Arian's motion would be filed in due course. In
response to questions from The New York Sun, the U.S. Attorney for the
Eastern District of Virginia, Charles "Chuck" Rosenberg, issued
a written statement denying any bias and standing behind Mr. Kromberg's
work.<br><br>
"Gordon Kromberg is a dedicated, talented, and scrupulously fair
prosecutor," Mr. Rosenberg said. "Further, when we decide to
prosecute an individual, that decision is based strictly on the facts and
the law, and in the pursuit of justice, period."<br><br>
A lawyer and former federal prosecutor who has squared off with Mr.
Kromberg in court, Henry FitzGerald, said the prosecutor has acquired a
reputation for leaving no stone unturned in cases relating to terrorism
or funding for Islamic militant groups.<br><br>
"Kromberg is absolutely relentless in his pursuit of everything that
could be pursued in the way of forfeiture or prosecutions in this area.
He's just indefatigable, relentless, tireless," Mr. FitzGerald said.
"If you say he's doing the country's work to fight terrorism, that's
good, he's a good fighter, but a lot of people say it's overkill, he
doesn't listen to reasonable arguments. Everything is black until
somebody takes him to court to prove it's white."<br><br>
Mr. FitzGerald said Mr. Kromberg, while unusually persistent, does not
take quixotic stances. "Kromberg's not a dumb man. He's smart. He's
not going to go out and take an utterly groundless case, raise hell with
it, and get himself in trouble. He just goes straight ahead, doesn't look
left or right and pushes to the absolute limit," Mr. FitzGerald
said.<br><br>
Mr. Kromberg sought Al-Arian's testimony as part of an investigation into
the finances of a Herndon, Va.- based think tank, the International
Institute of Islamic Thought. In 2002, federal authorities executed
search warrants at IIIT's headquarters and more than a dozen other
locations, including residences of the organization's officers. Court
papers said prosecutors had evidence of financial transfers involving the
think tank, nonprofit groups, including some run by Al-Arian, and
terrorist movements abroad, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad.<br><br>
A lawyer for IIIT, Nancy Luque, did not respond to repeated requests for
an interview for this article. However, in 2006, she complained to the
Washington Post that prosecutors had nothing to show for their raids.
"You storm into people's homes, take their children's toys,
terrorize the women, and 4 1/2 years later, you haven't got a scintilla
of evidence against them," she told the Post.<br><br>
A former federal terrorism prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, said complaints
that the Virginia probe is moving too slowly are silly coming from
Al-Arian and others who have refused to cooperate. Several witnesses
affiliated with IIIT have filed legal challenges to grand jury subpoenas
and have pursued appeals to the 4th Circuit, resulting in lengthy delays.
"I'm always amused when people who have obstructed an investigation
for years, at the conclusion of years say, 'Years have gone by and
nothing has been revealed,'" Mr. McCarthy said.<br><br>
Justice Department officials also reject the notion that the IIIT probe,
which grew out of an effort dubbed Operation Green Quest, has yielded
nothing. They note the arrest and subsequent guilty plea of Abdurahman
Alamoudi, a former Muslim-American political leader and founder of the
American Muslim Council, who admitted in 2004 to involvement in a Libyan
plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Alamoudi,
whose home was among those searched in 2002 and who worked for a group
related to IIIT, the Saar Foundation, was sentenced to 23 years in
prison. In addition, a financier with ties to Saar who left America just
after the 2002 raids, Soliman Biheiri, got 13 months in prison for
immigration fraud and lying to customs agents.<br><br>
Still, it is true that the principals in IIIT and the organization itself
have not been charged, more than six and a half years after the
investigation began.<br><br>
Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Kromberg's statements about Islam seemed directed
not to ordinary followers but to the beliefs of certain radical Islamic
extremists. "If he's got an innate feeling of disapproval and
hostility to that, I don't see the slightest problem with that. I do too,
and so do most Americans," the ex-prosecutor said. "If he's
concerned about the Islamization of our legal process or the idea that we
should be recognizing certain tenets of Islamic law as we conduct law
enforcement... Gordon is not the only prosecutor ever to have taken that
position."<br><br>
Al-Arian's motion includes no claim that Mr. Kromberg's alleged
anti-Muslim animus is related to him being Jewish or to a pro-Israel
bias. However, the Atlantic magazine and a left-leaning news agency,
Inter Press Service, have called attention to a travelogue Mr. Kromberg
wrote after traveling on a United Jewish Communities mission to Israel in
2002.<br><br>
In the diary, Mr. Kromberg complained that Israel is losing the global
public relations battle because of "a lack of resources on the
Israeli side to provide information to the innumerable members of the
press who are fed lies by the Palestinians ('hundreds were massacred in
Jenin')."<br><br>
"Bibi Netanyahu can only be in so many places at one time to answer
so many questions," the prosecutor lamented.<br><br>
Mr. Kromberg's journal also refers to the West Bank as "Judea and
Samaria," which Inter Press described as "a term favored by
right-wing Israelis."<br><br>
As a whole, the diary exhibits a hostility toward Palestinian terrorism
and a strong affinity for Israel, but gives no indication Mr. Kromberg is
particularly religious. He wrote that he does not speak Hebrew and that
his tour group opted to go shopping rather than visit Jerusalem's Western
Wall.<br><br>
Many Muslim activists consider Mr. Kromberg to be a doppelganger of a
journalist and author of books warning about the threat posed by Muslim
radicals in America, Steven Emerson. The selective prosecution motion
asks for a hearing to explore why the prosecutor's statements
"appear to track writings" by Mr. Emerson.<br><br>
In an interview with the Sun, Mr. Emerson called the motion's claims
about him and Mr. Kromberg "baseless."<br><br>
Mr. Kromberg grew up in the village of Lawrence in Nassau County, just
east of Queens. He volunteered briefly at an Israeli kibbutz and went to
college at Princeton University, where he took part in the Reserve
Officer Training Corps. The future prosecutor attended New York
University Law School, where he graduated in 1982.<br><br>
In the 1980s, Mr. Kromberg spent several years in South Korea as a
military defense attorney in the Army's Judge Advocate General Corps,
before taking a job in the Justice Department's civil division in 1987.
He is still in the Army Reserve, where he holds the rank of Lieutenant
Colonel.<br><br>
In 2000, Mr. Kromberg briefly joined the staff of the independent counsel
investigating President Clinton, Robert Ray. At the time, the impeachment
trial was long over and Mr. Ray was considering whether to bring criminal
charges against Mr. Clinton. They were never filed.<br><br>
That year, Mr. Kromberg started work at the U.S. Attorney's Office in
Northern Virginia, where he became a specialist in seizing money, cars,
boats, and houses allegedly used in drug dealing and other crimes.
Defense lawyers, civil libertarians, and some conservatives criticized
the tactic as an end run around the government's obligation to prove
criminals guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. As that criticism mounted,
Mr. Kromberg became a point person in the Justice Department's effort to
fend off legislation which would have made it tougher for the government
to confiscate such property.<br><br>
Some of the ire directed at Mr. Kromberg by the Muslim community stems
from his vigorous prosecution of the so-called Paintball Eleven, a group
of Muslims accused of training in Virginia to fight with a Pakistani
militant group, Lashkar e-Taiba, against Indian forces in Kashmir. Nine
of the eleven men were convicted at trial or pled guilty. Two were
acquitted.<br><br>
Mr. Kromberg later called one of the acquitted men, Sabri Benkahla,
before grand juries and questioned him about his attendance and
activities at jihad training camps in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Convinced
that Benkahla's answers were false, the prosecutor obtained an indictment
of Benkahla for obstruction of justice and making false statements to the
FBI and the grand juries.<br><br>
As with Al-Arian, defense lawyers for Benkahla said the perjury charges
amounted to an effort by Mr. Kromberg to retry the earlier case in which
Benkahla was acquitted.<br><br>
"When you look at the prosecutions together, there is a pattern that
really doesn't make Mr. Kromberg look very good," a Muslim scholar
from Maryland who has been subpoenaed in the IIIT probe, Imad-ad-Dean
Ahmad, said. "It reminds me of the Red Scare. Communism was a
serious problem for America, but some people seemed to think almost every
liberal was a Communist. Mr. Kromberg and a handful of other people in
the government seem to have the same approach when it comes to outspoken
Muslims."<br><br>
Mr. Ahmad said the punishments for those convicted in the Paintball or,
as the government prefers, Virginia Jihad, cases, were too extreme for
individuals who planned no act of violence in America. "It's hard to
imagine there isn't someone in the Department of Justice saying, 'Why are
we doing this?'" he said.<br><br>
Even Mr. Kromberg's critics acknowledge that he has a strong record of
prevailing in court. Last month, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit
unanimously upheld Benkahla's convictions and rejected the arguments that
he was unconstitutionally put on trial twice for the same crime.
"The investigations in which Benkahla was interviewed and the
questions he was asked show no sign of having been manufactured for the
sake of a second prosecution," Judge James Wilkinson III wrote. The
court also upheld a 10-year prison sentence for Benkahla.<br><br>
However, there are new signs that some judges have begun to chafe at Mr.
Kromberg's aggressiveness.<br><br>
Late last year, Judge Gerald Lee, who ordered Al-Arian jailed for a year
on civil contempt, raised questions about the strategy pursued against
the former professor. "Judge Lee expressed his frustration with the
government's continued attempt to use contempt measures against Dr.
Al-Arian and stated that he did not view these proceedings as a good use
of the time and resources of either the government or the Court,"
Mr. Turley wrote to Mr. Kromberg, describing a court hearing in December.
The e-mail was attached to a defense pleading filed recently in the
criminal case. The defense attorney also wrote that the judge had urged
Mr. Kromberg to ask Attorney General Mukasey, who had just been sworn in,
for a "new review of the case."<br><br>
Precisely what Judge Lee, Mr. Kromberg, or Mr. Turley said at the hearing
is not publicly known because the judge refused this reporter's request
for public access to the proceedings. A legal challenge to the secrecy is
pending before the 4th Circuit.<br><br>
At a bail hearing for Al-Arian earlier this month, Judge Leonie Brinkema
sounded skeptical about the new contempt charges against him.
"There's some strange signals coming out of this case," she
said, according to the Associated Press. "I expect the Department of
Justice to live up to its agreements." She granted bail to Al-Arian,
but he remains in jail on orders from immigration authorities.<br><br>
Still, Al-Arian may not get far with his argument that Mr. Kromberg used
religion to win a tainted conviction against al-Timimi. Judge Brinkema,
who will have to rule on the selective prosecution motion, presided over
al-Timimi's trial and rejected defense motions that Mr. Kromberg's
comments improperly invoked the defendant's religion.<br><br>
The frustration and anger Mr. Kromberg provokes in some quarters may stem
from an irreverence he sometimes displays in his dealings with defense
attorneys and the courts.<br><br>
In his declaration about Abu Ali, the terrorism suspect who claimed
torture in Saudi Arabia, the prosecutor deadpanned, "I do not have
any other information that would lead me to believe that he has anything
wrong with his fingernails."<br><br>
When Mr. Turley told Mr. Kromberg that "many" viewed the effort
to force Al-Arian before a grand jury as a "transparent perjury
trap," the prosecutor shot back an e-mail pointing out that a
federal judge in Tampa found that Al-Arian lied to his neighbors for
years by denying involvement with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. To
underscore his point, Mr. Kromberg invoked a legendary British rock
band.<br><br>
"I hope that the next time that your client tries to convince the
'many' to whom you refer that he is something that he is not, that 'many'
will remember the slogan of the Who, and loudly sing out together, 'We
won't get fooled [by your client] again!'" the prosecutor
wrote.<br><br>
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