A confederacy of dunces

More information is coming out now about the Holy Land Foundation trial, and oh man oh man, that jury was pretty much a gaggle of morons. Yesterday William Neal, one of the jurors, gave a bunch of interviews. He said that only a few of the jurors even bothered to deliberate, and that one in particular spent the 19 days of deliberation eating, sleeping and crying. Today, Neal said, of that particular clod:

After the mistrial was declared, he described the awkward scene in chambers between Judge Fish and the holdout juror as the judge thanked the panelists for their service.

"She looked at the judge and said she was confused. He just looked at her. There's not much you can say to that. Ignorance is a formidable weapon. You can't attack it."

Today we're learning more. Jury notes have been released, and they reveal a jury that was in turmoil from virtually the beginning. In this PDF file reproducing portions of the actual notes to the judge, you can see what a mess this thing was. The forewoman of the jury wrote at the beginning of deliberations, "Who were the expert witnesses?" -- this, after having listened to two months of testimony. One juror who was later dismissed wrote to the judge, saying, verbatim, "I don't feel that i can give the defendent's justice. Due to the circumstance in this case. I ask to be dismiss for this cause." The man was dismissed, but to see his subliterate request makes me wonder about the caliber of people who were empowered to discern the truth in this extremely complex terrorist financing case.

As for Neal, the only juror to speak publicly about the trial, he sounds like one of the more competent ones, but he's got big problems himself, I think. He was for acquittal, which is fine -- if he wasn't convinced by the evidence presented, he ought to have been for acquittal. But read the fine print in his comments. Check out a key passage in this story:

Prosecutors also attempted to show that all the money Holy Land raised was funneled into zakat committees they said were staffed and controlled by Hamas. To do this, the government called on an Israeli Shin Bet counterterrorism official testifying under the pseudonym Avi.

He was able to name board members for nearly all the zakat committees who he said were Hamas members, even identifying some as part of Hamas' violent military section, which recruits suicide bombers targeting Israeli citizens.

The defense countered with the former No. 2 intelligence official at the State Department, Edward Abington. He told jurors that although he got daily CIA briefings for years while he was stationed in Jerusalem as consul general, he never was told that the Palestinian charity committees Holy Land gave money to were part of Hamas.

Mr. Neal, the only juror who spoke out, said that he did not particularly believe either star witness.

"To me, [Abington's] a politician," Mr. Neal said. "Most politicians don't want to know what's going on so they can't be held liable. The fact that he didn't know that these people could have been Hamas, he probably never asked."

As for Avi, he "was paid by the Israeli government to be there," Mr. Neal added. "He's going to say what he needs to say."

As for the infamous quote, "war is deception," uttered by former Holy Land CEO Shukri Abu Baker at a bugged 1993 meeting with Hamas sympathizers in which they were accused of discussing how to hide the charity's real motives, Mr. Neal again was not convinced.

"We read the entire meeting," Mr. Neal said. "They went through so many subjects during that meeting, but if you took one page out, you're more likely to think they were guilty."

So, Neal decided that nothing the Israeli agent said was true, even before the guy opened his mouth (we learn in this same story that Neal believes Israel "oppresses" the Palestinians). Nor does he believe the former US official, not because of what the official said, but only because of who the official was. Has Neal never heard of the ad hominem fallacy? And he dismissed the relevant part of a transcript because it was only a small part of a much longer whole? And get this:

He also had difficulty calling Hamas a terrorist group. "Part of it does terrorist acts, but it's a political movement. It's an uprising."

The evidence, he said, "showed Hamas is a violent group, but I didn't see the defendants giving money to Hamas. They were giving money to the Palestinian people. Of course, it might get to Hamas somewhere down the line, but you can throw a rock and hit someone who belongs to Hamas there. I believe they were benefiting the Palestinians and others who needed charity."

Understand that when they were picking the jury, jurors had to affirm that they could convict even if it were shown that the money went to humanitarian efforts, and not directly to terrorism. Go read the trial exhibits, especially the transcripts of the secretly recorded conversations in which some of the defendants spoke of the need to fund Hamas quietly, so as not to attract attention. How on earth could Neal have concluded as he did? Neal discounted some of the evidence by saying, ""Some of it is 20 years old" -- as if that mattered in a 15-year undercover investigation!

Look, whether you favored conviction or acquittal, it's shocking, and appalling, that such an important case depended on the judgment of a group of people like this. Fifteen years of government investigators' efforts, down the tubes, at least temporarily. On the other hand, the freedom of the defendants, and in turn the welfare of their families, also depended on these poltroons. I wanted to see a conviction, but it would have been terrible for them to have been convicted by a jury that was too dumb to understand the case, or too prejudiced or disinterested to want to discuss the evidence rationally.

I wonder how many juries that we never hear about are so hapless and disconnected from the gravity of their task?