Holy Land Foundation snafu

I've been away from keys all weekend, at the Wendell Berry conference (more on which later), and have spent the morning at the federal courthouse here in Dallas, awaiting the verdict in the Holy Land Foundation trial. It was the government's most important terrorist fundraising trial to date. I was the last journalist allowed into the courtroom, and figured I'd be on hand for some drama. It was anticlimactic: the judge was forced to declare a mistrial on most counts, because the jury could not reach a verdict on most counts. The jury did exonerate one of the five defendants, but the other four will be retried, said the chief federal prosecutor.

I can't say I'm terribly surprised. I've been hearing from others who have been watching the testimony that the government has been overwhelming the jury with information. This passage from the Dallas Morning News story on this morning's verdict reflects what I've been getting from my sources:

But much of the government’s evidence, peppered with a blizzard of Arabic names with various spellings, was delivered to jurors through often dry testimony of federal agents, who seldom were allowed to expand on the context of the hundreds of exhibits on which the prosecutors were querying them.

In the end, it was up to jurors, chosen specifically because they had virtually no prior knowledge of the case or of Middle Eastern politics in general, to piece the government’s massive international jigsaw puzzle together. The found that after 19 days of deliberations, they could not.

The thing I kept hearing was that the information in the government's case was pretty damning, but that the narrative was so complex that even the sharpest jurors would have had trouble making sense of it. According to my sources, this jury was as glazed as a dozen Krispy Kremes throughout most of the testimony. When they walked into the courtroom this morning, I saw a jury that, in its manner of dress and presentation, was clearly a blue-collar jury. I understood then what one source of mine who'd sat through some of the testimony told me weeks ago: That this is like expecting his elderly grandmother from a tiny country town to sit through a graduate-level seminar in modern Mideast politics, and to make sense of it.

Anyway, it was a bad day for the government, but this story is not over yet. There is a retrial to come. The government is going to have to do something about its strategy, though. Moreover, a lot of useful information came out of this trial, particularly about how the Muslim Brotherhood runs the show among the US Muslim community's main organizations. This is by no means trifling information.

In the meantime, enjoy this video exhibit from the trial. It features Mufid Abdulqader, the Holy Land defendant exonerated by the jury today, taking the lead in a Hamas fundraising skit. He's railing about the Jews -- here's a transcript -- while disguised as a Hamas fighter. He "shoots" the "Zionist" at the 6:29 mark. Lovely people, these guys. He's not guilty of committing a crime, it seems, but he's still a bad man. Though the dude, with whom I rode the elevator up to the courtroom, does have a way with a terrorist chant melody. I'll give him that:

UPDATE: There appears to be some real confusion about what the jury did or didn't do this morning. I'm getting conflicting claims from various sides over whether or not any of the defendants were acquitted of anything. From my perch in the peanut gallery, this looked like a jury of one's peers if one were on trial for shoplifting Corn Nuts from 7-Eleven.