Adam Liptak NYTimes 02/19/08

Jeffrey Breinholt, who is on leave from a counterterrorism post at the Justice Department, has been studying what he calls “an undervalued source of strategic intelligence about the threats we face from radical Islam within the U.S.” He has been looking at court decisions.

Last year, 888 judicial opinions mentioned Muslims, Islam or variations on those terms, more than in any other year in the history of the United States. In contrast to the views of many academic researchers and civil liberties groups, Mr. Breinholt says the decisions show that terrorism prosecutions work and that American Muslims are prickly, litigious and poorly integrated into American society. Full article.

———

KH: Jeffrey Breinholt is the author of a 2003 “Terrorist Financing” paper that listed Dr. Dhafir and the Help the Needy case under “clean money cases.” The paper was published shortly after Dr. Dhafir’s arrest while he was being held without bail and denied access to his own records, and before he had been anywhere near a court of law.

Dr. Dhafir has never faced any terrorism charges and yet, just after Dr. Dhafir’s sentencing, Jeffrey Breinholt, along with the three Dhafir prosecutors presented a lecture on, “A Law Enforcement Approach to Terrorist Financing,” at Syracuse University Law School, in which the Dhafir and Help The Needy case was highlighted. After the lecture a request was made to the dean of the law school that ACLU court watchers at the trial of Dr. Dhafir be granted equal time to speak to the students. The request was denied.

The lecture was sponsored by Syracuse University Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism (INSCT). Jeffrey Breinholt is an INSCT Research and Practice Associate.

I wrote about Breinholt’s “Terrorist Financing” paper and the Syracuse University Law School lecture in my article for the National Lawyers Guild, “Denial of Due Process to Muslims Disgraces Us All.”

See, also, Breinholt paper mentioned in Liptak’s article: Islam in American Courts: 2007 Year in Review.