Part of ’96 Anti-Terror Law Overturned

A federal appeals court Wednesday overturned part of a sweeping 1996 anti-terror law that prohibits financial assistance or “material support” to organizations classified as terrorist by the State Department.

The government has increasingly used the law to prosecute suspected terrorists, and the ruling could be a blow to the Bush administration’s legal strategy in the war on terror.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that it is unconstitutional to punish people – sometimes with life in prison – for providing “training” or “personnel” to a terror group, categories the judges called overbroad.

The ruling also requires the government to prove that defendants knew their activities, such as donating money to outlawed groups, were actually contributing to acts of terror.

“According to the government’s interpretation … a woman who buys cookies from a bake sale outside of her grocery store to support displaced Kurdish refugees to find new homes could be held liable,” Judge Harry Pregerson wrote in the 2-1 decision.

In addition, Pregerson wrote that it is unconstitutional to criminalize donations of personnel or training, which fall under the “material support” section of the law, because that “blurs the line” on protected speech.

The court ruled in a case involving a civil liberties organization’s efforts to lobby Congress on behalf of a group on the terrorist watch list. The court ruled that the Humanitarian Law Project could legally lobby Congress and provide other nonfinancial assistance to the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey.

The Bush administration argued that donating “personnel” on behalf of the Kurdistan Workers Party violated the 1996 law.

Increasingly, the charge of choice for prosecutors in the war on terrorism is that a suspect provided some form of material support to terror groups. Wednesday’s decision means that for the first time, part of that strategy has been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court.

The ruling “declares unconstitutional one of the linchpins of the Ashcroft domestic anti-terrorism strategy,” said Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole.

A high-profile case brought under the law involved six Yemeni-Americans from Lackawanna, N.Y., who were convicted under the law of providing “material support” to al-Qaida. The first of the six received 10 years in prison Wednesday for attending an al-Qaida training camp.

The Lackawanna case isn’t governed by the 9th Circuit. But if the U.S. Supreme Court agrees with the appeals court, the ruling may be a blow to that case and others brought in the war on terror.

The Justice Department could not immediately say how it will respond. The government has weeks to decide whether to appeal before the decision becomes law.

The law in question was adopted by Congress following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.