Suit Challenges Ban on Aid to Terrorists

Charging excessive zeal in U.S. efforts to thwart terrorists, human rights activists filed suit in Los Angeles on Thursday, challenging a 1996 law that criminalizes virtually any kind of aid to foreign groups that the State Department labels terrorist organizations.

“I believe this is a modern version of McCarthyism,” said Ralph Fertig, president of the Los Angeles-based Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit rights group that is the lead plaintiff.

The law project supports the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which seeks self-determination for Turkish Kurds. Others suing say they have provided humanitarian aid to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group fighting the Sri Lankan government.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright included both organizations among the 30 groups worldwide that she branded as terrorist last fall, though both groups call themselves freedom fighters. The 1996 law freezes designated terrorist groups’ financial assets in the United States, denies U.S. visas to members and subjects those who give them money, weapons or other aid to up to 10 years in prison.

Albright called the new sanctions a necessary deterrent to terrorist actions concealed under a cloak of good works.

“The practice of some terrorist organizations is to raise money ostensibly for charitable purposes, but we know that this money can be used in the commission of terrorist attacks,” said Joe Reap, spokesman for the State Department’s counter-terrorism office.

The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 was in part a response to terrorist bombings in Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center in New York.

Specifically targeted in the lawsuit are provisions that make it a crime to provide designated terrorist organizations with “material support or resources”--a broad category that may include not only weapons and safe houses, but also such things as books, blankets and personal political advocacy. The only aid allowed under the law is medicine and religious materials.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, asks a judge to block prosecutions unless there is a finding that the intent of any aid is to further organizations’ unlawful terrorist activities.

Those suing contend that the 1st and 5th amendments shield their right to provide nonviolent aid, even to groups officially labeled as terrorist.

“This is guilt by association,” said David Cole, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University and one of the lawyers involved in filing the suit.

However, the law’s authors argue that any assistance for terrorist groups ultimately abets their violent aims.

“Foreign organizations that engage in terrorist activity are so tainted by their criminal conduct,” Congress concluded in 1996, “that any contribution to such an organization facilitates that conduct.”