CAIR, 2 other groups named as unindicted co-conspirators

Josh Gerstein of the New York Sun notices that CAIR has been fingered by the feds:

Federal prosecutors have named three prominent Islamic organizations in America as participants in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support a Palestinian Arab terrorist group, Hamas.

Prosecutors applied the label of "unindicted co-conspirator" to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust in connection with a trial planned in Texas next month for five officials of a defunct charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

While the foundation was charged in the case, which was filed in 2004, none of the other groups was. However, the co-conspirator designation could be a blow to the credibility of the national Islamic organizations, which often work hand-in-hand with government officials engaged in outreach to the Muslim community.
Update: Daniel Pipes comments  and cites Stuart Taylor on the meaning of unindicted co-conspirator.
Here is a definition by legal journalist Stuart Taylor, discussing an entirely unrelated case:
The prosecutor is saying in essence in court ... that we believe this man was part of the criminal conspiracy, along with the people who are on trial. We haven't indicted him but the relevance of that for the purposes of the trial is that [it] lets them get in more evidence about the unindicted co-conspirator's ... out-of-court statements than they otherwise could. It's a way around the hearsay rule. ... For example, if they want ... one of their witnesses, to talk about what [a person] said to him, ordinarily that would be barred by the so-called hearsay rule. You can't ... testify in a trial about what somebody else said out of court. That rule has a lot of exceptions. One of the exceptions is if the person who you're trying to quote ... is named by the prosecution as an unindicted co-conspirator, then you can talk about what he said out of court.
Substitute "organization" for "man" and "person" and this description applies to the situation of CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT.


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