Five years ago the government shut down the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the nation’s largest Muslim charity, on the basis that it was linked to terrorism, according to the Los Angeles Times. Thousands of hours of FBI wiretapping transcripts were classified, and the defense lawyers have been working with government summaries.
When they compared one transcript they had of a conversation to its government summary though, it was found that a number of comments never actually in the conversation were in the summary. Defense attorneys say that “not only are the summaries so inaccurate and misleading as to be useless,” but that the “author of the attached summary has cynically and maliciously attributed to the defendants racist invective and inculpatory remarks the defendants never uttered.”
Though the attorneys have the clearance to view the original documents, they cannot show it to their clients.
There were also apparently issues with translation, and some of the material was translated from Arabic to Hebrew, then to English.
Technorati Tags: Politics, Current Events, Bush, Current Affairs, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Race, Religion, Muslims, Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, Shukri Abu Baker
