The Al-Arian case is an utter and complete mess.

USF's Dramatic Move Spawns Legal Debate: The University of South Florida's overhauled case against Sami Al-Arian is a desperate act that puts the school in a clumsy position of proving a professor aided terrorists, his attorney said Wednesday. USF President Judy Genshaft's first comments about her new strategy were strong, too, as she accused Al- Arian of "using academic freedom as a shield to cover improper activities.'' School officials confirmed Wednesday that they want to fire the suspended professor on grounds he has disrupted USF for years through support of terrorism. It's a fundamental change for a school that had carefully avoided raising criminal issues in its original case for dismissal in December. USF also is asking a state judge to rule on whether firing Al-Arian would violate his First Amendment rights. Essentially, the school wants to test its case before acting, a maneuver that reinvigorated debate over this unprecedented case. [...] Potential litigants commonly employ the state's declaratory judgment law to ask for a judge's opinion before acting, Rogow said. But it is a rare move for a university.

Apparently, the University of South Florida believes that Al Arian will take the Fifth rather than answering questions about the various materials. This will prejudice his case in the eyes of a jury. And the precedent they're using makes sense (although the Tampa Tribune article doesn't tell you why it makes sense; one of the university's accusations is that he tried to help fund suicide bombers.) In any event, Al Arian is expected to try to move the case to federal court, due the the First Amendment issues that the university itself cited. If that happens, do federal district courts often make that sort of advisory judgement? I know that the Supreme Court sometimes does, when requested by the administration, but I don't know that much about what district courts do. (And in a full trial, the university would almost certainly lose on the first amendment issue, although not necessarily on the others.)

According to the June 23 Tampa Tribune:

Israel Ties Al-Arian To Jihad Board: Sami Al-Arian, the professor being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for alleged ties to Middle East terrorists, helped found the governing council of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and then served on it, current and former senior Israeli intelligence officials say.... U.S. law enforcement officials disagree. The threshold for convicting people in terrorism-related cases is far higher here than in Israel, they say, and - while they understand the Israelis' frustration - this case may dwell in a legal gray area.
     Such disagreement is fairly common when investigations in the United States require help from other countries, said Robert Blitzer, the FBI's former chief of domestic terrorism investigations. "They can do more with less,'' Blitzer said of the Israelis. "They have a tendency to read an awful lot into a piece of information to the degree that they view it as enough to do something. But we know here it's not enough to get a conviction. Al-Arian "is a representative of the Islamic Jihad, a known terrorist organization, here in the United States doing his thing in support of that organization, trying to radicalize and bring into the organizational fold more and more Muslims,'' Blitzer continued. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's broken U.S. law, Blitzer said.

The trick is that although his activities, if proven, would break current US law (the ever so lovely PATRIOT Act and its codicils), at the time he was doing them, they may not have been illegal. Depending, of course, on precisely what he was doing.

The AAUP is a bunch of wusses; South Florida should be placed on censure for what they're doing now, whatever good that does. The university has already stated that one of the reasons they're trying to fire him is for anti-Israeli remarks that clearly fall in the realm of protected speech.

In any event, Salon has a couple of articles about the case; they've been covering it for a while. Unfortunately, they've stuck the first one behind the premium wall, but the other is still available:

The prime-time smearing of Sami Al-Arian

(I'd forgotten he was related to al-Najjar. Another nasty case. And what a difference a few months makes. Can anyone seriously imagine Congress voting to repeal the secret evidence acts now? Or even being seriously perturbed by them?)