Damra's connection to the Holy Land Foundation is clear: The FBI and the foundation's leader say Damra helped Holy Land raise money at his mosque as recently as spring 2001

....Damra's connection to Al-Arian is clear, too. A 1991 videotape shows him raising money for an Al-Arian charity that Damra says represents the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Donors at that function clearly knew the purpose - Damra was shouting, asking who in the crowd would give money to help kill Jews. Terror analysts say his involvement with Al-Arian's organization continued after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was designated a terrorist organization.

Their belief is rooted in last year's indictment of Al-Arian, which cites the video and says the man on the tape is an unindicted co-conspirator connected to the case as recently as 2001.

A terrorist analyst with the Investigative Project says that based on the similarities, it appears that Damra is the unindicted co-conspirator. Among other things, the co-conspirator revealed to investigators another way terrorists raise money in this country - exploiting the federal tax system.

On wiretaps, the co-conspirator offered to help Al-Arian launder about $25,000 in cash he collected at a Chicago fund-raiser. If Al-Arian would send him some of the money, the co-conspirator said, he would arrange for wealthy people to recycle it as donations to Al-Arian's group. The funders are the enablers of terror, and they are just as responsible for innocent deaths as trigger-men and suicide bombers: no money, no terror.

John Caniglia:

Damra is the thread that links FBI agent Michael Maltbie, lawyer Joseph McGinness and U.S. District Judge James Gwin in Cleveland's first major case involving terrorism.

....Maltbie, whom agents describe as a bright, hard-working supervisor, was involved in the handling of a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. Maltbie's actions in part prompted an agent in the Minneapolis field office to say the agency - and supervisors like him - botched the case a month before the attacks.

McGinness is known for his tireless defense of men accused of helping the Nazis during World War II. He is so passionate that he once continued fighting the U.S. Justice Department after his client was dead and buried and deportation was no longer an issue. He also has relied on an expert who claims the gas pumped into showers at the Auschwitz death camp was nothing more than a disinfectant.

Gwin has gained notice as a judge who doles out some of the toughest sentences on the federal bench. He once sentenced a Canton man to 30 years in prison for mail fraud. He also braved a snowstorm to open a trial in Ohio's super-maximum prison, where the state's worst killers and rapists watched him from behind bars.

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