The verdicts point up a little-known reality of the Justice Department's war on terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While it has won scores of highly publicized guilty pleas in terrorism-related cases — often by dropping the most serious charges — its trial record is mixed.
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It has taken only two other major terrorism-related cases to trial since the Sept. 11 attacks, and at least some defendants have been acquitted in each.

In one case involving an alleged domestic "sleeper cell" in Detroit, the judge has threatened to throw out all three convictions because prosecutors allegedly withheld exculpatory information.

The case against Al-Hussayen, the son of a retired Saudi education minister who had been studying in the U.S. for nine years, raised questions from the start.

His arrest 16 months ago shocked the local Muslim community in the college town of Moscow, where he was known as a family-oriented father of three who shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks organized a blood drive and a candlelight vigil that condemned the attacks as an affront to Islam.

He was eventually charged under a section of the Patriot Act that makes it illegal to provide "expert advice or assistance" to terrorists. The provision was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in Los Angeles in January, although that ruling was not binding on the Idaho case.

"In some respects, this was the broadest reach in all of the government's anti-terrorism prosecutions," said David Cole, a Georgetown University Law Center professor.

"When President Bush and [Vice President] Dick Cheney say, 'You have not shown me a single abuse of the Patriot Act,' I think people can now say, 'Look at the Sami Omar Al-Hussayen case — a case where the government sought to criminalize pure speech and was resoundingly defeated.' "

Al-Hussayen was accused of helping to design about a dozen websites in conjunction with a Michigan-based group, the Islamic Assembly of North America, which the government has long suspected of having ties to terrorism but has never charged.

The defense was so confident that it presented only a single witness — a former top CIA operative who testified as an expert on terrorist recruitment methods and who questioned the government's premise that people are motivated to become jihadists by what they read online. The expert, Frank Anderson, a former CIA Near East division chief, said on Thursday:
"I take satisfaction in the verdict. But I am embarrassed and ashamed that our government has kept a decent and innocent man in jail for a very long time."
Some jurors said they had no confidence in the government's case, and that prosecutors had failed to adequately make a connection between the websites and wrongdoing.

Dickinson said he remembers the day Al-Hussayen was arrested, when scores of FBI and other law enforcement personnel descended on Moscow, and "interviewed every Muslim student in the community."

"I was interviewed by FBI agents for two hours. They said [that] whatever I knew about Sami was just the tip of the iceberg, that there was all this other information that was going to come out," Dickinson recalled. "At some point, some prosecutor should have asked the investigators to either get more evidence or let the guy go."