One of the worst of the anti-terror laws, adopted under Clinton, not Bush II, is the “material support law,” which makes it a crime to provide “material support” to any organization that is deemed a “terrorist organization” by the President (actually the Secretary of State).

The cases, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (08-1498) and Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, are about what is a legitimate use of the law.

The case here is interesting because it appears that the law is criminalizing purely political speech:

CCR contends that the challenged provisions violate the First Amendment insofar as they criminalize the provision of forms of support such as the distribution of literature, engaging in political advocacy, participating in peace conferences, training in human rights advocacy, and donating cash and humanitarian assistance, even when such support is intended solely to promote the lawful and non-violent activities of a designated organization. Plaintiffs’ principal complaint is that the statute imposes guilt by association by punishing moral innocents not for their own culpable acts, but for the culpable acts of the groups they have supported. The statute does not require any showing of intent to further terrorist or other illegal activity. We also claimed that the statute was unconstitutionally vague, and that the Secretary of State’s power to designate groups was too broad, giving the executive too much discretionary power to label groups as “terrorist” and turn their supporters into outlaws.

As I see it, if a group sees the designation of another group as a “terrorist entity” as in error, the way that the current law is written, or at least enforced, actually publicly advocating for a change in that designation would be offering “material support.”

In this case, the Human Rights Project wants to train the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party, designated a terrorist group, in, “human rights enforcement and peaceful conflict resolution,” but the material support law forbids this.

So this law is preventing the provision of training in how not to be a terrorist.

As with most of the anti-terror laws out there, it invokes Joseph Heller’s most famous work.

A good description of the oral arguments is here.