US officials charged with lying in botched 2003 terrorism trial

The charges highlight the zealousness with which investigators have pursued potential terrorists, critics said.

"In this instance the prosecutor went so far as to warrant a criminal indictment, but his actions were reflective of a broader problem in the Justice Department," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University.

"In the interest of notching up symbolic victories in the war on terror we've seen prosecutors forget their obligation is to do justice and instead overreach in their charges and engage in questionable - and in this case criminal - behavior."

Thousands of Muslim and Arabic men were rounded up and questioned in the weeks and months following the September 11 attacks.

The four arrested in Detroit were the first to be charged and the highly publicized 2003 conviction of two of the men on charges of providing material support to terrorists was hailed as a major victory.

That conviction was thrown out a year later after an internal Justice Department probe found that the prosecution withheld evidence that would show that crude sketches and a videotape with images of Disneyland and other tourism destinations could be plausibly explained as something unrelated to terrorism activity.

Several other high-profile cases have fallen apart, including an Oregon lawyer wrongly accused of participating in the Madrid bombing. Other cases have been compromised because of prosecutorial zeal, like the botched handling of witnesses in the sentencing trial of Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

This was the first to result in felony charges against either a prosecutor or an investigator.

"It's highly unusual - the Department of Justice is usually very protective," said Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University.

"This case turned into a disaster and a public relations nightmare and it threatened to show that all the cases" were tarnished, he said in a telephone interview.

"In the end this case won't fix that but it will send the message that the Department (of Justice) takes these cases seriously and that the war on terror can't be a war on justice at the same time."

Former federal prosecutor Richard Convertino, 45, and State Department special agent Harry Raymond Smith, 49, were indicted Wednesday on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and making false declarations.

"The object of the conspiracy was to present false evidence at trial and to conceal inconsistent and potentially damaging evidence from the defendants in the Koubriti trial in order to obtain criminal convictions," the indictment said.

The charges focus on a sketch found in a day planner that was said to resemble a military hospital in Jordan.

Smith testified during the 2003 trial that the sketch was an "exact" match to the area surrounding the hospital and Convertino later presented testimony that these sketches proved the men were casing the location for a potential terrorist attack.

The defense team challenged those assumptions and asked prosecutors to produce photographs of the site for comparison. Smith allegedly lied under oath and said he could not take photos of a military site without permission from Jordanian authorities.

In reality, the indictment said, he had to take several aerial photographs and had instructed a colleague to take several more, then had them sent to Convertino who failed to fulfill his duty to get copies to the defense team.

Convertino, who was also charged with obstruction of justice in a narcotics case, faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a one-million-dollar fine. Smith faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and a 750,000-dollar fine.

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