I came here from San Francisco to work for WMNF radio in the spring of 2000. (On that first weekend, Erin Brockovich was the must-see movie of the moment and the Gators were playing in the Final Four.) Since then, I’ve learned a lot about the area’s pre-2000 politics, but it was the first decade of the 21st century for which I had a front-row seat. Here’s my take on the biggest stories of the last ten years in Tampa Bay.
1. Sami Al-Arian (2001, 2003, 2005)
The Sami Al-Arian saga dominated the first part of this decade, a potent brew of politics, academia and post-9/11 paranoia. The story actually began in the mid-1990s, when the former USF computer science professor was suspended with pay by the university after it learned that the FBI was investigating Al-Arian’s think tank WISE (World Islam Studies Enterprise) in the wake of a provocative PBS documentary by terrorism researcher Steven Emerson.
Al-Arian had been reinstated at USF by the beginning of the decade, though this reporter grew familiar with his case while covering the detention hearing of his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar (who had been arrested in 1997 for alleged visa problems). While attending Al-Najjar’s detention hearings in Bradenton in the fall of 2000, I was struck by how much of it was not about Al-Najjar at all, but Sami Al-Arian. It seemed that the government was trying to squeeze Al-Najjar to possibly spill whatever beans there were on Al-Arian, but to the government’s frustration that never happened. At the end of 2000, a federal judge ordered Al-Najjar to be freed — a rare happy moment in a family whose lives were to be rocked dramatically for years to come.
This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2009.