Material Support of Foreign Terrorist Organizations vs. Freedom of Speech and Association
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Founded in 1974, the Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan (PKK) was established as a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group composed of Turkish Kurds who formed to seek Kurdish independence from Turkey. By the late 1990s the group had had morphed from a rural-based insurgent group into a full-fledged terrorist organization, sometimes using suicide bombings on civilian targets.
Founded in 1976, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) became one of the most lethal and well organized terrorist groups in the world that, beginning in 1983, waged an armed campaign in Sri Lanka to establish a separate Tamil homeland before the group was defeated by the Sri Lanka army in May 2009. The LTTE pioneered the use of suicide belts.
Both groups are designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the U.S Department of State.
The evidence is clear that the PKK and LTTE have engaged in terrorist activities, including suicide bombings, which have harmed innocent civilians. It was these kinds of international terrorist acts and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that prompted the U.S. Congress to enact the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton in April 1996.
One of the controversial components of AEDPA was codified at 18 U.S.C. § 2339B which makes it a federal crime to provide “material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” While Congress has amended the definition of “material support or resources” a number of times since 1996, Subsection 2339A (b) (1) offers the current definition:


