The material-support statutes — which criminalize providing "support" to designated organizations regardless of intent — became the war on terror's workhorse, and their reach extended far beyond weapons or money. The Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Muslim charity in America, was destroyed for funding zakat committees in Palestine; after a first trial produced no convictions, a 2008 retrial ended with sentences of up to sixty-five years for its leaders, Shukri Abu Baker and Ghassan Elashi, for charity the government conceded fed real orphans. Professor Sami Al-Arian was acquitted or hung on every count in 2005, yet remained imprisoned and under indictment for years before being deported in 2015.

The statute also reached lawyers: veteran civil-rights attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted in 2005 of passing her imprisoned client's statement to the press, and when an appeals court demanded a harsher sentence, the 70-year-old was resentenced to ten years — dying in 2017 shortly after a compassionate release. In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the Supreme Court confirmed the design: even training a designated group in nonviolence and human-rights law is a crime, making "material support" the broadest speech-and-association offense in modern American law.