April 13th Rally at DoJ for Dr. Sami Al-Arian

WHAT: April 13th Rally and Press Conference for Dr. Sami Al-Arian, Political Prisoner in the U.S. since February 2003

WHEN: Friday, April 13, 2007, 1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

WHERE: U.S. Department of Justice, 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW In support of Dr. Sami Al-Arian the Muslim American Society (MAS) Freedom Foundation is holding a press conference and rally in front of the U.S. Department of Justice on April 13th, 2007. The event is in response to the U.S. Department of Justice's failure to uphold their current plea agreement with Dr. Sami Al-Arian, which scheduled his release date for April 13th. Dr. Al-Arian was recently sentenced to an additional eighteen months in jail for his refusal to testify before a grand jury. However, this verdict was rendered against him despite a plea agreement he had with the government, which included a no-cooperation clause.

http://www.masnet.org/takeaction.asp?id=3987
http://www.freesamialarian.com
Jummah Prayer, 12:30 pm Protest and Rally, 1:00 pm - 1:30 pm

The true story of free speech in America: Systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues

Robert Fisk

This systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in schools

Published: 07 April 2007

Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.

Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloguing al-Arian's little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel's lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian's family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring "to murder and maim" outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in "Palestine". He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.

Al-Arian's $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian's lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation - found Moody talking about "blood" on the defendant's hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonoured and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America's torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a "contract interrogator", who has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation "facility" of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning "by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes". Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. "A man with no face stares at me ... pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realise the screams are mine."

Thank God, Fair didn't write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant's play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 "Servicepersons" - by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to his demise as "death" now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it - and who knew all about Mousa's fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it's really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It's to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country's schools. Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those "who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak", proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High's principal. And - my favourite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure the play would provide "a legitimate instructional experience for our students".

And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty's point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller's The Crucible were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that it wasn't their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honour killing. It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A "legitimate instructional experience" if ever there was one.

George Bush’s America

Posted on Dec 4, 2006

AP Photo / Chris O'Meara

Former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian smiles as he makes his way through the media with his wife Nahla, left, before entering the United States Courthouse Thursday afternoon Dec. 12, 2002 in Tampa, Fla. Al-Arian, who is accused of helping lead a terrorist group that has carried out suicide bombings against Israel, was acquitted on nearly half the charges against him Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005. The jury deadlocked on the rest of the charges.

By Chris Hedges

The Democrats may have taken control of the House and Senate, but we still live in George Bush’s America. It is an America the imprisoned Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who has spent over two years in isolation, knows intimately. Dr. Al-Arian, who was a tenured professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida until being fired, was given the maximum sentence earlier this year for what the judge, in a case that bordered on the farcical, said was his support of a radical Palestinian organization.

The imprisoned professor, who will be deported when he is released, was to have spent 57 months in prison. But his time now seems likely to be extended since, despite plea bargaining that should have exempted him from further testimony, he has been called to testify before a secret grand jury in Virginia investigating Islamic organizations in the state. It is the newest twist in a case that has become emblematic of the repression meted out to America’s Muslim minority.

Al-Arian endured a six-month show trial in Florida that saw the government’s case collapse in a mass of contradictions and innuendo. During the trial the government called 80 witnesses and subjected the jury to hundreds of hours of often inane phone transcriptions and recordings, made over a 10-year period, which the jury dismissed as “gossip.” Out of the 94 charges made against the four defendants there were no convictions. Of the 17 charges against Al-Arian—including “conspiracy to murder and maim persons abroad’’ --, the jury acquitted him of eight and was hung on the rest. The jurors disagreed on the remaining charges by a count of 10 to 2 favoring his full acquittal. Two others in the case, Ghassan Ballut and Sameeh Hammoudeh, were acquitted of all charges, dealing another body blow to the government’s case. The May sentencing of Al-Arian contradicted the basis of the jury’s acquittal and the reasoning behind the subsequent plea agreement.

Following the acquittal, a disaster for the government, especially since then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had announced the indictment, prosecutors threatened to retry Al-Arian. The Palestinian professor, under duress, accepted a plea bargain agreement that would spare him a second trial, saying in his agreement that he had helped people associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad with immigration matters. It was a tepid charge given the high profile of the case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the Counterterrorism Section of the Justice Department agreed to recommend to the judge the minimum sentence of 46 months. But U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. sentenced Dr. Al-Arian to the maximum 57 months. In referring to Al-Arian’s contention that he had only raised money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s charity for widows and orphans, the judge said acidly to the professor that “your only connection to orphans and widows is that you create them.”

“The cards were stacked against us,” said the defendant’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian. “The prosecutors showed gruesome videos of suicide bombings in Israel and tried to tie my father to them. He had nothing to do with these attacks. He has always condemned the killing of Israeli and Palestinian civilians. The trial was Orwellian. The government prosecutors would take events and statements that had nothing to do with my father and attempt to connect them to him. This was all about silencing a Palestinian activist, not combating terrorism.”

But all this has not stopped the government from continuing its harassing of Al-Arian. Judge Moody recently ruled that compelling Al-Arian to testify in the grand jury investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Va., would not violate the plea agreement. Several people close to the case fear that the current attempt to make Al-Arian testify is part of an effort to charge him with perjury and set him up for a new trial. The assistant U.S. attorney in Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, like many involved in the case, has made derogatory and racist comments about Muslims. When Al-Arian’s lawyers asked Kromberg to delay the transfer of the professor to Virginia because of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan they were told “if they can kill each other during Ramadan they can appear before the grand jury.” Kromberg, according to an affidavit signed by Al-Arian’s attorney, Jack Fernandez, also said: “I am not going to put off Dr. Al-Arian’s grand jury appearance just to assist in what is becoming the Islamization of America.”

“Had he said this about any other ethnic or religious group it would have provoked widespread outrage,” said Laila Al-Arian.

And so, although Al-Arian is scheduled to be deported in April 2007, he could now be imprisoned for an additional 18 months. The federal government has placed him in contempt of court because he is refusing to answer questions before the Virginia grand jury.

This trial says legions about the place of Muslims in the United States following the attacks of 9/11. It is part of a ruthless campaign to strip Americans of fundamental rights because of their religious beliefs.

“The jury spoke a year ago when they acquitted my father and the other three defendants,” Laila Al-Arian said. “This is part of a government campaign to silence and intimidate all Muslims in America by persecuting their leaders. It is part of an effort to disenfranchise American Muslims.”

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