AN OVERZEALOUS federal prosecutor is proving that anti-Muslim racism is at the heart of the ongoing prosecution of Dr. Sami Al-Arian.
On August 13, activists in Los Angeles are planning a “Free Dr. Sami Al-Arian” protest and vigil at 5 p.m. at the downtown Federal Building, 300 North Los Angeles St. Sponsors include Al-Awda, the American Friends Service Committee, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the International Socialist Organization and many others. Call 323-691-5283 for information.
Visit the Free Sami Al-Arian Web site to get regular updates about his case and learn more about what you can do to protest his continued imprisonment.
You can send donations to help the Al-Arian family defray the costs of more than five years of legal defense to: Liberty Defense Fund, P.O. Box 1211, 24525 E. Welches Road, Welches, OR 97067.
The documentary film USA v. Al-Arian can be viewed on the Internet at the LinkTV Web site.
Al-Arian is a former University of South Florida professor who has been imprisoned for the past five and a half years–despite never being convicted of a single crime–after the government accused him of using an Islamic think tank and a Muslim school and charity as a cover for raising funds to finance “terrorism.”
Though the Bush administration claimed that prosecuting Al-Arian was an essential part of the “war on terror” here at home, after a six-month trial that the government spent more than $50 million on, a Florida jury in 2006 refused to find Al-Arian guilty of a single count.
Facing the prospect of a lengthy retrial and further separation from his family, however, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to a single count of the least-serious charge against him in exchange for what was supposed to be a minor additional sentence and voluntary deportation.
Instead, Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, had Al-Arian moved to that state to try to force his testimony in an investigation of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)–in defiance of an agreement with Florida prosecutors, recorded in court transcripts, that Al-Arian would be exempt from future testimony.
Sami Al-Arian continues to languish in prison after more than five years (usavsalarian.com)
Kromberg’s demand for Al-Arian’s testimony is a legal Catch 22. If he refuses to testify, say his lawyers and family, he faces continued contempt charges–but if he were to testify, it is likely that prosecutors would simply charge him with “perjury” and continue his imprisonment.
Al-Arian has so far continued to refuse to testify, leading Kromberg to file first civil, and now criminal, contempt charges against him—and extending his prison sentence well beyond his original release date. Criminal contempt is one of the few crimes that does not carry a set maximum sentence, meaning that if he is brought to trial and found guilty, and continues to refuse to testify, Al-Arian could conceivably be kept in prison indefinitely.
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KROMBERG’S BEHAVIOR during his involvement in the Al-Arian case has been reprehensible. At one point, he objected to defense attorney requests not to have Dr. Al-Arian moved during the Muslim religious holidays of Ramadan, reportedly saying that “If [Muslims] can kill each other during Ramadan, they can appear before the grand jury, all they can’t do is eat before sunset. I believe Mr. Al-Arian’s request is part of the attempted Islamization of the American Justice System.”
On August 8, at the most recent pre-trial hearing in the criminal contempt case, Judge Leonie Brinkema postponed the upcoming trial until a separate appeal by Al-Arian’s lawyers could be ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court. In her ruling, Brinkema questioned whether prosecutors have been overzealous in filing additional charges against Al-Arian.
At the hearing Kromberg again showed off a vicious streak of anti-Muslim racism and sexism. As the Tampa Bay Coalition for Peace and Justice, which has mobilized support for Dr. Al-Arian, noted in a statement:
After Judge Brinkema ordered that Dr. Al-Arian be released on bail under the custodianship of his eldest daughter, Kromberg abruptly objected, claiming that, as an Muslim woman, Dr. Al-Arian’s daughter would be too weak and submissive to oppose any potential attempt by Dr. Al-Arian to flee, saying that “in this particular [Arab-Islamic] culture, she would not be able to stop him from leaving.”
Though Judge Brinkema struck down Kromberg’s objection, noting that it was “insulting,” Dr. Al-Arian still may not be released on bail–since the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has, in the past, taken custody of Al-Arian pursuant to a deportation order. Rather than actually deport Al-Arian, however, ICE seems willing to hold him in custody until federal prosecutors can drag him back into court.
Incredibly, Kromberg also attempted to play the victim during the latest hearing, complaining in court that Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) has called for activists to picket him in order to put pressure on him to free Dr. Al-Arian.
“Call him a racist in signs if you see him,” Gravel reportedly told a crowd in Washington, D.C., regarding Kromberg. “Call him an injustice. Call him whatever you want to call him, but in his face all the time.”
While Al-Arian’s lawyers and family have made it clear that they do not encourage people to target Kromberg or his family–and have publicly repudiated Gravel’s comments—it should be noted that that, due to being painted as a “terrorist,” Dr. Al-Arian and his family have faced continuous harassment by extremist Web sites, not to mention conservative media pundits like Bill O’Reilly. In addition, during his more than five years in prison, Dr. Al-Arian has been the victim of a campaign of abuse: from racist verbal and physical assaults, to punishing restrictions on visits with his family and phone calls, even to his attorneys.
As daughter Laila Al-Arian said in an interview in April,
After spending more than five years in 10 different prisons across the United States, and despite a six-month trial with 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, 12 average Americans stood firm and refused to convict innocent people of any count of over 100 charges leveled at them by the most powerful government in history.
No wonder people have been asking, “Where is justice?” Justice can’t be served when people are targeted because of their beliefs and politics…Justice can’t be served when those who are supposed to administer it abuse it in order to exact revenge. Justice can’t be served when employing fear mongering and fear tactics by exploiting a national tragedy to silence the voices of a vulnerable and weak minority in our society.
The Indian government’s responsibility to protect civilians from attacks by militants is no excuse for an abusive law like the AFSPA. Fifty years of suffering under the AFSPA is 50 years too long – the government should repeal the AFSPA now. 
Peace and Justice Post 
Transfer and Torture of Iraqi Prisoners
August 20, 2008Legal opinions permitting the U.S. to torture prisoners and authorize their transfer out of Iraq were respectively accepted or written by Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith while he headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel(OLC).
In that capacity, Goldsmith drafted a memo on March 19, 2003, that was a green light for the transfer of up to a dozen prisoners from Iraq to CIA prisons where they were tortured, writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Velvel makes his comments in a thorough critique – – giving both pros and cons – – of Goldsmith’s self protecting book entitled “The Terror Presidency,” a book in which Goldsmith seeks to make himself look good in order to evade the criticism he deserves.
And while Goldsmith withdrew a torture memorandum written by government lawyer John Yoo on August 1, 2002, he accepted a second Yoo memo of the same date apparently spelling out harsh interrogation techniques to be used on prisoners–techniques said to be torture by international law authorities, Velvel said.
Goldsmith has succeeded in his effort to falsely make himself look good: the MSM and Congress have anointed him a hero when it is more likely he aided and abetted violations of law, says Velvel.
In his thorough, two sided critique, Velvel describes the ways in which Goldsmith deserves sympathy and credit (e.g., in standing up to David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff ), as well as the ways in which he abetted crimes. CIA torture methods such as electric shocks, stress positions and waterboardings must have been approved in the second memo, Velvel writes, which Goldsmith did not withdraw “because it was devoted to the actual tactics (as) the CIA people were demanding a golden shield that would protect them from later prosecutions, and only a memo approving specific tactics could do that.” Velvel said that Goldsmith in his book entitled “The Terror Presidency”(W.W. Norton), published last year, tells us “he read and was horrified by torture memos after he was put in charge of the OLC and long before he wrote the transfer memo…He is convicted out of his own mouth.”
“His (Goldsmith’s) admission that he read the second, still secret memo that detailed specific interrogation techniques being used by the CIA makes it flatly impossible that he did not know or suspect what was going on when he wrote the transfer memo,” Velvel writes.
Goldsmith’s memo “was used to facilitate the ghost detainee program in which various prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross so that nobody would learn that they were prisoners,” Velvel wrote, “and contrary to the Geneva Conventions I gather, their status, health and whereabouts were not disclosed to their families.” Goldstein’s memo, Velvel added, was tantamount to a “get out of jail free card” for torturers who could later claim legal authorization for their acts.
Velvel wrote that Goldsmith’s transfer memo held that by not charging prisoners the U.S. could transfer them out of the country. “By not formally accusing them in any judicial way, we could, according to Goldsmith, transfer them out of Iraq because formally they were not yet ‘accused persons’ although in fact our government had already accused and convicted them every way but sideways. This is true dissembling. This is true reliance on minimal form over gigantic substance. And this is exactly what Jack Goldsmith did in his memo of March 19, 2004.”
Goldsmith also protected criminals and shielded their criminal conduct in other ways, Velvel said. He noted Goldsmith admits in his own book that he flatly lied to New York Times reporter Eric Licthblau when, prior to the 2004 election, he denied he knew anything about a secret, illegal NSA spying program. Had Goldsmith truthfully conceded (extensive) knowledge, thereby affirming the (at the time unconfirmed) existence of the program, says Velvel, or if he even had merely said “no comment” or “I can’t discuss that,” the NY Times might have broken the story of the NSA spying before the 2004 election, instead of delaying a year and thereby greatly advancing Bush’s reelection prospects.
What’s more, Velvel charges, Goldsmith lengthened the period of U.S. conduct regarding torture by maintaining his three-year silence “until the time came to garner publicity in September, 2007, for his new book.” He pointed out: “Goldsmith was an enabler of evil, including evil and crime justified by the tortured rationalizations of lawyers who set out to provide legal cover for torture, for cruelly inhuman conduct and other horrors.”
At issue, Velvel says, is “whether lawyers, in order to justify and provide a basis for supporting vicious and illegal actions of the government, are free to assert the most outlandish arguments in favor of these actions, are free to invent astonishing, even evil, arguments in favor of the positions, are free to facilitate the government’s evil actions and not to counsel against the positions even though the positions and actions are in violation of domestic criminal laws, in violation of international law, contrary to the American constitutional system, and taken without consideration of the traditions and values of this country.”
Velvel added that any lawyer in private practice who attempted to provide cover for a client’s “gravely illegal conduct in this way would be subject to disbarment, subject to criminal prosecution, and disqualified from being on any respectable law school faculty.”
Velvel’s views, previously set forth in a blog posting, have now been published in “An Enemy of the People: The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom,” a collection of essays published by Doukathsan Press.
Sherwood Ross, media consultant to Massachusetts School of Law, at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross
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Tags:CIA prisons, Geneva Conventions, Iraqi prisoners, Jack Smith, John Yoo, Lawrence Velvel, US tortured prisoners
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