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Paul Merrell

Deported by US to Turkey, Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian speaks out | The Elect... - 0 views

  • More than six months after the US government finally dropped all charges against Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the stateless Palestinian academic and activist was deported yesterday to Turkey. During his appearance on Democracy Now! today, Dr. Al-Arian expressed relief that his twelve-year-long persecution in the US, where he lived for forty years, had finally come to an end. “It feels like I’m free, finally really feeling freedom for the first time in twelve years,” Dr. Al-Arian said.
  • During the half-hour segment, Dr. Al-Arian revealed how he campaigned for George W. Bush, helping him win crucial votes from the Muslim community that would clinch his 2000 presidential election victory in the decisive state of Florida. Dr. Al-Arian was very active politically, and had visited the White House several times during both the Bush and Clinton administrations. Regarding his role in Bush’s election, Dr. Al-Arian said that he received a call “from someone who was very close to [Bush advisor] Karl Rove” asking how the campaign could win the endorsement of the Muslim American community. Dr. Al-Arian told this contact that Bush needed to declare his support for proposed legislation against secret evidence being used against Arab and Muslim Americans. During the second presidential candidate debate, Dr. Al-Arian told Democracy Now!, Bush did just that, securing the support of Muslim and Arab American leaders.
  • His administration had invited these leaders to the White House after Bush took office for a big announcement of good news regarding the legislation. “Unfortunately, it was on 9/11,” Dr. Al-Arian said, referring to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. “So that meeting never happened.” Instead, the country went in a very different direction. “At the time, we were protesting secret evidence,” Dr. Al-Arian added. “What happened after 9/11 is that they were arresting people with no evidence.”
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  • After he was fired from the University of South Florida following two years of administrative leave and a lengthy smear campaign that began with “vicious” attacks on him by right-wing Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly, Dr. Al-Arian found himself a target of the newly passed Patriot Act. In February 2003, as Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman explained today, “The Justice Department handed down a sweeping fifty count indictment against him and seven other men, charging them with conspiracy to commit murder, giving material support to terrorists, extortion, perjury and other offenses. He was held in solitary confinement leading up to the trial.” That trial ended in 2005 with the jury failing to return a single guilty verdict, acquitting Dr. Al-Arian of eight of the seventeen counts he was tried on. But the government’s efforts did not end there, as the prosecution threatened a retrial of the nine charges on which the jury had deadlocked. Dr. Al-Arian chose to spare himself a second trial.
  • “In the hopes of escaping an indefinite legal battle that would keep him in jail, Al-Arian opted to plead guilty for one of the less serious charges, which accused him of sending money to a Palestinian charity before the US government made it illegal to do so,” Khadijah Qamar and Hamdan Azhar recounted for The Electronic Intifada last year. “The judge gave him a 57-month sentence, most of which he had already served, with the promise of deportation by April 2007,” Qamar and Azhar added.
  • Despite this plea deal, Dr. Al-Arian was subpoenaed for a separate prosecution and then hit with contempt charges in March 2008 and issued two more subpoenas in the following year. Now under house arrest, Dr. Al-Arian’s case languished in the courts for years until the government finally moved to dismiss in June of last year. Regarding the saga endured by Dr. Al-Arian, Qamar and Azhar write: Reading the case files is an exercise in bewildering consternation. How did a man who was never convicted by a jury of his peers end up serving five years in prison and four and a half years under house arrest? Several lawyers we consulted point to the unique nature of the case, perhaps unprecedented even in the annals of bizarre government judicial practices since 11 September 2001.
  • The underhanded and unprecedented tactics used by government prosecutors against Al-Arian were wielded against other Palestinian activists. Humanitarians were sentenced to decades in prison in the Holy Land Five case as material support for terror convictions became the domestic front of the endless US wars and occupations abroad. The era of political repression is not over, as shown by the recent moves to criminalize Palestine solidarity work, including at US campuses, and the recent conviction of Palestinian American community leader Rasmea Odeh. “I’ve heard a lot from Obama, but it’s all rhetoric … after six years, I haven’t really seen much change,” Dr. Al-Arian said from Turkey today. But he expressed happiness towards protests and whistleblowing regarding “the excesses of the surveillance and police state.”
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    A very sad chapter in American legal history. 
Paul Merrell

US Deports Professor Sami Al-Arian | Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • One of the ugliest post-9/11 trials was the terrorism prosecution of a Palestinian immigrant, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, for using strong words in criticizing Israel and backing Palestinian rights, a case that amounted to thought crimes. It has now ended with Al-Arian’s deportation, note Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann LeverettEarlier this week, the U.S. government deported our friend and colleague, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, from the United States. Turkey has granted him sanctuary.
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    I've followed Dr. Al-Arian's case for many years. It is a shameful chapter in American legal history, an exercise in tyranny.
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