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Free Dr. Sami Al-Arian immediately without conditions |
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By Editor
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We are entering the second month of the current hunger strike by the unfairly jailed Palestinian Professor, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. He is protesting his continued unfair incarceration and harassment by the U.S. Justice Department. We call on the Bush administration to immediately free him once and for all and without conditions.
Al-Arian did not commit any crime, nor did he violate any law in the U.S. He was using our constitutional right to free speech and exercising his moral right when he was speaking for the end of Israeli occupation of Palestine.
It was essentially at the behest of Israel that the U.S. government kept Al-Arian under surveillance since the early 1990s.
Eventually, taking advantage of the engineered mass-hysteria after 9/11, the government arrested him on Feb. 3, 2003, and later put him on a six-month trial that cost us $80 million. The prosecution used all means – fair or foul – to secure his conviction. They even flew in Tel Aviv bus bombing victims to testify against him. But the jurors were not impressed. On Dec. 6, 2005, they unanimously freed him of the eight counts of violent charges and voted 10 to two in favor of his acquittal on the remaining nine nonviolent charges.
The prosecution then threatened to retry Al-Arian while offering him to enter a plea bargain. To end the ordeal, Al-Arian then signed an agreement, pleading guilty to one count of providing services to a designated terrorist organization. Actually, what he pled to were some innocuous activities like helping his brother-in-law immigrate to the U.S.
According to the plea deal, Al-Arian was expecting to be free and leave the country shortly after his sentencing on May 1, 2006. But in a new twist, the presiding judge sentenced him to 57 months and ordered him held for the remaining 11 months beyond the time he had already served. Following this period, Al-Arian was to leave for Egypt early in 2007.
But in a further violation of the terms of the plea deal, Gordon Kromberg, a Virginia prosecutor and Israel-supporter, subpoenaed Al-Arian in October 2006 to testify before a grand jury in a completely unrelated case. The intent was to convict Al-Arian by outfoxing him into a perjury trap. Previously, Kromberg used a similar trap to secure a 25-year sentence for another Muslim who, after his acquittal, testified out of good faith in a grand jury trial. As Al-Arian refused to testify, he was held in contempt of court.
Al-Arian’s is now on his third hunger strike during his five year. According to www.freealarian.com, in 2003, he lost 45 pounds when he went on a 140-day liquid only hunger strike and had to be hospitalized. In early 2007, he went on a 60-day water only hunger strike, losing 55 pounds and being hospitalized and confined to a wheelchair. As of March 19, in the current hunger strike, “Dr. Al-Arian has now lost 30 pounds and was in a wheelchair when he was brought to the attorney-client room,” according to Jonathan Turley, his lead counsel.
“He appears very diminished and gaunt. His skin shows the advanced stages of dehydration and he is very weak. He remains committed, however, to his protest against his treatment and the prolongation of his confinement despite his plea agreement.”
In the words of Chris Hedges, the injustice meted out to Al-Arian in America is “writ large in the Middle East. He has no passport, no home, no country. He must live on the charity of others, stateless, as most Palestinians are, and without the rights of the citizens around him. He once thought America would be his home. He was, before this charade [Florida trials], in the process of gaining citizenship. All this is over.”
The continued incarceration of Al-Arian is utterly unethical on several counts: First, the incarceration violates a plea deal. Second, the government is manipulating letters of the law in violation of the spirit of the law to secure his conviction. Third, there are no good reasons for the government to harass Al-Arian. Fourth, his prosecution is being led by an attorney, Gordon Kromberg, who is on record expressing anti-Muslim prejudice and discriminatory attitude.
Amongst his many tirades about Muslims he has said: “If they 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. 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.”
We condemn the Justice Department’s wicked attempts to continue inflicting injustice on Al-Arian. We urge all our fellow American and global citizens to speak out against this injustice.
As Dr. Martin Luther King put it, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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