By Jeanne Theoharis, March 1, 2010

A U.S. citizen has spent his last three birthdays in solitary confinement awaiting trial.

Not in Iran.

Not in North Korea.

But in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.

His name is Fahad Hashmi. He turned 30 last week.

But there was no celebration with family and friends, though they are but a few miles away. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., where his family still lives, and he received his bachelor’s from Brooklyn College.

Hashmi is awaiting trial on four charges of material support to al-Qaida.

Under special administrative measures imposed by the U.S. attorney general, Hashmi is not allowed contact with anyone — outside his lawyers and highly restricted visits every two weeks with his parents (which in December were suspended without explanation).

His cell is electronically monitored inside and out, 24 hours a day. He is allowed only one hour out of his cell a day and is forced to exercise in a solitary cage. Because much of the evidence in the case is classified, he has not been allowed to review it.

The “centerpiece” of the U.S. government’s material support charges against him, it claims, is the testimony of a cooperating witness, Junaid Babar.

Babar, an acquaintance of Hashmi’s who came to London in 2004 when Hashmi was doing his graduate study there, asked to stay with him for two weeks. The government claims that Babar had luggage containing raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in Hashmi’s apartment, and that later Babar delivered these materials to the third-ranking member of al-Qaida in South Waziristan, Pakistan. In addition, Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone, who then allegedly called other conspirators in terrorist plots. Babar was subsequently arrested and has agreed to testify in a number of cases in exchange for a much-reduced sentence.

On Tuesday, Feb. 23, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of these material support laws, hearing arguments in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Brought by the Humanitarian Law Project and the Center for Constitutional Rights, the case challenges certain aspects of the material support provisions introduced under President Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and expanded under the Patriot Act. The law defines and bans material support as the knowing provision of “any service, training, [or] expert advice or assistance” to a group designated by the federal government as a foreign terrorist organization. The challengers argue that aspects of the ban — and its definition of material support — are overly vague and violate the First and Fifth Amendments by inhibiting a range of protected activities.

Material support laws are the black box of domestic terrorism prosecutions, a shape-shifting space into which all sorts of constitutionally protected activities can be thrown and classified as suspect, if not criminal. Their vagueness is key. They criminalize guilt by association and often use political and religious beliefs to demonstrate intent and state of mind.

Hashmi, for instance, had drawn the attention of authorities years earlier as an outspoken activist in the Muslim community and member of the New York political group al-Muhajiroun while he was a student at Brooklyn College. He faces charges of material support without being accused of being a member of al-Qaida, of trying to help al-Qaida commit any act of terrorism or any crime, or of even having any direct contact with al-Qaida.

This is the new McCarthyism, under the guise of “material support” for terrorism but bearing a stark resemblance in practice to the criminalization of belief and association a half century ago.

And so Fahad Hashmi sits in isolation, still awaiting trial, in a legal black hole in New York City. Let us hope the current Supreme Court heeds former Chief Justice’s Earl Warren’s caution: “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of … those liberties … which makes the defense of this nation worthwhile.”

Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science and endowed chair in women’s studies at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is the author of numerous books on civil rights and is the co-founder of Educators for Civil Liberties. She can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.

Commentary
Even after the guilty verdict, Aafia Siddiqui will just not go away
By Ridwan Sheikh
Online Journal Guest Writer

Feb 26, 2010, 00:42

While Aafia Siddiqui awaits sentencing on May 6, with the prospect of facing a maximum of 20-year term in prison, the case that rattled the US is far from closed.

Although, the Pakistani government paid $2 million dollars to Aafia Siddiqui’s legal defence team, behind the scenes it’s a different matter. The truth is the joint involvement of the Pakistani, US and Afghan governments have yet to answer some simple questions. How did she end up in the police compound in Afghanistan? Who knew about it? And who is responsible for her missing children?

Following the guilty verdict, one of Aafia Siddiqui’s defense attorneys, Elaine Sharp, broke her silence, “Aafia Siddiqui told us that she was picked up by Pakistani men in two black cars. These were people of Pakistani intelligence. ‘You know’ she said ‘ISI.’”

However, Abdul Basit, a spokesman for the Pakistani foreign ministry, insisted it has the welfare of Aafia Siddiqui at heart and the “ultimate objective is to get her back to Pakistan and we will do everything possible and we’ll apply all possible tools in this regard.”

But at a press conference in Karachi, given by, Fauzia, the sister of Aafia Siddiqui, boldly confirmed what many had feared.

“This is a pack of lies; everybody knows that she was kidnapped by the Pakistani intelligence agencies at the behest of General Pervez Musharraf. He [Musharraf] later handed her over to Americans, who took her to Afghanistan, where she was detained and tortured for many months.”

In a recent statement written to the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation, Fauzia Siddiqui lifted the lid on what really happened: “At first, the government had shown its complete ignorance regarding Aafia’s abduction but in the background meetings with members of her family, top Pakistani leaders and the then interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, gave assurances for her early recovery on the condition that there would be no protest against the government and then president Pervez Musharraf.

“The PM told me if the US did not accept the government’s demand to release Aafia, his government would say ‘no’ to the US aid until Aafia returned home,” Fouzia Siddiqui said.

In a separate development, the Pakistani daily, The News, reported on 04 February that a new legal proceeding was underway in Karachi. But many suspect due to the critical comments against the Pakistan government, it wanted to shift the blame to the US government and thereby wash its hands in the whole affair.

An investigating officer, Shahid Qureshi, submitted a report to the judicial magistrate on charges related to the 2003 kidnapping of Aafia Siddiqui and her children, stating that it was carried out “by FBI intelligence agents without any warrants or notice.”

It is not unusual for Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), agency, to collaborate in forcibly abducting its citizens from Pakistan to secret US prisons, where unspeakable torture awaits them, all under the guise of the US government’s ‘war on terror,’ in exchange for cash from the FBI.

The truth is Aafia Siddiqui’s tragic ordeal didn’t begin in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. Human rights groups believe in March 2003 Aafia Siddiqui and her three children were on their way to Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, to board a flight heading to Islamabad, when Pakistani intelligence agents cut short their car journey and nabbed the family. They later handed the family to Afghan officials, where under the noses of FBI and US military officials, Aafia Siddiqui, was secretly abducted to the US Bagram air base in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she was held for more than five years and subjected to torture and unspeakable abuse.

The family’s ordeal didn’t stop there. Mohammed, her eldest son, was eventually released into the care of Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia, on condition that he kept his mouth shut about the details of his abduction and arrest. However, the fate of the other two children, her daughter, Maryam, and her infant son Suleman, remains shrouded in mystery. Pakistan’s ISI, US officials and the Afghan authorities amazingly deny all knowledge of the whereabouts of the children. Their disappearance has stunned Pakistan.

The ISI’s secretly run role in kidnapping and abduction is nothing new. In fact, it’s something human rights groups have been voicing for some time. The ISI denies any wrong doing but recent reports have cast serious doubts on ISI’s claim.

Indeed, in December 2009, the Asian Human Rights commission called for Colonel Hamza of the ISI to be prosecuted for the abduction, illegal detention and torture of young men from Pakistani Kashmir, held in Bala Hisar fort near Peshawar, Pakistan.

It is believed Colonel Hamza and other officials in his charge, physically abused these men and warned them not to tell anyone about their illegal detention otherwise they would face serious consequences.

In recent months, a stinging 226-page UN report, entitled Cruel Britannia, researched by the New York-based NGO, Human Rights Watch, focused primarily on US policies and its partners towards its ‘war on terror’ facilities and practices.

The report written by the UN investigators, Manfred Nowak and Martin Scheinin, details the practices, of how secret US detention facilities were set up and run in the previous nine years.

The study includes interviews of government officials, former intelligence officers and 33 interviews with former detainees, their lawyers and families over the course of a year.

It said after the September 11, 2001, attacks, former US President George W. Bush used “black sites,” such as the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, in its “war on terror” so that they would be outside the jurisdiction of US civilian courts.

The intention was to create a “free license” to continue illegal activities in secret locations outside the US.

The report mentioned a number of secret prisons in Afghanistan — in particular, the “Dark Prison,” the “Salt Pit” and a secret facility within Bagram airbase.

“Victims and their families deserve compensation and those responsible should be prosecuted,” said the four independent investigators.”

The report also revealed from interviews with several Pakistani Intelligence agents that they, allegedly, had tortured British terrorism suspects on the orders of key eastern European and Western governments, including the U.K.

It makes you wonder, that If the ISI can abduct British and US nationals and residents to secret locations in Afghanistan and torture them, with the knowledge of Western governments, then the ISI wouldn’t have any trouble in widening their license to subject their own citizens to the same treatment. .

What is clear is the US government refuses to acknowledge or discuss highly questionable practices in secret detention sites, such as rendition, torture and widespread abuse. But it is the fate of hundreds of prisoners that has left a deep imprint on the US government and serves as a symbol of distrust to the rest of the world.

In such detention sites the guilt and innocence of a human being is deemed irrelevant, something which the Obama administration tried to block in the US Court of Appeals, District of Columbia, in September 2009, in its unsuccessful attempt to deny habeas corpus rights to detainees held in Bagram.
Since US media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, ran exposes in November 2009 of illegal activities in Bagram, the rest of the media are pretty much silent, instead preferring to churn out puff pieces on the lifestyle of the US president and his family. But what about Aafia Siddiqui’s family and the mystery surrounding her missing children? Isn’t this considered news? Then again, to Western eyes at least, it’s not ‘glamorous’ enough.

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Commentary
Texas’ Debra Medina, the Fahad Hashmi case: Grounds for hope and despair
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Feb 19, 2010, 00:16

 My February 16 column, A Country of Serfs Ruled By Oligarchs, received confirmation from high places on the very day it appeared. Popular Indiana Democratic U.S. Senator Evan Bayh announced that he was quitting the Senate.

Yahoo News gave this account: “In an interview on MSNBC this morning, newly retiring Sen. Evan Bayh declared the American political system ‘dysfunctional,’ riddled with ‘brain-dead partisanship’ and permanent campaigning. Flatly denying any possibility that he’d seek the presidency or any other higher office, Bayh argued that the American people needed to deliver a ‘shock’ to Congress by voting incumbents out in mass and replacing them with people interested in reforming the process and governing for the good of the people, rather than deep-pocketed special-interest groups.”

In short, Senator Bayh got tired of being a whore for the corporate lobbyists who rule the U.S.

As Shamus Cooke noted the same day, in the last election voters gave the Democrats a super majority in the mistaken belief that Democrats would remove U.S. policy from the corporate/neocon grip only to find that the result was a surge in America’s wars of aggression.

There are grounds for hope in the fact that some of the Tea Party people understand that Americans have been betrayed and abandoned by both parties.

An unusual candidate has emerged for governor of Texas. Debra Medina is doing well with popular support without machine politics. She has an intriguing idea to abolish the property tax in Texas.

Medina makes the valid point that the property tax is a permanent government lien on a person’s home. A person never owns his home even after the mortgage is paid off, because he has to continue paying government for the right to live in his home.

Many elderly people have found that a lifetime of inflation and rising real estate assessments have pushed up the tax on their homes so much that it accounts for a large percentage of their retirement incomes. In Alexandria, Virginia, for example, the local government has a program by which the elderly can avoid property tax in exchange for letting the government inherit the property. It is the heirs who are dispossessed.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation studied Medina’s proposal and concluded that a rise in the Texas sales tax from 8.25 percent to 8.8 percent would allow the property tax to be abolished as long as some untaxed services, such as mining services, drilling services, legal services, and limousine services were brought into the tax base.

If Medina is a real representative of the people, she comprises a threat to the oligarchy. The oligarchy will go after her with every known dirty trick. Will Texans stand by her?

Grounds for hope are not easily come by, but plentiful are the grounds for despair. My recent article, It Is Now Official: The U.S. Is A Police State, also received confirmation on February 16 with the appearance of Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist Chris Hedges interview with Russia Today on Information Clearing House. [Video]

Asked about the Fahad Hashmi case, Hedges pointed out that Hashmi is a U.S. citizen whose every constitutional right has been violated just as if he were an “enemy combatant,” a designation used to justify holding non-Americans in indefinite detention. Moreover, Hedges reported that Hashmi is not being prosecuted for committing or planning an act of terror. He is being prosecuted “for what he believes,” or to be more precise Hashmi is being prosecuted for expressing dissent. The government’s evidence against him is tape recordings of speeches he made at Brooklyn College as a student activist denouncing U.S. policies.

These tapes will be played to a patriotic jury likely to convict him for being a Muslim and an anti-American.

As Hedges emphasizes, Hashmi’s conviction would make expression of dissent an indictable offense. If expressing dissent is a crime, then thinking it will also be a crime. The government will produce manuals for its police on how to read body language and facial expressions as indicators of thought crimes.

The rapidity with which the U.S. is being transformed into a police state is astonishing. It has occurred under the guise of “the war on terror,” itself a product of 9/11. Americans were told that the police state regime was only for terrorists, but like RICO’s asset freezes, which were only for the Mafia, and the war on drugs’ asset forfeitures, which were only for drug lords, the suspension of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties now extends to all.

Americans regard such warnings as hyperbole. They think they are safe as long as they are not doing anything wrong. In other words, they think that anyone the government picks up must be guilty.

This view shows a remarkable ignorance of the 20th century. Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag were full of people who had done nothing wrong. Many were people demonized for being of the wrong race and class. Others were people reported by envious neighbors or by someone settling a score. The system didn’t care, because it existed independently of any concerns about justice or security.

In the 1990s, I saw a Russian movie about the Stalin era. The main character was a Soviet war hero, personally praised by Stalin. In his home area he had enormous authority and could order off Soviet military maneuvers that impinged on the collective farm’s crops. One day a KGB agent shows up who wants the war hero’s beautiful wife. The war hero is amused that a mere KGB agent thinks he has power over him. “Wait until Stalin hears about this,” he says as he comes out in his military uniform with his medals and confidently drives away with the agent to be beaten and disappeared into the gulag. Even if Stalin would have cared, he would never have known.

Police states remove accountability from those in authority. One result is to remove constraints on behavior. Even when there are constraints, some spouses abuse one another and some parents abuse children. Some people abuse animals. Even many Americans have abusive tendencies as Abu Ghraib makes completely clear.

It starts with little things and works its way up. Tens of thousands of people have experienced unsatisfactory encounters with the Transportation Safety Administration, otherwise known as the airport police. In a recent case, a police officer and his wife were taking their 4-year-old son to Disney World for his birthday. The child has to wear leg braces due to problems associated with his premature birth. The TSA screener ordered the braces removed before the boy could walk through the detector. But, of course, the boy could not walk without the braces. The police officer and his wife were stunned to find that TSA cannot tell the difference between an American police officer and his disabled child and a terrorist threat.

A police state has no need to differentiate. Those Americans who don’t care what happens to Fahad Hashmi, Aafia Siddiqui, Omar Khadr, and countless others are opening themselves to similar treatment and the rest of us along with them.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Analysis
It is Now Official: The U.S. is a Police State
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Feb 11, 2010, 00:18

Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the 21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” which continues under the Obama administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and U.S. civil liberties.

The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists. Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.

The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed “terrorist” prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.

As there was no evidence against the “detainees” (most have been released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws against torture in order that the government could produce evidence via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S. Department of Justice [sic] to invent arguments that the Bush regime did not need to obey the law.

The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized by the regime as “the 760 most dangerous men on earth,” there was little public outcry over the regime’s unconstitutional and inhumane actions.

As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S. citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas corpus rights. Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an American citizen of Pakistani origin, might have been the first.

Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University, was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan, and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. military’s notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. Her three young children, one an 8-month-old baby, were with her at the time she was abducted. She has no idea what has become of her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.

Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense. A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being tortured, disclosed her presence. An embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldier’s rifle and fired two shots attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S. soldier’s excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach, resulting in her near death.

On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted murder. The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings, no bullet holes. Just an accusation.

Wikipedia has this to say about the trial: “The trial took an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.”

An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a Muslim. This is the kind of “justice” that always results when the state hypes fear and demonizes a group.

The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and convicted.

This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim is an American citizen.

Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3, Dennis Blair, director of National Intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that it was now “defined policy” that the U.S. government can murder its own citizens on the sole basis of the government’s judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.

This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.

I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans abroad as it kills them at home — Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.

Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis Blair’s “defined policy” is a bold new development. The government, of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver’s wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government says that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought on by the Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that Ruby Ridge was Randy Weaver’s fault for not appearing in court on a day that had been miscommunicated to him. The Black Panthers, the government says, were dangerous criminals who insisted on a shoot-out.

In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S. government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.

In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans whom it deems a “threat.”

What defines “threat”? Who will make the decision? What it means is that the government will murder whomever it chooses.

There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state than the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens if it views them as a “threat.”

Ironic, isn’t it, that “the war on terror” to make us safe ends in a police state with the government declaring the right to murder American citizens whom it regards as a threat.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
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Fahad Hashmi’s case characterizes overreaching powers that came about due to War on Terror
By Udai Malhotra

We must consider cases such as Fahad Hashmi’s, which illustrates the overreaching powers that have come to characterize the Federal Government, the intelligence community, and the American justice system through the War on Terror.

Keywords: Analysis, Bronx, Government, Human Rights, Law, Security, Police & Prisons, Repression,

In the eight years since President Bush began the War on Terror, a number of Muslim charities, human rights groups, and community based organizations have been under intense scrutiny and surveillance by the US Federal Government. Muslim Americans have had their phones tapped, their financial assets frozen, and their places of worship infiltrated. The American intelligence community has been slowly bringing home many of the intelligence gathering tactics used abroad to now monitor and detain its own citizens. In this climate of profiling, and eroding civil liberties at home, we must consider cases such as the one of the American, Syed Fahad Hashmi, which illustrates the overreaching powers that have come to characterize the Federal Government, the intelligence community, and the American justice system through the War on Terror.

The Global War on Terror is conducted mainly through intelligence gathering as opposed to evidence gathering. For intelligence gathering agencies, association with blacklisted individuals is all that is needed to raise a red flag and invite the scrutiny of the state. Independent journalist Petra Bartosiewicz comments in “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes It’s Enemies Dissapear” in Harper’s Magazine, “What most of us understand as human relationships, infinitely varied and poignant with ambiguity, criminal investigators understand simply as a series of associations.” This approach is problematic. Coupled with the coercive tactics used in the interrogation of detainees, inaccurate intelligence becomes actionable, and individuals may be punished simply for their association . Imposing guilt by association, and doling out punishment for the actions of others does not provide any guidance about what kinds of actions are prohibited by the government and it punishes innocent assistance to, or association with, blacklisted individuals. The prosecution of individuals for their association is a tactic that has been used by states to suppress dissent and criticism.

Fahad Hashmi emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1983 from Karachi, Pakistan, at the age of three. He grew up in the vibrant and diverse community of Flushing, Queens and studied Political Science at Brooklyn College. On campus, he was outspoken in his views of American foreign policy and the oppression of Muslims post 9-11. In 2002, he was mentioned in a Time Magazine article as a student activist. The article quoted him saying, “America is directly involved in exterminating Muslims,” and that “America is the biggest terrorist in the world.” Jeanne Theoharis, one of Fahad’s professors at Brooklyn College, and a campaigner for his release has stated that Fahad wrote his senior seminar paper on the treatment of Muslim groups within the United States and the violations of civil rights taking place.

In 2003, Fahad moved to London to pursue a Masters degree in International Relations from London’s Metropolitan University, which he completed in 2005. There he came in contact with an individual blacklisted by the American government, Junaid Babar, an acquaintance from New York, who stayed in his London apartment for two weeks. Babar has since been convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda and will be a witness against Fahad in his future trial.

On June 6, 2006, Fahad was arrested by British Police at Heathrow Airport while preparing to board a plane to Pakistan. He pleaded not guilty to charges in the U.S. of “providing material support to Al-Qaeda” and was held for eleven months in Britain’s Belmarsh prison as part of the regular prison population while he fought his extradition. On May 25, 2007, under pressure from the American government, he was extradited from the U.K. Upon his arrival in the US, Fahad was placed in pre-trial solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Lower Manhattan, where he has remained for almost three years. Subject to Special Administrative Measures (SAM’s), he is kept in his cell for 23 hours a day and allowed a single hour in a cage for recreation. He is currently under extreme mobility restrictions and remains under constant video surveillance. He may not interact with anyone other than prison officials, his lawyers, and approved members of his family, and is not allowed to speak out loud, or gesture, under threat of having even more restraints placed on him. Solitary confinement to a lesser extent than what has been imposed is considered torture as permany international standards, and Fahad has been kept in this extreme situation for almost three years now. Over 30 appeals have been made by his lawyers pertaining to his treatment under SAM’s with each one thus far being denied.

Fahad’s charge of providing “material support” to Al Qaeda, does not accuse him of giving money, weapons, or information to the terrorist organization as originally reported. Rather, he is being accused of allowing an acquaintance, Junaid Babar, to stay in his home in London while carrying raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in his suitcase. According to the government, these items were later delivered by Babar to a third ranking member of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. During his stay, the government also alleged that Fahad allowed Babar to use his cell phone to speak to other individuals associated with terrorist groups. As a cooperating witness, Babar has already been convicted of five counts of material support himself and faces 70 years in prison. The case built against Fahad will be based upon the testimony of Babar who has already been used by the government to testify in numerous other terrorism related cases. Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist writes in One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists, “Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial”. It is expected that the US government will also be introducing tapes showcasing Fahad’s political and activist background to demonstrate intent. The implication being that there is no real evidence connecting Fahad to terrorism other than his constitutionally protected religious and dissident political speech.

Under U.S. Law, Fahad is currently presumed innocent while in custody. He has no criminal record or history of violence and there is no precedent for the SAM’s in place against him. SAM’s were first introduced under President Clinton and were meant to be used to disable and severely limit ones contact with the outside world. They were created specifically for dealing with the most violent and unrestrainable of criminals like mob leaders whose criminal activity and leadership could not be halted while present in the regular prison population. Fahad’s “proclivity for violence”, cited to justify such harsh restrictions placed on him are based only upon his religious and political beliefs as he has no past history of violence. SAM’s were expanded in wake of 9/11, with the regulations loosened, and the standards for renewal relaxed. They have allowed for Fahad to be kept in a state of administrative limbo, isolated and flagrantly denied his right to a speedy trial, to confront the evidence against him, and to be given the opportunity to defend himself. Apart from the restraints on Fahad as part of SAM’s, there are also numerous limitations on his lawyers. They are restricted in what they can and cannot say to the media about their contact with him, and have had to go through extensive and time consuming background checks to be given the required clearance to see the classified “secret evidence” against him. They are however barred from discussing this evidence with Fahad himself or the media. A full cover story in the Village Voice by Nat Hentoff in 2007 regarded Hashmi’s case as a “Bush “dark side” legacy”. A year into Obama’s presidency we have seen Attorney General Holder reissue Fahad’s SAM’s in November of 2009.

Regardless of Fahad’s ultimate guilt or innocence – something only a fair trial can establish – placing someone in prolonged solitary confinement with such extreme restrictions before being given a chance to defend themselves is deplorable irrespective of the charges, and amounts to torture. For activists rallying around this case, it is an attempt to salvage some justice that has so far uniformly been denied. Fahad’s treatment should be of concern to all Americans who value their right to political, religious speech, and the inalienable rights guaranteed under the constitution. The right to a fair defense is beyond controversy, and community organizations have been mobilizing around Fahad’s case with Theaters Against War holding regular vigils outside the Metropolitan Detention Center at 500 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan. More information about Fahad’s case can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org. Fahad’s trial is presently set to begin on April 28th , 2010 in the courtroom of Judge Loretta Preska.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2010/02/109497.shtml

The Terror-Industrial Complex

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror-industrial_complex_20100208/

Posted on Feb 8, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Editor’s note: As a result of errors, an earlier version of this column misrepresented quoted material. The corrected version is below.

The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.

The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.

Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.

“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”

The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.

No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen? In an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version.

The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.

The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui’s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.

“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.

On February 3, a Department of Justice press release headlined “Aafia Siddiqui Found Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court of Attempting to Murder US Nationals in Afghanistan and Six Additional Charges.”

At her scheduled May 6 sentencing, she “faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each of the attempted murder and armed assault charges; life in prison on the firearms charge; and eight years in prison on each of the remaining assault charges. SIDDIQUI faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison on the firearms charge.”

On February 3, New York Times writer CJ Hughes headlined: “Pakistani Scientist Found Guilty of Shootings,” convicting her on all seven counts, including attempted murder – “capping a trial that drew notice for its terrorist implications as well as its theatrics,” but omitting convincing evidence of Siddiqui’s innocence. Instead, Hughes said she was arrested with “instructions (in her purse) on making explosives and a list of New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.” Her defense team acknowledged their existence, but Siddiqui denied packing them or knowing of their origin. She later suggested she copied them from a magazine, planned no terrorist acts, nor did her indictment claim them.

Hughes also said she “raised suspicions when she and her three children vanished in Pakistan in 2003.” She didn’t vanish. Her mother said she “left the family home in Gulshan-e-lqbal in a taxi on March 30, 2003 to catch a flight for Rawalpindi, but never reached the airport.” Pakistani intelligence agents abducted her, turned her over to US authorities, after which her long ordeal of secret imprisonment, interrogations, and years of brutalizing torture began, even though she wasn’t charged.

Her son Mohammed was later released on condition he say nothing. Her other two children, Maryam and Suleman, disappeared and may have been killed.

In May 2004, Pakistan’s Interior Minister confirmed she was turned over to US authorities in 2003 after no link between her and Al Qaeda was established. In 2006, Amnesty International called her one of many of the “disappeared” in America’s “war on terror.” In 2007, a Ghost Prisoner Human Rights Watch report suggested she was held in secret CIA detention.

In February 2008, the Asian Human Rights Commission said she was brought to Karachi and severely tortured to secure her compliance as a government witness against Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, related to Siddiqui through marriage to his nephew. He reportedly “gave her up” after capture on March 1, 2003, after which she and her children disappeared.

The charges were bogus and outrageous. Yet, on September 2, 2008, the Justice Department (DOJ) indicted her “on charges related to her attempted murder and assault of United States nationals and officers and employees.” According to Michael Garcia, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (in his same day press release):

On July 18, 2008, “a team of United States servicemen and law enforcement officers, and others assisting them, attempted to interview Aafia Siddiqui in Ghazni, Aghanistan, where she had been detained by local police the day before….unbeknownst to the United States interview team, unsecured, behind a curtain — Siddiqui obtained one of the United States Army’s M-4 rifles and attempted to fire it, and did fire it, at another United States Army officer and other members of the United States interview team….Siddiqui then assaualted one of the United States Army interpreters, as he attempted to obtain the M-4 rifle from her. Siddiqui subsequently assaulted one of the FBI agents and one of the United States Army officers, as they attempted to subdue her.”

Left unexplained was how this frail, weak, 110-pound woman, confronted by three US Army officers, two FBI agents, and two Army interpreters, inexplicably managed to assault three of them, get one of their rifles, open fire at close range, hit no one, and only she was severely wounded.

According to her attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp:

“how did this happen? And how did she get shot? I think you can answer that, can’t you (and question the outrageous charges against her)?”

During proceedings, another defense lawyer, Linda Moreno, said no forensic evidence proved the rifle Siddiqui allegedly used had been fired since no bullets, shell casings, or bullet debris were recovered and no bullet holes detected.

Garcia didn’t explain, nor about her abduction, torture and repeated raping at Bagram prison, Afghanistan where, as Prisoner 650, she was called the “Gray Lady of Bagram” because her screams were heard for years. Nor did he discuss her physical and emotional destruction. She was a pawn in America’s “war on terror,” used, abused, now convicted, and facing life in prison when sentenced, a victim of gross injustice.

Some Background

A Pakistani national, Siddiqui is deeply religious, attended MIT and Brandeis University where she earned a doctorate in neurocognitive science, married a Boston physician, raised money for charities, did volunteer work, distributed Korans to inmates in area prisons, and did nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the UK Times Online called her “Al-Qaeda woman.” For ABC News, she was “Mata Hari,” and the Justice Department targeted her as a terrorist, a woman guilty only of being Muslim in America at the wrong time.

When seized, the FBI said she was a potential “treasure trove” of information on terrorist suspects, sympathizers, or sleepers in America and overseas. CIA officer John Kiriakou called her “the most significant capture in five years,” and an unnamed counterterrorism official said she’s “a very dangerous person, no doubt about it.” FBI Director Robert Mueller said she’s “an Al Qaeda operative and facilitator.” He and the others lied.

Those who knew her recalled she was very small, quiet, polite, and shy, barely noticeable in a gathering. However, she’d say what was needed when necessary. Her fellow students described her as soft-spoken, studious, religious, but not extremist or fundamentalist. She taught Muslim children on Sundays, and was dedicated to helping oppressed Muslims worldwide. She spoke publicly, sent emails, gave slideshow presentations, and raised donations as part of her faith, activism, and sincerity. Yet she was targeted as “a high security risk” despite no evidence then or now to prove it.

Siddiqui is innocent of all charges, yet the DOJ claimed she was involved in biochemical warfare. In fact, she devised a computer program, enlisted adult volunteers to watch various objects move randomly across the screen, then reproduce what they recalled. The idea was to learn how well they retained information after viewing it on a computer. It had nothing to do with terrorism, biochemical warfare, or blowing up New York targets, charges never appearing in her indictment.

Siddiqui’s Trial and Conviction

Against her lawyers’ advice, she spoke publicly for the first time, despite the risk and her frail condition. She explained her academic work, her post-doctorate teaching, her interests that included studying the capabilities of dyslexic and other impaired children, then recounted her ordeal.

After being abducted, she agonized over the fate of her children. In US custody, the relevant incident leading to her indictment went as follows:

– at one point, she was tied down;

– then untied;

– left behind a curtain;

– peaked through it; and

– an American soldier shot her in the stomach;

– another in her side;

– then violently threw her to the floor unconscious.

She vaguely remembered being on a stretcher, placed in a helicopter, and getting a blood transfusion. She emphatically denied seizing and firing a weapon.

Under cross-examination, she said she was given the bag with incriminating documents, didn’t know its contents or whether handwriting on them was hers. She explained her repeated torture at Bagram, the effects of the strong medications given her, and at one point said, “If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured,” after which she was forcibly removed from court and the proceedings continued without her.

According to media reports, these revelations were “outbursts.” On January 25, New York Times writer CJ Hughes reported numerous “disruptions….plagu(ing) the trial. Monday (January 25) was hardly an exception. The defendant was ejected from (court) – not once, but twice (for) loudly proclaiming her innocence.” On January 19, she “had several outbursts in previous court appearances, raising questions about her competency to stand trial.”

On February 4, AP writer Tom Hays said “True to form, Aafia Siddiqui did not go quietly,” called her comments “combative,” then claimed the prosecution presented “compelling testimony.”

On February 5, the Islamophobic frontpagemag.com headlined “How a ‘Nice American Girl’ Became a Jihadist,” saying “veiled Muslim women can be very aggressive, murderously so.”

On February 3, the New York Daily News headlined, “Lady Al Qaeda Aafia Siddiqui convicted of attempted murder.” Writer Alison Gendar accepted DOJ’s charges as fact and added some of her own, saying:

“She grabbed a rifle at an ‘Afghan police station’ (she was at Bagram) and started shooting at the Americans sent to grill her. She was shot by the soldier whose weapon she swiped. (In 2008, she was) caught in ‘Afghanistan’ with ‘2 pounds of poisonous chemicals.’ (During the trial), she disrupted the proceedings several times with ’strange outbursts.’ ”

An August 22, 2008 Fox News report said “emails obtained by FOXNews.com show messages sent by Siddiqui (during her time at MIT) soliciting money for Al-Kifah Refugee Center – a known Al Queda charitable front tied to Usama bin Laden and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”

After a three week trial and two days of deliberation, a federal jury of eight women and four men convicted her on all charges, including attempted murder, armed assault, discharging a firearm during a violent crime, and assaulting US officers and employees. As a result, she potentially faces life in prison at her May 6 sentencing. It’s not confirmed, but her lawyers may appeal given the bogus charges, long detention, and brutalizing torture, leaving her a shell of her former self, so physically and emotionally shattered she was in no condition to stand trial.

After the verdict, aljazeera.net headlined “US verdict sparks Pakistan protests,” saying thousands in several cities rallied in her defense. Her relatives spoke publicly condemning the decision, her sister Fauzia saying “we’re proud to be related to her. America’s justice system, the establishment, the war on terror, the fraud of the war on terror, all of those things have shown their own ugly faces.”

Her mother, Ismat said “I did not expect anything better from an American court. We were ready for the shock and will continue our struggle to get her released.” Pakistan’s foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Basit, said the government would try “to get her back to Pakistan and we would do everything possible and we’ll apply all possible tools in this regard.”

Al Jazeera’s Islamabad correspondent, Kamal Hyder, explained the public disappointment “for failing to find a diplomatic way out and getting (her) back home, because they feel she was innocent.” She was missing for five years like “many hundreds of (others who’ve) disappeared from Pakistan – still not accounted for – and now that Dr. Aafia’s case has come up, that’s likely to be a rallying point for the anti-American sentiment.”

The UK-based Cageprisoners spokesman, Asim Qureshi, said “The case of Aafia Siddiqui carries great significance in terms of the ability of the Obama administration to administer justice. Already we have seen a blanket refusal to look at the facts of her detention prior to 2008. This verdict will only confirm what many already believe, that it is impossible for Muslim terrorism suspects to receive a fair trial in the US.”

Defense lawyer Elaine Whitfield Sharp called the verdict unjust, in her opinion “based on fear….not fact,” and the result is the continued ordeal of an innocent woman facing a potential life sentence.

Carefully orchestrated, the trial proceeded like numerous others, targeting innocent victims because of their faith, ethnicity, prominence, benevolent charity, activism, or other reasons for political advantage, ending with convictions and punitive incarcerations against innocent defendants, guilty of being Muslims in America at the wrong time when we’re all just as vulnerable.

In a manipulated climate of fear, the same process repeats, using bogus charges, secret evidence, enlisted witnesses to cooperate, the defense prohibited from introducing exculpatory evidence, and proceedings carefully scripted to intimidate juries to convict.

Justice is again denied, Siddiqui another victim, a human tragedy, portrayed by the dominant media as a jihadist, and getting public sentiment to agree because disturbing truths are carefully suppressed

What do you do if a young man who was a student in your class is thrown in prison on a terrorism charge?

Jeanne Theoharis teaches Political Science at Brooklyn College. In June 2006, when British authorities detained 26-year-old Syed Fahad Hashmi at Heathrow Airport, she remembered the youth from her class several years ago. Back in 2002, in the days following the attacks of September 11, Hashmi had been a student in Professor Theoharis’s class on race. He was articulate and very critical of the ways in which the civil rights of American citizens, especially Muslims, had been curtailed by the Bush administration.

When Theoharis heard that Hashmi had been arrested by the British police because there was a warrant out for him in the US, she was struck by the irony of it all. A part of her former student’s thesis had been about the government’s surveillance and harassment of four or five Muslim groups in the US. Now, he was himself behind bars on suspicion of having aided and abetted terrorism. Less than a year later, when Hashmi was extradited to the US, the FBI revealed that a man who had stayed at the detainee’s apartment in London had supplied “military gear” to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi’s lawyer found out that the items being labeled as “military gear” were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery. The FBI has revealed nothing more.

I met Jeanne Theoharis recently for lunch in a restaurant in New York’s West Village. She told me that when Hashmi was arrested, the faculty at her College was asked not to talk to the media. But after Hashmi’s extradition, Theoharis told me, she “felt a huge sense of responsibility.” Teaching students is so much about encouraging them to come into their own, to find a voice, and she thought Hashmi had succeeded in doing just that. He had become an activist and a critic of what he thought were unjust policies. Theoharis said, “He was so earnest, so outspoken. My instinct was that there’s no way this is not about politics.”

But it couldn’t have been instinct alone. Athan Theoharis, Jeanne’s father, is the author of a definitive, critical book about the FBI and the ways in which the agency has undermined civil liberties and democratic institutions. Her mother is a social activist. Jeanne Theoharis’s own research is on the civil rights movement in America. She is currently writing a book on Rosa Parks, who, despite the current public image of her as an icon of democracy, had been reviled for decades as a traitor and a communist.

Theoharis responded to Hashmi’s extradition by meeting with his lawyer. She also met and talked with a colleague of hers, Corey Robin, who is the author of a book about the ways in which fear circumscribes our lives and rights. Then, she sent a brief letter (“literally like a condolence card”) to Hashmi’s parents. Hashmi’s old father called Theoharis and broke down and wept on the phone. With this appeal for help, Theoharis began to define a role for herself in what she regarded as a fight for justice.

After several delays, Hashmi’s trial in New York has just been postponed indefinitely. According to Hashmi’s lawyer, the case against his client rests on the testimony of single government informant, Junaid Babar. The informant had stayed for a short while in Hashmi’s apartment in London, at a time when Hashmi was working toward a graduate degree in Political Science. In addition, Babar had used Hashmi’s cellphone to call his associates; he also claims to have received money from Hashmi. Having already pleaded guilty to having been involved in terror plots, his work as an informant is widely seen as an attempt to get a reduction in his 70-year prison sentence.

A few months after his extradition to the US, the conditions of Hashmi’s incarceration underwent a drastic change. He was placed under what is called “special administrative measures.” He was put in solitary confinement; for 23 hours each day he remained in his cell; when taken out of it for an hour, he was allowed to exercise in a cage. He was also under round-the-clock surveillance. He could not participate in group prayer, or communicate with other prisoners, and was denied any access to the media. Family visits were now limited to one family member every two weeks, although even such visits were imperiled because oftentimes, as Hashmi’s parents soon discovered, the meeting could be canceled if the government interpreter had not come. Theoharis believes that the prolonged solitary confinement has already affected Hashmi: in his court appearances, Hashmi has appeared nervous and depressed. Earlier, Theoharis said, Hashmi’s attention “had seemed rock solid” but now “he seems to be retreating into his own head.”

Theoharis also told me that one of the first, more urgent, questions she faced was to come up with a list of books she could send her former student in prison. It was tricky. Which books would not be censored? Theoharis decided to have Amazon.com send books to Hashmi, and among the first titles she chose was Edward Jones’s The Known World because she felt a cover that said “Pulitzer Prize” would make the book less scary to the prison authorities. Among the other titles she sent to prison, without even knowing whether the books were making their way to Hashmi, were Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine.

The book list was a revelation to me. So far, all I had known about Jeanne Theoharis was that she had been behind an online petition signed by hundreds of academics, including some of the top names at US universities (see educatorsforcivilliberties.org). Some of the first people to add their names to the petition were African-Americans and others familiar with the systematic denial of civil rights in the 1960s and later. And when during lunch she told me about her book list, I began to see how Theoharis had understood the related nature of oppressions. Toni Morrison’s novel is a lyrical, wonderfully imaginative account of the brutality of slavery. Julie Otsuka’s book is the story of one Japanese family’s internment in an alien enemy camp in the US. I also saw how Theoharis had perhaps never stopped being Hashmi’s teacher. She was offering solace, or strength, to someone who, in the name of American security, was not even allowed to see the evidence against him.

I also saw Theoharis as offering a lesson to her fellow Americans. She was reminding them that President Obama might have expressed a resolve to close Guantánamo, but it is no consolation at all if Guantánamo has just been moved to within a few blocks of the place where Hashmi was once a student learning about civil rights.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amitava-kumar/kidnapped-by-the-state_b_453462.html

Syed Hashmi, known to his family and friends as Fahad, was born in Karachi, Pakistan in 1980, the second child of Syed Anwar Hashmi and Arifa Hashmi. Fahad immigrated with his family to America when he was three years old. His father said “We knew there would be many opportunities for us here in the United States. We came here to find the American dream.” The large Hashmi family settled in Flushing, New York and soon developed deep roots throughout the tri-state area. Fahad graduated from Robert F Wagner High School in 1998 and attended SUNY Stony Brook University. He transferred to Brooklyn College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2003. A devout Muslim, through the years Fahad established a reputation as an activist and advocate. In 2003, Fahad enrolled in London Metropolitan University in England to pursue a master’s degree in international relations, which he received in 2006. On June 6, 2006, Fahad was arrested in London Heathrow airport by British police based on an American indictment charging him with material support of Al Qaida . He was subsequently held in Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s most notorious jail.

The Charges
The US government accused Fahad of providing material support to Al Qaeda, but a close look at the evidence shows that the charges make little sense. Fahad is NOT charged with providing any money or resources to any terrorists or being a member of al Qaeda. Instead, the US government charged Fahad with allowing an old acquaintance — Junaid Babar — to stay in Fahad’s London apartment for about two weeks in 2004. During that two week period, Babar allegedly kept several raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in luggage that Babar temporarily stored in Fahad’s apartment. The US government then alleges that at some point Babar gave the socks and ponchos to a high ranking member of al Qaeda. There is no allegation that Fahad is a member of al Qaeda or that he ever personally gave or helped to give anything to any member of al Qaeda.

Conditions of Fahad’s Imprisonment
Fahad was held in England’s Belmarsh prison mixed with the general prison population for 11 months without incident. Since his extradition to the United States more than a year ago, Fahad has been kept in solitary confinement and subject to unduly restrictive Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), These draconian measures mandate that he be kept under 23-hour lockdown, be allowed only one visit from an immediate family member a week, and have no other contact with anyone besides his lawyer and prison officials. The SAMs also limit the material that Fahad can read and make it illegal for his family members to pass any messages from him onto friends.
Fahad is not charged with any acts of violence, nor were there any accusations that he attempted to contact any terrorists during his time with the general prison population at Belmarsh, rendering the restrictions he is subject to unnecessarily cruel in a society that treats people as innocent until proven guilty. SAMs are meant to prevent crimes orchestrated from within prison walls, but even if EVERYTHING the government alleges is true, there is no evidence that Fahad would be a danger if he were kept with the general prison population.

The Evidence Against Fahad
Substantial evidence in the case will come from the testimony of Junaid Babar, the man who stayed at Fahad’s London apartment as a houseguest. There is evidence to show that Babar’s testimony may be unreliable. He has taken a plea bargain – he will receive a reduced sentence if he agrees to testify against people like Fahad. It is a common practice for the government to offer a deal to one defendant who’s accused of a lesser crime in order to convict a more serious criminal – in this case his testimony will be used try to convict somebody who gave him a place to sleep for two weeks.

Civil Liberties Concerns
Many in the civil liberties community are gravely concerned by the implications of Fahad’s case. Fahad is facing trumped-up charges as a result of his opinions. It is a dangerous precedent to make people responsible for the actions of their houseguests. Concern also surrounds the conditions of Fahad’s detention. Even were all the charges against him true, the SAMS measures would be unwarranted. The government should exercise extreme caution when deciding when to invoke such severe restrictions. He is in solitary confinement and subject to a regime of severe deprivation. Under the SAM imposed by the Attorney General, Hashmi must be held in solitary confinement and may not communicate with anyone inside the prison other than prison officials. Family visits were not granted for many months and are now limited to one person every other week for one and a half hours, and cannot involve physical contact. Mr. Hashmi may write only one letter (of no more than three pieces of paper) per week to one family member. He may not communicate, either directly or through his attorneys, with the news media. He may read only designated portions of newspapers – and not until thirty days after their publication – and his access to other reading material is restricted. He may not listen to or watch news-oriented radio stations and television channels. He may not participate in group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown, has no access to fresh air, and must take his one-hour of daily recreation – when it is given – inside a cage.