The Palestinian activist and professor Sami Al-Arian has been deported this week from the United States. In one of the most controversial prosecutions of the post-9/11 era, Al-Arian was jailed in Florida for five-and-a-half years on what many described as trumped-up charges. He was arrested in 2003 at a time when he was one of the most prominent Palestinian activists in the United States. In addition to teaching at the University of South Florida, Al-Arian was a frequent media commentator and speaker at antiwar rallies. He co-founded the Tampa Bay Coalition for Peace and Justice and the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom. Between 1997 and 2001, he visited the White House four times. He actively campaigned for George W. Bush in the 2000 election. But life for Sami Al-Arian changed after the September 11th attacks.
On September 28th, 2001, Sami Al-Arian was interviewed on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly about former University of South Florida professor Ramadan Shalah, who went on to become the leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Beginning the next day, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian worked, was overwhelmed by hundreds of threatening letters and emails. Thirty-six hours after the interview, the university put Professor Al-Arian on paid leave.
in February 2003, Al-Arian was arrested and accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Justice Department handed down a sweeping 50-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.
At the end of his trial in December 2005, the jury failed to return a single guilty verdict. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of 17 counts against him, and the jury deadlocked on the rest. Four months after the verdict, he agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges in exchange for being released and deported. He was later found guilty of civil contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in another case. In the end, Al-Arian was jailed from February of 2003 until September of 2008. For three-and-a-half years, he was imprisoned in solitary confinement. He was then held under house arrest until this week, when he was deported to Turkey. Last year, a federal court dropped all charges against him. Sami Al-Arian joins us now from Istanbul, Turkey, in his first broadcast interview since being deported.
Sami Al-Arian talking:
It feels like I’m free, finally really feeling freedom for the first time in 12 years. I don’t have to watch over my back or my head, or think that someone is trying to monitor you or get you. So, it feels like you’re free.
It’s much better than prison, of course, but you’re under house arrest, so basically you’re confined to your living environment. And though there were no restrictions, other than that you can’t leave the house, you still know that you’re being monitored all over you. So it’s not really total freedom. And unfortunately, after 9/11, many Americans feel that they live in surveillance and police state, and that’s a very discomforting feeling.
I actually applied to many countries, some in Latin America, some in the Middle East and Turkey. And I have friends who actually talked to the Turkish authorities, and they immediately made the decision to accept me. So, it’s a tribute to them and to their thinking, of that they value people who fight for freedom or have been dealt with unjustly. And I’m very grateful for that.
Laila Al-Arian talking:
I think what’s really important to take note of is the fact that when my father was arrested nearly 12 years ago in February, on February 20th, 2003, John Ashcroft went on national television and made pretty extraordinary claims about who my father is, completely distorting and outright lying about my father, calling him a terrorist on national television. And, of course, years later, none of that has borne true. My father was acquitted by 12 ordinary jurors in Florida. He said from the very beginning this is a political case. And I think what people should take away from what has been a nightmare for our family is the fact that in the United States of America there’s no room for political prisoners, there’s no room for politically motivated prosecutions. And, you know, my father was vindicated, even if he did have to eventually leave the country. I think when we look back at this case in history, we’ll see that, you know, it’s really a shameful part of our history. And, you know, it won’t be—it won’t be something that anyone will look at with any kind of pride. So, I hope we learn the lessons from this case.
it’s impacted us personally. My sister, the youngest sibling, was nine years old when all of this began. She’s now about to graduate college. So you can just see how long this ordeal has lasted for us. You know, it’s been, in many ways, pretty destabilizing, feeling that we’ve been—not feeling, knowing, actually, that we’ve been under surveillance, even as children. So, when we were going over—you know, when my father was preparing for his trial, and his attorneys, we learned that, in fact, all of our phone calls were recorded, even as children. We had the opportunity to even listen to some of the phone calls between us and our friends when we were in grade school. It’s something that’s pretty psychologically jarring and traumatizing. So I think really feeling that every aspect of your life is under surveillance by the government, simply because my father was an outspoken Palestinian advocate, is something that I’ll never truly get over.
But at the same time, there’s been a lot of positive things that have come out of this case, a lot of the relationships we’ve formed with many supporters, many activists, who have really, you know, shown tremendous courage in standing up for my father and his rights, and that’s what we’ll really remember more than anything else.
Sami Al-Arian talking:
It’s really a story of what happened after 9/11. After 9/11, for whatever reason, the forces of intolerance, exclusionary politics and hegemony really took center stage, where rational people were no longer able to advance any kind of dialogue or rationality in their dealings. So what you have here is people who pressured the government just to take retaliatory action against any activists. And if they had the opportunity to do that, they just went for it.
For instance, you know, my case was celebrated as being the first case after the PATRIOT Act, meaning—you know, they said that the intelligence people did not speak to the prosecution’s, and therefore the government, to actually prosecute criminals, they didn’t know anything about my activities. And that was patently false, because during my discovery I saw an earlier version of the indictment back in 2000, when we were very active politically and my brother-in-law was in immigration court. They really wanted to indict me and stop what—you know, the activity that we were doing. But somehow Janet Reno, Department of Justice, refused, refused to prosecute that case. And it was every other act that they said the prosecution didn’t know from the intelligence people, was there up to 2000, so that was patently false.
And it was so political case that, you know, all legal standards were just—were just ignored. You know, my speedy trial—I was denied speedy trial. You know, the judge asked me in April of 2003 if I’m going to waive my speedy trial. When I said no, that meant that they had to try me within 70 days. The government immediately objected and said they were not ready. And if they were not ready to try the case, why did they indict?
So if you go back and see the political nature of the case—when USF was in hot water because they wanted to terminate my employment, and they couldn’t do it because of the pressure that was coming from all over the place, we found, for instance, that the president of USF went to the U.S. attorney, in public, asking him to investigate. And at the end of the meeting, the U.S. attorney announces, in February of 2002, the empaneling of a grand jury. Now, grand juries are supposed to be in secret. And here we had the university president going to the government, asking them to bail her out, and at the end of the meeting, they announced the empaneling of a grand jury. And then nothing happens.
And I saw in discovery, for instance, when the government wanted to settle—I mean, sorry, when the university wanted to settle with me, and they offered me almost a million dollars to resign, the board of trustees chairman objected, because he had been calling me, you know, all kind of names up to that point. And he was the governor’s appointee, Jeb Bush’s appointee. So he goes to Jeb Bush, basically—and we have that information from their lawyer—and he asks to bail him out. And then, somehow, instead of offering me a settlement, they sue me in court in order to fire me. It was a delaying tactic. And I could see, during my discovery, how the speed-up of the grand jury went in August, September, October and so on, until the indictment came back in February.
And then, we saw, you know, that the—you know, during the superseding indictment, when they indicted earlier in 2003, they had 17 counts against me. But they knew that half of these counts, the statute of limitations had run out. And the judge kept telling them, “When are you going to supersede?” But they didn’t want to supersede with less counts, so they added more counts on some transactions that took place in Chicago that I had no knowledge of, and they knew that I had no knowledge of it. And when we went to trial, they produced zero evidence of that. And then the person who was actually on the phone calls, on the transactions, on the bank account, on the—on everything that had to deal with Chicago, was soon acquitted, and I wasn’t, because two jurors couldn’t bring themselves to acquit on all counts. So, you know, from start to finish, it was a political case, unfortunately, that took a very ugly turn. And, you know, thankfully, we had great jurors who could see through that, and they would not, at the end, go along and support the government’s case.
Laila Al-Arian talking:
I was actually the same age as my youngest sister is now. I was 21, studying at Georgetown University. And I actually heard the news in a phone call from an administrator who worked in the same office where I had my work-study job. And she called me to convey her sadness over the arrest. I had no idea, so of course I was really shocked to learn what happened and, you know, just tried to focus on graduating, really, at that point. And then, after that, I really started becoming involved in advocating for my father and raising awareness, not just about his case, but about the atrocious prison conditions that he was suffering under, which we talked about a little bit earlier. Throughout that time, he also went on three different hunger strikes to protest his prison conditions, but also the fact that a vindictive prosecutor, long after my father was acquitted by a jury, tried to ensnare him in another case up here in Virginia unrelated even to his own trial. So, you know, there were a number of times when we really had to raise awareness about his case, and that kind of became a full-time job for our family.
Sami Al-Arian talking:
I’m aware of the pressures that they were facing, as I said, after 9/11. But unfortunately, you know, most of the rules that govern the relationship between the citizens and the government were just scrapped. You know, the government has now—or at least after, shortly after 9/11, they just did whatever they thought they can get away with. You know, I remember one of the lawyers, who had access to some information, was that even the prosecutors themselves, when they went, before indictment, to Washington, D.C., telling Chertoff, who was at the time the head of the criminal section of the Justice Department, that some of these charges they couldn’t prove. He said, “Everything stays. Everything stays.” So, you know, it’s very sad that you had to go through this.
You know, you’re right, I went to the White House several times, not just during the Bush, but even the Clinton administration. I was able to communicate, and that’s a tribute to the system, in fact, that I was able to go and meet with all kinds of leaders. You know, I met with Bush, Hillary, you know, Bill Clinton, all kinds of people in Congress, chairmen, speakers and so on and so forth. And the whole point was to engage politically, because there are certain causes that were of concern to me at the time. A lot of it has to do with civil rights and secret evidence. And I thought that we were making progress, that the politicians were really responsive to our plea and to our campaign against the use of secret evidence.
Even in the—a lot of people ask me, “Why did you support Bush?” Well, it wasn’t really supporting Bush per se. You now, I approached both the Gore campaign and the Bush campaign, and the Gore campaign, whose administration at the time was using secret evidence, against mostly Arabs and Muslims, they just ignored our pleas, whereas the Bush campaign gave us lip service, except at the last month, when the race was neck to neck. So I get a call from someone who was very close to Karl Rove, asking me personally how we can get the endorsement of the Muslim community. And my answer was that you need to—so he needs to say—the candidate, Bush, needs to say publicly that he’s against secret evidence and that he is for the bill that we were advancing in Congress. And to my surprise, the following day, during the second debate, he said these two things. You know, he was asked about racial profiling, and he came in saying, you know, “There’s another form of racial profiling used against Arab Americans. It’s called secret evidence. And I support the bill in Congress.” And I get a call back, and said, “Now I delivered. Are you going to deliver?”
So it shows that empowerment of communities does work when you are active. And the Muslim leaders, the Arab—the Muslim American leaders actually met and decided to support Bush based on his stand on secret evidence. And the following week, they met and endorsed him, and they identified six states as being the swing states. And Florida was my—because I lived in Florida, it fell into me. And we did a lot of programs, again, based on this; it wasn’t based on Iraq or Palestine or other things. It really was based on that one issue. And he won by 537 votes. And obviously, we proved later on that we delivered to him 14,000 extra votes than what he would have got had we not intervened.
And then, the following month, you know, I get invited to the inauguration, and I get a thank you from Newt Gingrich and John Sununu and Tom Davis, that we really delivered that to Bush. And then we asked them to deliver for us secret evidence, you know, the bill against secret evidence. And they tell us that the Bush—because Ashcroft was delayed, his confirmation was delayed, he said it’s going to take time to study the issue. But I get a call back in August of 2001 basically telling me, from the same person, that they’ve studied the issue, and we were going to get—to hear good news. And he asked me to invite all the Arab and Muslim leaders to Washington, D.C., at the White House, in which that news would have been announced.
And I did invite everybody, and I briefed them, and I told them that there will be an announcement, an important announcement, against the use of secret evidence by Bush that afternoon. And everybody was in town. Unfortunately, it was on 9/11. It was 3:00 on 9/11. So that meeting never happened. But everybody was asking, “How come all these Arab and Muslim leaders were in Washington, even though the airspace was closed for several days?” And the reason they were behind Bush when he visited a mosque and when he went to the National Cathedral is because they were already there. They were going to meet with him for that announcement.
It never happened, of course. You know, at the time, we were protesting secret evidence. What happened after 9/11 is that they were arresting people with no evidence. I mean, we really went totally backward. And as I said, all the rules were no longer valid. So, you know, it’s a sad story in the history. One day it will be written.
But, you know, I’m so happy that a lot of people are pushing back. You know, at the beginning, there was this shock, where everybody was afraid, everybody was angry, everybody was stepping back. But after the abuses that we’ve witnessed in the past 10 years, a lot of people are stepping up. A lot of people are protesting. A lot of people are speaking out. We saw even some government contractors or officials, like Snowden, is crying out against what’s taking place. And hopefully, you know, the excesses of the surveillance and police state will be put in place.
I’ve heard a lot from Obama, but it’s all rhetoric. You know, when it comes to actual policies, I haven’t seen much change. I mean, at the beginning, I give him the benefit of the doubt. You wait for a couple of years. He’s busy with the economic program. He’s busy with, you know, trying to get elected for the second term. But after six years, I haven’t really seen much change. And that is very distressing.
And I tell people, you know, change should come really from the bottom up. Very rarely you get change from the top down, until people stand up and speak out and campaign and go to their congressmen and senators and administration and voice opposition to these policies, that not only is going to affect Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, it’s going to affect every American. And we can’t advocate a policy where, you know, the rights of the minority could be taken out so that the majority could feel at ease, because eventually any—any things that will restrict—
— source democracynow.org
Sami Al-Arian, a prominent Palestinian activist and professor. He has lived in the United States for the last 40 years, but was just deported to Turkey. He was previously accused of ties to the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but a Florida jury failed to return a single guilty verdict on any of the 17 charges against him.
Laila Al-Arian, Peabody Award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C. She is the co-author (with Chris Hedges) of Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. She is the daughter of Sami Al-Arian.