Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Are we one of the people who do nothing? (to counter Islamophobia)

Find this and many more articles on the Islamophobia issue: The Nation Magazine:
July 2-9 2012

From:
My dad, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, was arrested by the FBI on trumped up charges, sending a chill through the local Muslim community. Yet we found support from unlikely allies.

Here's just an excerpt of the articles' ending:

... In November 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney created the “1 percent doctrine,” which held that if there is even “a 1 percent chance” that a threat is real, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” As policy, this has led to innocent Muslims being framed or entrapped in plots wholly manufactured by the FBI.

One of the most egregious cases took place in Albany, where a local imam—a Kurdish immigrant named Yassin Aref—found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case began with a notebook, discovered in 2003 in the wreckage of a bombed-out encampment in Iraq. Aref’s name was on one of the pages, alongside the Kurdish word kak, which US authorities translated as “commander.” (It actually means “brother.”) With that, Aref was suddenly a government target. The FBI enlisted the help of Shahed Hussain, an informant facing deportation for fraud who has since been involved in several other sting operations throughout the Northeast. Hussain approached a friend of Aref’s, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, and offered him a loan of $50,000. After giving him the money, Hussain told him it had come from the sale of a missile to be used in an attack against the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. That, too, was part of the FBI sting.
Aref, knowing nothing about the supposed missile sale, was asked to witness the loan payment. The informant spoke in code, using the word chaudry—a common South Asian surname—to refer to the missile. Aref was arrested and, in March 2007, sentenced to fifteen years in prison on terror charges, including support for a foreign terrorist organization and money laundering.
“It’s fabricated police work,” says Andrew Shryock, a University of Michigan professor, regarding these types of prosecutions using government informants. “And the disturbing thing is not that it produces arrests but that the public tolerates it.”

Aref’s case galvanized peace activists in Albany, who held vigils and wrote letters to the judge calling for Aref’s release. Among them was Steve Downs, a former attorney for New York state, who volunteered in his defense. The day after Aref’s conviction, he visited his client in prison. “He looked at me and said, ‘I want to fire you as my lawyer,’” Downs told me, smiling. “But he said, ‘I want to hire you as my brother.’ He said, ...and I need family more than I need lawyers.’”

Downs and the Muslim Solidarity Committee, as the mostly non-Muslim Albany activists called themselves, raised thousands of dollars to help cover the rent for Aref’s wife and four children. Downs and others also drove Aref’s children to visit their father in prison, fourteen hours away in Indiana.

“I’m not sure I would’ve had the guts to do any of this by myself,” Downs says of the activism around Aref’s case, which drew strength from the number of people involved. Now 70 and retired, Downs says his profession long discouraged him from involvement in political causes, so that for twenty-eight years, he was in a “cocoon.” Today, he is glad to have broken free of it.
“When I was 3 years old, my father died in World War II,” he recalls. “He was a Navy doctor. Later, I asked my mom, ‘Why did he die?’ She would say, ‘Well, there was this war—the Nazis came to power in Germany.’ I would ask, ‘How did Hitler come to power if he was so bad?’ And she would say, ‘Because good people who could have stopped him didn’t do anything.’
“A lot of time growing up, I was angry at good people who didn’t do anything,” Downs says. “Until one day, I realized I was one of those people.”

5 comments:

  1. Just in from Christian Science Monitor June 20 PM

    'Executive Privilege.' What's that?

    Facing a contempt vote, Attorney General Eric Holder urged Obama to invoke 'executive privilege' to avoid turning over documents to Congress. To be valid, the claim must bear on a core power of the presidency.

    By Peter Grier, Staff writer / June 20, 2012

    Attorney General Eric holder spoke to reporters on June 19, following his meeting on Capitol Hill over a request from a congressional panel for more Justice Department documents regarding Operation Fast and Furious, a flawed gun-smuggling probe on the border.

    Susan Walsh/AP

    President Obama on Wednesday invoked executive privilege to withhold from a congressional committee some documents dealing with the failed gun enforcement operation “Fast and Furious."

    Peter Grier, the writer of this article, is The Christian Science Monitor's Washington editor. In this capacity, he helps direct coverage for the paper on most news events in the nation's capital.

    (See other comment(s) for more....

    ReplyDelete
  2. How much do you know about the US Constitution? A quiz. (According to the CSM Christian Science Monitor)

    Obama invokes executive privilege to protect Eric Holder: Can he do that? What’s executive privilege, exactly?

    Well, executive privilege is not mentioned in the Constitution, per se. But since the founding of the republic, presidents have, on occasion, claimed a right to withhold information from Congress in the name of confidentiality. Their theory is that, without this right, it would be much more difficult for US chief executives to get the unvarnished advice they need to run the nation.

    RECOMMENDED: Know your US presidents? See if D.C. Decoder can stump you.

    George Washington, for instance, in 1796 refused to let the House of Representatives see presidential papers dealing with negotiations over the controversial Jay Treaty with Great Britain. Some years later, Andrew Jackson said Congress couldn’t have documents detailing negotiations over the shape of Maine.

    In the 1950s, President Eisenhower refused to allow his attorney general to testify before the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee. It was at this point that the concept got the name “executive privilege” and expanded to cover more than direct presidential papers.

    Watergate gave executive privilege more legal heft. President Nixon asserted that he had broad powers to withhold from Congress executive branch documents, testimony from officials, and (most crucially) his White House tapes. Federal judges ruled that presidents did indeed have a presumption of executive privilege. But they also held that this power isn’t limitless. Executive privilege could be overruled if Congress showed an overriding public need for the information. In Nixon’s case, that’s what happened.

    According to an authoritative Congressional Research Service history of executive privilege, at least three important elements must be present for a legally correct assertion of the power. First, the communication the president wishes to withhold must bear on a core power of the presidency, such as the right to grant pardons or conduct law enforcement. Second, the communication must have come from or to the president or a close White House adviser. Third, the communication can’t contain info so unique that investigators can’t figure it out by looking elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well since Holder and Obama are in the limelight on the "Fast and Furious" accusations, it's as fine time as any to take a closer look at Holder's apparent flip-flopping or at times unconcern about torture of "enemy combatants" in our name. Whether or not some of what's being said or revealed is damage control or whether or not Holder (Obama?) have been caught practicing
    unconstitutional, illegal acts, we need to ask whether or not Holder/Obama and others who represent us are practicing the kind of rights which represent the majority of US citizens who dont stomach torture, intimidation, religious scoffing or departures from the US constitution.

    These concerns should matter regardless of our political affiliation or despite the possible/likely election politics use of this current Holder raking over coals.

    ReplyDelete
  4. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/06/christopher-hitchens-waterboarding-video-changed-eric-holders-mind/53114

    /http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/obama-executive-privilege-fast-and-furious_n_1611962.html?utm_hp_ref=eric-holder

    almost 36 THOUSAND comments!
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/obama-executive-privilege-fast-and-furious_n_1611962.html?utm_hp_ref=eric-holder

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well since Holder and Obama are in the limelight on the "Fast and Furious" accusations, it's as fine time as any to take a closer look at Holder's apparent flip-flopping or at times unconcern about torture of "enemy combatants" in our name. Whether or not some of what's being said or revealed is damage control or whether or not Holder (Obama?) have been caught practicing
    unconstitutional, illegal acts, we need to ask whether or not Holder/Obama and others who represent us are practicing the kind of rights which represent the majority of US citizens who dont stomach torture, intimidation, religious scoffing or departures from the US constitution.

    These concerns should matter regardless of our political affiliation or despite the possible/likely election politics use of this current Holder raking over coals.

    ReplyDelete

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