"Traditional Islam is not the replication of the positions of the ancients; it is to seek what they sought." (Abdal-Hakim Murad)

Contentions 13, # 93

Chris Hedges: One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_day_well_all_be_terrorists_20091228/

Posted on Dec 28, 2009

By Chris Hedges

Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.

This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.orgor www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.

The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.

Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2½ years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His “proclivity for violence” is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.

“My brother was an activist,” Hashmi’s brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. “He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother’s humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.

“Hashmi’s right to a fair trial has been abridged,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA, and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.

“The prosecution’s case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others,” Ratner added. “While Hashmi’s political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities.”

Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.

“Most of the evidence is classified,” Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, “but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2½ years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi.”

Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.” He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master’s degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more “aspirational rather than operational.” And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney’s actions in Al-Arian’s plea agreement saying curtly: “I think there’s something more important here, and that’s the integrity of the Justice Department.”

The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.

“Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political,” said Theoharis. “This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can’t get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril.”

Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar’s presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.

There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.” All calls and mail—although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials—are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill., they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.

Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.

Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).

AP / Mary Altaffer

The image of Uncle Sam is seen behind shattered glass at the military recruitment center in New York’s Times Square.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET

Getting comfortable with imperfect security Posted By Stephen M. Walt

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/28/getting_comfortable_with_imperfect_security

After reading several post-mortems on the abortive attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 the other day, there's little doubt that the security procedures failed badly. Here's the kicker, courtesy of the New York Times:

The family of the suspect arrested in the Dec. 25 incident, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said on Monday that they had been trying to locate him for weeks, had sought help from Nigerian and American officials and would cooperate with an investigation. His father, a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official, phoned the American Embassy in Abuja in October with a warning that his son had developed radical views, had disappeared and might have traveled to Yemen. But embassy officials did not revoke the young man's visa to enter the United States, which was good until June 2010.

Instead, officials said on Sunday, they marked the file of the son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa. And when they passed the information on to Washington, Mr. Abdulmutallab's name was added to 550,000 others with some alleged terrorist connections -- but not to the no-fly list. That meant no flags were raised when he used cash to buy a ticket to the United States and boarded a plane, checking no bags.

Other commentators have already pointed out some of the reasons for the failure (among other things, our "watch lists" are bloated with lots of people who got placed on them on dubious grounds), but the predictable outrage at this obvious failure needs to be tempered with a bit of, well, realism.

The cruel reality is that no combination of security measures and counter-terrorist action can drive the risk of terrorist attacks-including attacks on airliners-down to zero. All of these protective measures involve considerable expense and divert resources away from other initiatives that could also save lives or make people safer. We should of course take reasonable precautions -- like secure locks on cockpit doors so that planes cannot be commandeered and transformed into weapons as they were on 9/11 -- and continue to work on refining security procedures. Varying routines and holding officials accountable (now there's a novel concept!) makes sense too.

But we also need to recognize that we can never achieve perfect security, and that means terrorist attacks will sometimes succeed. (Airline travel is a lot safer than it was fifty years ago, but airplanes sometimes crash for other reasons and we can't make that impossible either). There are enough angry people out there; destructive technology is too plentiful, and all security procedures are fallible, especially in the face of adversaries who can calculate and plan and look for chinks in the armor. This danger -- which is often overstated but will not disappear completely -- is simply part of the price of doing business in the contemporary world. And we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

Moreover, at some point the cost of additional security precautions simply isn't worth it in terms of the additional safety gained, especially if it means neglecting other steps that could improve human well-being. Our aim should be to prevent the worst sorts of attacks -- and especially those involving weapons of mass destruction -- while admitting to ourselves that perfect security is impossible. The good news -- and it really is good -- is that the probability that any of us will be harmed in a terrorist incident is far lower than the odds we will die in a car accident or a bathroom mishap.

Nonetheless, as economist Kip Viscusi argues in a recent article, the public appears to place a greater premium on preventing deaths by terrorism than some other possible dangers (such as natural disasters). So let's by all means learn from this latest incident and try to do better. But I hope that grandstanding politicians quickly move on to something else, and that we don't impose another costly and time-consuming layer of security procedures in a fruitless attempt to achieve complete invulnerability.

Reviving the Islamic Spirit 2009

Thousands attend Toronto Muslim convention

Reviving the Islamic Spirit Conference: "Saving Our Souls" starts with a message for all

Reviving the Islamic Spirit Conference continues with a message of love for family & community

Reviving the Islamic Spirit Conference: "Saving Our Ship for Humanity" ends "United We Stand."

"I tell my students it takes at least twenty-five years to lay an adequate foundation to do the kind of work one is called to do." (Cornel West)

-pg. 550 of The Cornel West Reader

New York Ranks Last in Happiness Rating

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/nyregion/22nyc.html

December 22, 2009

NYC

By CLYDE HABERMAN

In this season given to tidings of comfort and joy, word has come that we New Yorkers are the sad sacks of the United States. This is something of a surprise. Sure, we complain a lot. Grumbling could qualify as the official state sport. But are we really the unhappiest of them all?

It seems so, judging from a study by two economics professors, newly published in Science magazine. The academics — Andrew J. Oswald, of the University of Warwick in Britain, and Stephen Wu, of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. — examined piles of data, tossed them into a research Cuisinart and came up with a guide to American happiness, ranked by state. On the smiley scale, New York landed on the bottom.

Dead last?

“I’m sorry about that,” Professor Oswald said by phone from Warwick.

It’s rather dismal. If there were a National Happy League, we’d be the New Jersey Nets. We’re No. 51 out of 51. The District of Columbia was included in the list as if it were a state. It made it all the way to No. 37 despite the handicap of having Congress in its midst.

At least New Yorkers can take comfort in knowing that their immediate neighbors in Connecticut (No. 50) and New Jersey (No. 49) are not appreciably happier.

A remarkable aspect of this study is that Professors Wu and Oswald concluded that we are not gruntled without even having asked what we think of Albany, Donald Trump or Thom Browne suits. Rather, they focused on two sets of information.

One was a survey of 1.3 million Americans done over four years by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which asked people about their health and how satisfied they were with their lives. Those self-assessments were stacked against “objective indicators” borrowed from researchers at U.C.L.A. They included state-by-state variances on quality-of-life gauges like climate, taxes, cost of living, commuting times, crime rates and schools.

When the two sets were blended, the economists discovered that the subjective judgments closely tracked the objective ones. In other words, people knew what they were talking about when they said if they were happy or not. Americans who described themselves as satisfied tended to live in places where the quality of life was good by most standards — where the sun shone a lot, the air was reasonably clear, housing didn’t leave you busted, traffic wasn’t too fierce and so on.

“We were actually surprised that the match was as strong as it was,” Professor Wu said in a phone interview. “The strength of the correlation is very, very high.”

The state-by-state rankings were not a priority, he said. But they are what has inevitably drawn the most attention. In case you were wondering — and you know you were — the Top 10 states on the happiness scale are, in descending order, Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, Alabama and Maine.

Louisiana? Uh, didn’t it have that huge hurricane, what’s her name, a few years back?

Yeah, Katrina is a complication, the professors said. Some of their data predated the storm. But the hurricane is not all that defines Louisiana. Like nearly all the other states in the Top 10, it is warm. (Surprisingly, sunny California is way down in the ranks, No. 46.)

It falls to a New Yorker to ask how it is, if this is such an unhappy place, that more people are living in the city than ever before: an estimated 8.4 million. “That’s a very sensible point,” Professor Oswald said. Many people, he said, do indeed think of states like New York and California as “marvelous places to live in.”

“The problem,” he said, “is that if too many individuals think that way, they move into those states, and the resulting congestion and house prices make it a nonfulfilling prophecy.”

Not to be unkind, but some states that made the Top 10 are among the poorest in the country. Are people there truly happy, or are they wearing “What, me worry?” smiles.

More important, might contentment be overrated? Seriously, isn’t restlessness, even outright discontent, often a catalyst for creativity?

We’re from the Harry Lime school. If you’ve seen the film classic “The Third Man,” you will remember that character’s admonition: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

“In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

Refusal to release autopsy raises suspicions

December 22, 2009 http://detnews.com/article/20091222/metro01/912220352 Refusal to release autopsy raises suspicions County medical examiner cites investigation as the reason for holding on to information PAUL EGAN The Detroit News Dearborn -- The Wayne County medical examiner's refusal to release its autopsy report on Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah is fueling concerns in the Muslim community about a possible cover-up of facts surrounding his death, a community leader said Monday. Abdullah, 53, was killed Oct. 28 in a gunfight with the FBI at a Dearborn warehouse. The FBI said Abdullah, an alleged leader of a radical Muslim separatist group involved in fencing stolen goods, fired a weapon that killed an FBI dog. The county Medical Examiner's Office denied a Nov. 2 request The Detroit News filed for Abdullah's medical examiner report, saying it was not complete. Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Michigan, said the county office has not responded to a request from his organization requesting a copy of the report once it is completed. The office also quoted exorbitant fees for copies of autopsy photos, he said. Dennis Niemiec, a spokesman for the county, confirmed Monday that the report is completed but is being withheld at the request of Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad, who does not want the report released until his department completes its investigation. The county will seek more information from Haddad about how the release of the report would hamper his investigation, Niemiec said. Haddad could not be reached for comment. Walid said medical examiner reports are frequently released during active police investigations. "The unfortunate and perhaps unintended consequence is that the failure to release the autopsy report and the very exorbitant amount for the pictures is raising in the minds of some people in the community that there's a potential cover-up," Walid said. How many times he was shot, whether he suffered dog bites, and whether Abdullah was handcuffed after he was shot are among the questions on people's minds, Walid said. Special Agent Sandra Berchtold, a spokeswoman for the FBI, said it was not the federal agency's call to withhold the report. However, "evidence is often not released during an ongoing investigation," she said. © Copyright 2009 The Detroit News. All rights reserved. http://dawudwalid.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/refusal-to-release-imams-autopsy-raises-suspicions/

the tragedy of the political neutralisation of the American Muslim community

Also dismally absent from the discussion is the tragedy of the political neutralisation of the American Muslim community. Dissent, a core American political value, is one denied to American Muslims who cannot point to the vacuity of many of the terror charges produced against suspects or that pronouncements about the radicalisation of their community may be premature.

Any critique whatsoever of the policies that lead to terror arrests or that highlight the injustice of condemning those who have yet to be charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime is deemed as apologia favouring terrorism. As the unabated political fever for establishing a connection between AfPak and American security rises; American Muslims must contend not simply with the burden of increased scrutiny but also with a tragic political silencing.

-"Climate of suspicion" by Rafia Zakaria

"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle."

"Perhaps the most important thing for all of us to remember is that which Martin Luther King Jr. tried to tell us in his last full book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?: namely, that 'Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.'"

-pg. 149 of Tim Wise's Between Barack and A Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama

Q&A from "The Sacred Trust" with Imam Zaid for MSA National

Watch live streaming video from mcontributor at livestream.com