A petition seeking justice for 400 wrongfully prosecuted Muslims is to be delivered to President Obama and Attorney General Holder on Tuesday, February 3. Please sign, and pass on information about the petition to anyone you think might also be interested. The petition can be signed online at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/projectsalam/index.html
Details follow…
The petition is an initiative of the (Albany, NY-based) Muslim Solidarity
Committee. It is also being signed by individuals across the nation, including some well-known figures such as Brother David Steindl-Rast and Howard Zinn. If, under the Obama administration, justice is to be restored to the Justice Department, the 400 cases mentioned in this petition must be reviewed, and the grievous injustices that took place must be remedied. The petition encourages President Obama and Attorney General Holder to make this goal a priority of the Justice Department.
Again, the petition can be signed online at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/projectsalam/index.html
You can, of course, find the exact wording of the petition at the above
url. But it is also reproduced below, for your convenience.
Stephen Downs, the petition’s primary signatory, and Kathy Manley,
are both local attorneys who worked tirelessly on the Aref/Hossain case,
and on the appeal, and continue to advocate in their behalf. Individuals
interested in learning more about the cases in question before signing the
petition might begin with these national and local news articles:
http://www.yassinaref.com/newsarticles.htm
The petition reads:
———————-
Dear President Obama and Attorney General Holder:
We join with the consensus of people who believe that upon taking office
you must move swiftly to close Guantanamo, end warrantless electronic
surveillance, and prevent the U.S. from engaging in further torture. These
fundamental errors arose because the Justice Department succumbed to
post-9/11 hysteria and set aside the Constitution and a long legal
tradition of due process and respect for human rights to sanction illegal
government policies aimed primarily against Muslims.
The fundamental errors of the Justice Department did not stop just at
international issues such as Guantanamo and torture, but continued into
domestic prosecutions of Muslims based on suspicion of possible future
criminal activity, rather than on actual crimes committed. Obviously,
prosecuting innocent people because of suspicion that they might commit
crimes in the future is highly illegal, and violates the Constitution and
our legal tradition in the same way as the Bush Administration’s policy on
torture or Guantanamo violates it. That these prosecutions were directed
at a particular religious group – Muslims – makes the errors all the more
offensive to American notions of justice. We ask you to review these
prosecutions.
Project SALAM is an internet project, whose web address is listed above,
dedicated to recording and documenting the Justice Department’s illegal
abuses against the Muslim community after 9/11. On our website we have
listed approximately 400 cases that we believe may have resulted in
injustice – and the number keeps growing. Rather than provide you with
massive amounts of material showing this abuse, we are including with this
letter only a sample of newspaper columns from around the country showing
how independent newspaper reporters reacted to some of the phony,
over-hyped, under-proved prosecutions of Muslims that have occurred around
the country. If this material does not convince you that an investigation
is necessary, we will be happy to provide more.
The abuses in the prosecution of innocent Muslims have not received the
same publicity or scrutiny that Guantanamo or the torture policy have, but
they have resulted in equally serious or even greater abuses. We believe
that large numbers of innocent or over-charged Muslims are serving long
prison terms based on illegal and unconscionable prosecution tactics,
where the prosecutors knew or believed that the defendants were not guilty
of any crime or were not guilty to the extent prosecuted. If an
independent inspector were to examine the files of these cases, he or she
would discover memos indicating that the prosecutions were begun not
because the prosecutors believed the defendants had committed crimes, but
at best because they believed the defendants were suspicious or might
commit crimes in the future, and at worst because they believed that a
successful prosecution might intimidate the Muslim community, or boost
approval of the administration at the polls, or justify the large budgets
given to law enforcement after 9/11, or lead to the “cooperation” of the
target defendant against other suspicious targets. In many instances, no
criminal activity would have existed at all but for the fictional
conspiracies or terrorist plots created by the prosecutors themselves.
Often the charges and the proof against the defendants rely on guilt by
association and on the demonizing of free speech and lawful activities.
Some of the common factors in these prosecutions have been the use of
illegal wiretaps, secret evidence withheld from the defense, and
entrapment of the defendants using criminals hired as “informants” to
suggest activities for which the defendants had no predisposition.
Prosecutors have intimidated juries with fear tactics, hyped pre-trial
press conferences, exaggerated security precautions at trial,
mistranslated documents, introduced phony expert testimony, and admitted
irrelevant but prejudicial material as “evidence.” The defendants, once
convicted, have often been sent to a special Muslim prison in Terre Haute,
Indiana, the Communication Management Unit (CMU), where their ability to
communicate with the outside world has been severely restricted, and they
are given minimal or no services that are normally afforded prisoners in
other jails.
Many of the questionable prosecutions originated in a special terrorism
unit in Washington which used warrantless NSA material to illegally
generate suspicion and target individuals. Because the NSA material has
been deemed secret, it could not be challenged or revealed to the
defendants to show it was unreliable or false. (In the same way, the
Justice Department classified secret legal memos that led to the
establishment of Guantanamo, secret rendition, torture, and other abuses
so that none of it could be challenged and shown to be false.)
Where it is known that a certain government agent committed perjury in
some cases to obtain convictions, it is an established practice to appoint
an independent investigator to examine all of the cases in which the agent
testified to determine if the agent committed perjury in the other cases
as well. Here it is beyond question that the Bush Administration engaged
in highly illegal tactics to punish innocent people, mostly Muslims, in
places like Guantanamo, and it is a matter of this country’s honor as well
as justice for the victims to examine all of the cases in which such
injustices may have occurred, including domestic cases.
All around the country, groups have been formed (by Muslims and
non-Muslims) to protest particular cases of injustice, and these groups
may send you information about the particular injustices they have
observed. But tragically, in many cases the U.S. government’s tactics of
scapegoating the Muslim community were successful, and no groups were
formed to protest or advocate for wrongly prosecuted Muslims. It is
especially for these cases of injustice that we ask that an independent
investigation be conducted. Neither appointed defense counsel nor the
courts can successfully protect innocent people when the government covers
up its illegal acts by secrecy. Only a reformed Justice Department, which
conducts an investigation of these cases by an independent counsel, can
clean the stain of injustice from its record of abuse against the Muslim
community in America.
You may contact us at any of the addresses below.
Yours very truly,
Stephen Downs Esq., lawyer, 26 Dinmore Road, Selkirk NY. 12158;
(518) 767-0102; swdowns68@aol.com
