acquits Mohammad Salah
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
On February 1, 2007, a federal jury in Chicago acquitted Muhammed Salah and his codefendant Abdelhaleem Ashqar of supporting terrorism financing charges. Muhammed Salah was charged with terrorism based upon a confession extracted by torture in an Israeli jail.
The case against Mr. Salah, and his co-defendant Abdelhaleem Ashqar, was deemed so significant that the indictments were announced in a news conference by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft along with Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in 2004. At the time, Ashcroft said that these two men "played a substantial role in financing and supporting international terrorism ... [and] took advantage of the freedoms of an open society to foster and finance acts of terror."
Fitzgerald's office then promptly proceeded to announce that it would prove its case by attempting to introduce a purported confession that defendant Muhammad Salah gave in Israel to Israeli authorities after 80 days of interrogation in an Israeli prison in 1993.
When Salah's lawyers challenged the use of this purported confession as the byproduct of Israeli torture tactics, Fitzgerald's office promptly asked U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve to close her courtroom to the public so that it could present the testimony of some of the Israeli agents in a secret proceeding. Not only would the courtroom be closed, but the Israeli agents would be permitted to testify in disguises with code names. St. Eve granted the government's request and conducted weeks of testimony in her courtroom that was completely shut off from the public.
St. Eve also had no problem at the end of the hearing permitting the government to introduce the confession at trial notwithstanding considerable evidence presented in the hearing with respect to torture tactics that were in place and regularly used by the Israeli secret police. She accepted the government's argument that the Israeli secret police decided not to use their torture tactics against Salah because he was an American.
According to Abdelhaleem Ashqar’s attorney Tom Durkin the jury had the courage to preserve what is left of the freedoms of an open society Ashcroft and his cronies in the Justice Department and the White House have left us with since Sept. 11, 2001. “This jury had the courage and integrity not to fall for the government's much abused "terrorism" rhetoric and call this case for what it was worth--which was virtually nothing.”
Mr. Salah, 53, a former grocer who lives in suburban Chicago, and Ashqr, 48, a former Howard
University professor who lives in Springfield, Illinois, were convicted of lesser charges. Ashqar was convicted of obstruction of justice and criminal contempt for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury, while Salah was convicted of obstruction for providing false answers in a civil lawsuit. Though, he was found guilty of obstructing justice, he was found not guilty of racketeering, which was the major charge. The third charge of providing material support to a terrorist organization had been dropped mid-trial. In July 2007 Salah was sentenced to 21 months in prison for lying in a civil lawsuit.
Arrested by Israeli police in Gaza in January 1993, Salah allegedly confessed to being a Hamas military commander during 54 days of interrogation that included physical and psychological torments. Prosecutors charged Salah, a U.S. citizen, and Ashqar, a longtime resident, with using the safe haven of the United States to transfer funds, coordinate operations and provide other aid to Hamas. Mr. Salah was declared a terrorist through an executive order without any court of law finding him as such.
The prosecution’s key witnesses were two of Salah’s “interrogators” from Israel’s Shin Bet secret police, who testified in disguise and under aliases, and Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter who played a central role in retailing the Bush administration’s lies about Iraq possessing “weapons of mass destruction” that served as a pretext for U.S. war and occupation. In 1993, Salah supposedly confessed to secretly acting as a major fundraiser for Hamas’ military operations while working at a used car dealership and doing Muslim charity work in the Chicago area.
Salah was imprisoned for nearly five years in Israel. When he came home to the U.S. in 1997, the Clinton administration froze his assets on the grounds that he was an admitted terrorist. In 2000, he and others accused of being supporters of Hamas were sued by the family of an American student who was shot and killed in the West Bank in 1996, an act for which Hamas took responsibility. In 2004, after the Bush administration launched a slew of legal attacks on Muslim charities, the Feds threw the racketeering charges against Salah and Ashqar, the latter accused of opening bank accounts for Hamas and linking phone calls between Hamas members.
In an unsuccessful effort to bar the U.S. government from using the “confessions” as evidence, Salah filed an affidavit that described in chilling detail the “on-going nightmare of unmitigated and unbearable terror, threats, physical and psychological abuse” he faced in the Israeli dungeons.
In an attempt to refute Salah’s accounts of torture, the prosecution called Judith Miller as its star witness. …..This purveyor of U.S. war lies about Iraq had years earlier been invited by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, her longtime friend, and Shin Bet to witness Salah’s interrogation. The purpose: to plant a story in the Times about Hamas and their supposed fundraising cells in the U.S.
Miller included an entire chapter about this incident in her 1996 anti-Islamic screed, God Has Ninety-Nine Names. In this book and in her testimony, Miller recounted watching Salah’s interrogation via a television monitor, his statements translated by an Israeli-supplied interpreter. She even provided questions for the interrogation. Miller portrayed the whole thing as a friendly chat.
Mr. Salah was proved innocent of any connection to terrorism in the United States or abroad. However, the trial judge’s rulings in at least two instances set very negative precedents regarding due process in future cases. First, the judge admitted Mr. Salah’s confession when he sided with the prosecution claim that Salah was not tortured. Second, the judge allowed two Israeli agents to act as witnesses using fictitious names.
|
