Egypt Today
December 2003
By Yasmin Moll
He could be forgiven for thinking he had it made. When he left Cairo for Chicago at age 17, he had only his father’s life savings in his pocket to pay his college tuition. More than 30 years later, he has five beautiful children, two of whom recently graduated with honors from top universities. He owns a nice house on a nice street in a nice neighborhood in a Florida suburb. He built a school, founded activist organizations and won tenure at a Florida university.

He broke bread with Clinton. Campaigned for Bush. Was called to the White House for talks.

Then came charges that the soft-spoken Palestinian professor was the new face of terror in the United States.

Today, Sami Al-Arian spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, prevented from speaking publicly about his case and barely able to communicate with his lawyers as he waits to stand trial in early 2005.

It was around 5 a.m. on a Friday when Nahla Al-Arian woke her husband and told him to get dressed. Outside, men were pounding on the door, yelling something about a car.

She knew better, though, and wanted Sami to be properly dressed when they took him away.

As he pulled on his clothing, the hammering and shouting woke the kids: Leena, 17, Aly, 11, and Lama, nine. Finally, Nahla opened the door. Eight agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation burst in and placed her husband under arrest. As he was being handcuffed, Al- Arian asked Nahla to call the University of Florida-Gainesville and cancel a lecture he was supposed to deliver there that afternoon.

In the wintry darkness of Tampa, Florida, Sami Al-Arian prayed fajr in the back of an unmarked FBI car. His family watched US Attorney General John Ashcroft live on national television, declaring Al-Arian a leading member of “one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world.”

It was February 21, 2003, the day Sami Al-Arian’s American dream died.

Al-Arian, 45, a Palestinian refugee born in Kuwait and raised in Cairo, was soon charged in a US federal court with raising funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which the US State Department lists as a foreign terrorist organization.

The 120-page federal grand jury indictment lists 50 counts against Al- Arian and 12 alleged co-conspirators, including operating a racketeering enterprise and laundering money for PIJ, as well as conspiracy to murder, maim or injure people on foreign soil. Stripped to the basics, the charges allege Al-Arian was a founder of PIJ and its paymaster in America.

Although not accused of committing or planning acts of terror, Al- Arian could face life in prison if convicted.

Experts say PIJ, or Harakat Al-Jihad Al-Islami Al-Filastini, is an ideological offshoot of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Organized some time in the late 1970s or early 1980s in the Gaza Strip under the leadership of Fathi Saqaqi, it is fighting to establish an Islamic state in Palestine. PIJ has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in both Israel and the Occupied Territories; US authorities say it has killed at least 100, many of them civilians.

The government’s case against Al-Arian rests largely on more than 20,000 hours of wiretaps made over a ten-year span. The tapes, only declassified in August, were made under a secret warrant obtained through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Al-Arian and his defense team are being fed the digitized tapes in batches. His attorney recently noted it would take him six years of eight-hour days, seven days a week, to listen to all of them.

“Sami has heard some of the tapes and there is nothing there,” says another lawyer close to the defendant. “In fact, most of it makes him look good – but he is not allowed to say that.”

Why? US District Judge Thomas McCoun, overseeing the case, has issued a “protective order” barring the defense from discussing the evidence in public without his permission. Restrictions on the prosecution are significantly more lax, Al-Arian’s defenders claim.

The federal prosecutor’s office in Florida declined Egypt Today’s request for an interview.

But legal experts consulted by Egypt Today raise a serious question about the evidence in the state’s case: The same Palestinian Islamic Jihad for which Al-Arian is accused of having raised funds was a perfectly legal organization in the US until 1996, when it was designated a foreign terrorist organization under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

While the most recent piece of evidence included in the indictment is from 2002, the bulk of the recorded conversations date to the early 1990s.

Laila Al-Arian, Sami’s eldest daughter, believes her father has been charged for his politics.

“His only crime is speaking out and having the nerve to say that Palestinians are human beings who deserve to be treated as equals,” the young journalist says. “Unfortunately, that’s a very controversial opinion to hold in the United States.”

It has never been easy to be a Muslim in America, members of the community say, but in the wake of 9/11, it’s downright terrible to be an outspoken, active one. Just ask Rabiah Ahmed, director of communications at the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the US.

“There is definitely a feeling of being under siege,” she says. “There is a campaign against Muslim empowerment. Some high- profile people have publicly said that Muslim political participation in America is a scary thing.”

Islamaphobia in high places was dramatically illustrated at the 30th annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, this past January, which was kicked off by Vice President Dick Cheney. On sale were bumper stickers reading “No Muslims – No Terrorism.” More recently, Lt.Gen. William Boykin, the former special operations forces operator who now heads the Pentagon’s intelligence branch, declared (among other things) that his forces trumped Muslim warlords in Somalia because “my God was bigger than their God.”

“There was anti-Islamic sentiment prior to September 11,” says Atef Ali, director of CAIR’s Florida chapter. “But afterward, there was a huge opportunity for those who had hatreds and biases against [Muslims] to come out… in the open. The majority of Muslims in America never expected they would be in this state today.”

Secret evidence Al-Arian’s family is no stranger to controversy: Their torturous relationship with the US government began in 1997, when authorities arrested Mazen El-Najjar, 45, Sami Al-Arian’s brother-in-law and best friend since high school in Egypt, but refused to tell him why.

Invoking a “secret evidence” rule, prosecutors locked El-Najjar in a Florida jail for just over three-and-a-half years without charge. The provision, formalized under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, was drafted by the Clinton administration in the wake of the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing. It gave federal authorities the power to arrest and detain non-Americans on the basis of secret evidence – evidence that wasn’t revealed to detainees or their lawyers. In some cases, even the judge didn’t get to see it.

Of the 25 immigrants analysts believe were detained under the secret evidence provisions (since made virtually obsolete by tougher post- 9/11 legislation), 20 were of Arab or Muslim descent.

El-Najjar was set free in December 2000 after then Attorney General Janet Reno herself reviewed the evidence against him – much of which overlapped with that in the indictment now against Al-Arian – and ruled he was not a threat to national security.

Sami Al-Arian had lobbied tirelessly for El-Najjar’s release. He founded the Tampa Bay Coalition for Justice and Peace to draw attention to the unconstitutional detention of Arab immigrants. He met with members of Congress. He flew around the country, speaking at college campuses and churches. Invited in 1998 to a private Arab- American dinner with President Bill Clinton in Washington, the Al- Arians gave the president a brief on El-Najjar’s plight.

“Mr. President, help us,” Nahla remembers saying as she pleaded her brother’s case. Clinton, she says, promised he would “get back to you on this.”

Less than a year after El-Najjar was released, terrorists slammed planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. El- Najjar quickly found himself behind bars once again, held for nearly a year in solitary confinement, again on “secret evidence,” until he was deported in September 2002 to what US officials said was a “US- friendly Arab country.”

To this day, El-Najjar has been formally charged with nothing more serious than overstaying his student visa. The secret evidence against him has never been released, although the indictment against Al-Arian allegedly includes a tape of a conversation in which one of Al-Arian’s co-defendants appears to suggest to El-Najjar’s wife that El-Najjar’s problems stemmed from his alleged association “with terrorists.”

(Al-Arian also faces obstruction of justice charges for allegedly giving false statements to authorities investigating El-Najjar.)

So maybe Sami should have seen his own problems coming. Maybe his brother-in-law’s case was like the canaries that miners once took into the shafts to warn of disaster.

It’s certainly not what Al-Arian expected when he moved to America in 1975. His father, Amin Al-Arian, who was in the textile business, wanted his eldest son to get the best education possible – an American university degree. Al-Arian earned his bachelor’s from Southern Illinois University and went on to get a Ph.D. in computer engineering from North Carolina State University in 1985.

Enamored with America’s freedoms, he settled in Florida in 1986 with Nahla, his Egyptian-raised wife.

By day a professor of computer science at the University of South Florida (USF), Sami devoted his free time to Muslim and Palestinian causes. He founded an Islamic school in Tampa (his two eldest children are graduates) and built a mosque for the area’s Muslims, leading it as an imam. On the national level, he was a founding member of the Islamic Society of North America, one of the most important Muslim grass-roots organizations in the US and one of the few with mobilizing power.

He also set up the Islamic Committee for Palestine, a charity that collected money for Palestinian orphans in the Occupied Territories, and launched the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), a think-tank that worked in cooperation with USF – but was not university-sponsored – to promote interfaith dialogue. Until the mid-1990s, when he seemed to mellow, Al-Arian was known in activist circles as a firebrand, often lacing his speeches with fiery rhetoric in favor of the Palestinian cause.

Looking back, Al-Arian’s troubles began with WISE. The think-tank became the center of controversy when Ramadan Shallah, a former lecturer at USF and administrative director of WISE, turned up in Syria in 1995 as the new leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Soon after, the FBI raided Al-Arian’s home, one of the earliest steps in an investigation that ultimately led to his arrest this year. His university placed him on paid leave as it conducted an independent inquiry.

After a 15-month investigation, the FBI pressed no charges, USF cleared WISE of any links to terrorism, and a federal judge ruled it was nothing more than a “reputable and scholarly research center.”

But the indictment against Al-Arian now names the old investigation and the Shallah link as damning evidence. It’s a classic case of guilt by association, Al-Arian’s supporters claim. Bashir Nafi would certainly agree: An Egyptian-Irish professor still teaching at London University, he is one of the 12 co-conspirators named in the US indictment.

“It’s absolute nonsense,” Nafi told The Independent, a UK newspaper. “You’re a friend of someone who is a friend of someone and that’s how it starts.”

Shallah has denied Al-Arian has any connections to PIJ. Significantly, both WISE and the Islamic Committee for Palestine (which one intelligence official says made no donations to PIJ, Hamas or any other armed militant group) were both shut down by the end of 1995.

Jihad U
It’s hardly surprising that the American media has latched on to Al-Arian’s case like there’s no tomorrow. After all, it’s a country with its own 24-hour-a-day cable network devoted only to courtroom drama, both real and fictional.

Al-Arian has frequently been a punching bag for the press, particularly in his home state, where the local Tampa Tribune has called him a “consummate manipulator,” among other unsavory labels.

In 1994, investigative journalist and self-declared terrorism expert Steve Emerson made a documentary for PBS, America’s publicly funded television network, called “Jihad in America.” In it, Emerson accused Al-Arian and WISE as being the US fronts for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. His claims – he also called USF “Jihad U” – were later echoed in a series of Tampa Tribune articles called “Ties to Terrorists,” which ran in 1995 and cited Emerson as one of its sources. The series pointed to a lecture at WISE by Hassan Al-Turabi, the prominent Sudanese Islamist and former speaker of parliament with alleged ties to Al-Qaeda, as evidence of terrorist ties.

Al-Arian’s family claims it was a local vendetta in the conservative state. “The Tampa Tribune is motivated and ruled by neo-cons,” Nahla claims.

“The area he is in is called the Middle District of Florida, and it doesn’t include Miami and some of the more cosmopolitan areas,” says Asim Rafoor, a Muslim activist and family friend of the Al-Arians, who says the area still has chapters of the racist Ku Klux Klan. A 2002 CAIR report backs his assertion, awarding Florida the dubious honor of being the second-most unfriendly state in the nation for Muslims. California placed first.

Those close to Al-Arian suggest the media claims prompted the FBI’s investigation, and they may be right: When Al-Arian, a permanent resident of the US, filed a Freedom of Information request to see why his citizenship application was being delayed, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent him a set of Tampa Tribune news clippings.

But while Emerson was once well-regarded, he has gotten little play in the media after claiming Middle Easterners were behind 1995’s Oklahoma City bombing. (Timothy McVeigh, an American who served in the first Gulf War, was subsequently found guilty of carrying out the bombing. He was executed in 2001.)

In a review of Emerson’s 1991 book The Terrorist, the New York Times wrote that his work is “marred by factual errors that betray an unfamiliarity with the Middle East and a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.” His detractors also point to his stereotyping of Islam, which he has reportedly said is a religion that “sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its doctrine.” Emerson has sued at least one publication for allegedly libeling him in its criticism of his work.

But Al-Arian himself unwittingly gave the right wing a card to play when he agreed to appear on Fox’s brash “The O’Reilly Factor” talk show on September 26, 2001 to discuss the 9/11 terror attacks. After repeating allegations that Al-Arian had ties to Al-Qaeda (allegations even the US government says are without basis) Bill O’Reilly, the show’s popular and combative host, brought up statements Al-Arian made over a decade ago about the Israeli occupation. Al-Arian, as it turns out, was on tape declaring, among other things, “Death to Israel!”

“Let me put it in context,” Al-Arian said, claiming he meant “death to occupation, death to apartheid, death to oppression,” not death to individual Jews.

O’Reilly wasn’t convinced.

“If I were the CIA, I would follow you wherever you went. I’d follow you 24 hours -” he told Al-Arian.

“Well, you don’t know me. You don’t know me. You do not-,” the professor stammered.

“That doesn’t matter,” came the reply.

Unholy alliance
It certainly didn’t matter to some who knew Al-Arian well, it seems. After his appearance on the O’Reilly show, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian had taught for 17 years and won several teaching awards, decided it would be better off without the controversial Palestinian.

USF President Judy Grenshaft suspended him, a first step toward dismissal. The move prompted a flood of calls and letters to USF from academics and citizens around the country.

One letter writer said he was taken by “surprise by your decision to terminate Al-Arian’s employment at the University. There is no connection between anything Al-Arian is or was connected to that has any bearing whatsoever on the events of 9/11.”

The letter was signed “Regretfully, Vincent M. Cannistraro.” Cannistraro’s opinion carries weight: He is a former chief of operations and analysis for the Central Intelligence Agency’s counter-terrorism unit – a man who may safely be presumed to know a thing or two about terrorists.

But when the American Association of University Professors threatened to censure the school if it didn’t reinstate Al-Arian, things went from bad to worse for the middle-aged professor.

USF’s board of trustees are corporate heavyweights handpicked by Governor Jeb Bush, the president’s brother. They wanted nothing more than to be rid of the Al-Arian headache. Richard Beard, the board’s chairman, bluntly told the media the USF was firing Al-Arian – this was before he was indicted, remember – because “he is a terrorist.”

“Sami was winning his legal battle with USF, not just in public opinion but also in court,” argues Asim Rafoor, a Washington-based attorney who helped found the National Liberty Fund, which raises money to pay the legal fees for Muslim-American detainees. “The university was being forced to settle the case – either compensate or rehire him, which would have been a big humiliation. We expect that at trial evidence [will come out] that there was pressure on the Justice Department to indict Sami because that was the only way to get out of the situation,” he alleges.

Al-Arian’s wife takes it a step further. “Jeb Bush went to Washington, DC – we know that because the itinerary was mentioned in the papers – and he met with [Attorney General] Ashcroft,” says Nahla. “Then the indictment came, Sami went to jail and he was fired a week later.”

The notion of Jeb Bush having Al-Arian indicted so USF could fire him is a stretch to some, but it’s not hard to see why the family is suspicious, particularly given that the Florida governor went on the record saying USF should get rid of the controversial professor. “The taxpayers have no obligation to continue paying for a teacher whose own actions have made it impossible for him to teach,” Bush said in a statement.

(No fan of Al-Arian’s, O’Reilly nonetheless followed up on the case in a subsequent show in which he demanded that Grenshaft resign, saying she was a “coward.” “You don’t sack a tenured professor for saying stuff you don’t like,” he said.)

USF’s board of directors weren’t the only ones who wanted Al-Arian dismissed.

“Sami wasn’t stupid,” says Rafoor. “He told me a year before he was arrested that he would probably be indicted. He said there are enough people who want him to go away.”

Who? Muslim academics and activists claim an unholy alliance between Christian fundamentalists, neo-cons and Zionists.

“There is a coalition in evidence that is pursuing their attack on Islam in academia, in the media, in political circles and in popular culture,” claims Agha Saeed, chairman of the Muslim American Alliance and professor of political science at California State University-Hayward. “[This] group is becoming more vocal and more visible, saying this is a war against Islam … that Islam is the largest ‘weapon of mass destruction.'”

“There is a strong group of people in America that don’t want Muslims to grow and become involved in the American mainstream,” says Younus Mirza, whose father, Yaqub, a well-known Muslim business leader and philanthropist in Virginia, got a taste of Al-Arian’s medicine when authorities raided his home and business on March 20, 2002, as part of a Treasury Department clampdown on the sources of terrorist funding.

“Whether it’s the Christian fundamentalists or the Zionists, they see the growth of Muslims in America as a threat to Israel,” Mirza alleges.

Foreign pressure was undoubtedly a factor: The left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz reported in December 2001 that Israel had pressured USF to dismiss the professor, adding that Al-Arian’s alleged support for PIJ had been known to the Mossad for years.

Reached at his home in Virginia last month, Vincent Cannistraro backs both assertions. “There was a real debate inside the Department of Justice about his case,” the former counter-terror chief says. “There’s been an incredible amount of pressure from Israel to move on it.”

Cannistraro has previously said that the professor was part of a “small group of Islamic intellectuals who created [Islamic Jihad],” but adds that he believes Al-Arian no longer has links to PIJ and has never supported terrorist activities. “He participated in the creation, I think, of an organization that later carried out terrorist activities,” Cannistraro told Florida’s St. Petersburg Times last year.

Noting that PIJ wasn’t officially a terrorist organization until the mid-1990s, by which time he says Al-Arian had moved on, Cannistraro warns that the debate over the professor’s alleged terrorist ties has become so “heated and polemic” that “there are subtleties in the role he played that are getting lost in all the rhetoric from both sides.”

But the political biases of judicial and law-enforcement officials involved in the case are too bold to appreciate any subtleties, Al-Arian’s family alleges.

“The judge’s ruling is so biased, so hateful,” says Al-Arian’s wife, referring to federal magistrate Mark Pizzo’s decision to deny her husband bail after a four-day hearing on the grounds that the indictment was “substantial and convincing.” Al-Arian, he said, presented a danger to the community and was a “serious” flight risk.

“He gave a very a emotional analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, putting the blame on the Palestinians for breaking the Oslo Accords,” Nahla adds.

Even evidence of Al-Arian’s alleged terrorist sympathies is a matter of political perspective. The indictment quotes, for example, from a pro-Intifada speech the professor gave in 1991, as well as his comments against the first Gulf War.

In his bail-hearing cross examination of Abdallah Al-Arian, Sami’s 23-year-old son, federal prosecutor Walter Furr seized on a picture the young man had taken while on vacation in Lebanon: It was of a billboard depicting Ayatollah Khomeini and the Hezbollah symbol. Only someone who actually liked Iran and, by default, terrorist groups, would take such a photo, Furr suggested.

Blow back
The shame of it all, Laila Al-Arian says, is that by arresting her father and others like him, the government is “going after the people they truly need to ally with in order to tell the Muslim people that they are not against Muslims in general.”

Younus Mirza agrees. “My father and the groups he belongs to – like Dr. Al-Arian – they are very mainstream and want to be involved in the [political] process and make change from within the system. They say, ‘This is our country, our home,'” he says.

Al-Arian is certainly no stranger to the corridors of power. He campaigned tirelessly in Florida’s Muslim community for George W. Bush during the hotly contested 2000 election, believing Bush’s campaign promise to help bring Muslim-Americans into the political mainstream.

When Bush came to Florida – a key battleground state that ultimately catapulted Bush into the White House – Al-Arian, his wife and five children posed for a picture with the Republican, grinning proudly at the camera. Analysts say it was largely a result of Al-Arian’s lobbying that Bush declared in the debates that year that “Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence,” going on to say it was a form of discrimination that simply had to stop.

Bush spent enough time with the Al-Arians to come up with a nickname for Abdallah, calling him “Big Dude.”

The ties continued past the election. In June 2001, Karl Rove, a senior advisor to Bush, invited Sami to attend a meeting in the White House along with other leading Muslim-American activists. It was Al-Arian’s fourth invitation, the previous three having come when Clinton was in office.

Eight days later, Abdallah Al-Arian, then a Congressional intern, made headlines when Secret Service agents asked him to leave a White House briefing on faith-based initiatives. A few weeks later, Bush sent a personal letter of apology to the Al-Arians, saying, “I have been assured that everything possible is being done to ensure that nothing like this happens again.” He thanked them for their support, saying he sincerely appreciated the charity work being done by the Muslim community they helped lead.

But while Al-Arian was on speaking terms with the powers that be, he wasn’t afraid to take them on.

In January 2001, he was elected president of the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom, the largest nationwide organization fighting the use of secret evidence in the American justice system. Its biggest achievement was helping rally Congressional support for the Secret Evidence Repeal Act, passed in 1999 in the House of Representatives. The Repeal Act fell by the wayside as Congress rushed in the month after 9/11 to incorporate secret evidence in a much more far-reaching (and controversial) piece of legislation: the USA PATRIOT Act. It really is a capital-letter acronym: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.

Advocates say the irony is that mainstream Muslim-Americans like Al-Arian have been trying to do just that for years.

“Professor Al-Arian has been involved in building a culture of understanding, accommodation and involvement as opposed to a culture of terror and violence,” says Saeed, the Muslim American Alliance chief.

By alienating moderate Islamic voices such as Al-Arian, the American government risks giving extremists more room to maneuver. The CIA has a term for this: blow back. It’s when the unintended consequences of a well-meaning policy do more damage than good over the long haul.

“If Muslims everywhere see the American government as denying rights to its Muslim members, then most unfortunately [there will be] a backlash in the Muslim world against Christian minorities,” says Saeed. “It will ultimately be a lose-lose situation.”

A question of rights Power politics aside, defendants in American courts have rights – and supporters claim Al-Arian’s are being violated.

Al-Arian now spends endless days in the Coleman Correctional Facility, a maximum-security federal penitentiary usually reserved for convicted criminals. Al-Arian and one of his co-defendants, Sameeh Hammoudeh (who is also charged with being a member of PIJ), are the only two pre-trial detainees being held there.

He’s in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, locked in a windowless 70 square-foot cell. It’s impossible to tell night from day because he’s is not allowed a clock. His neighbors leave a little to be desired, even by prison standards: He’s locked down in Coleman’s special isolation wing, which also houses mentally disturbed prisoners. When they get really angry, they wail and scream.

Al-Arian is allowed out of his cell one hour a day, five days a week, to go to a neighboring steel-barred cage where he can pace around. His family is allowed to visit for five hours per week. But when they come, he can’t touch, let alone hug them. He has to speak to them from behind a glass partition. After they leave, the guards strip-search him.

Convicted criminals in the same facility are allowed contact visits.

Al-Arian is in shackles even when he meets his lawyers, carrying his legal documents in his handcuffed hands behind his bent back. Even his smallest requests are the subject of judicial interest: It took a while for the judge to decide he could be allowed pencils for writing.

Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog that usually reserves its critical reports for third world prisons, has condemned Al-Arian’s conditions as “gratuitously punitive.”

His defenders openly question whether the harsh prison conditions are part of a government strategy to break his resolve before the January 2005 trial date.

“One strategy of the government in this case – and it’s very obvious – is to get Sami’s co-defendant Sameh Hammoudeh to break down in prison,” says Rafoor. “They have him in such rotten conditions, hoping that he will just plead guilty, even if he didn’t do anything.”

Perhaps more worrying is Al-Arian’s lack of access to adequate legal counsel. Until October 29, Al-Arian had been representing himself, having fired in July his court-appointed lawyers, whom he charged were incompetent.

The obstacles facing his counsel are many. All of the evidence is housed 70 miles away in Tampa, an hour and a half drive from where he is detained. Judge McCoun has only recently made a small part of the evidence available to him, and Al-Arian has not always been allowed to attend his own hearings, violating his right to assist in his own defense, his lawyers say.

They also complain they’re allowed far too little time to meet with their client, and say they’re hampered by unorthodox provisions including not being allowed to bring to prison any documents more than half an inch thick.

“That makes it quite difficult to confer with Dr. Al-Arian, since the indictment itself is 2.5 inches [thick],” says Linda Moreno, a Florida-based member of Al-Arian’s new defense team. The veteran criminal defense attorney says that “in 23 years of practicing, I have never seen anything like that.”

Retired CIA official Cannistraro agrees there’s something sketchy about Al-Arian’s conditions. “He’s being subjected to extraordinary actions which are not applicable to 99.9 percent of people in that situation,” he says. “There is definitely a political determination being made to punish him.”

Early last month, the prominent Washington, DC, firm of Asbill, Moffitt and Boss agreed to take on Al-Arian’s case. His new attorney is also a friend: Bill Moffitt, a high-powered defense attorney. The former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Moffitt also serves on the board of directors of Al-Arian’s National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom.

Moffitt calls the upcoming trial the first “civil rights case of the 21st century.” At an often combative procedural hearing early last month, Moffitt made better prison conditions for Al-Arian and full access to the state’s evidence (it is releasing tapes in a trickle and has yet to hand over any other evidence) his first priorities. Judge McCoun has promised conditions will slowly improve, but did not order a more rapid release of evidence to the defense.

Good legal counsel doesn’t come cheap, though: The tab for Al-Arian’s defense is likely to run past $1.2 million. So far, his family says, only $500,000 has been raised, largely from donations collected from friends and supporters.

“If you look at [the federal prosecutors], they have billions, not millions, and we have nothing,” says Al-Arian’s wife. “The federal government is a monster here … you need excellent lawyers to be able to stand up to it.”

A virulent disease Al-Arian and his predominantly Muslim and Arab supporters aren’t the only ones suggesting his case raises serious questions about civil rights post-9/11.

“Civil liberties are under a very direct and serious threat in the US,” says Mark Lance, who teaches in the Peace and Justice Program at America’s prestigious Georgetown University. “Non-citizens have essentially no rights whatsoever, and can be imprisoned with secret evidence indefinitely. One can be charged with felonies for vague and distant ‘association’ with people who have committed crimes.

“Essentially, the government is using the fear generated by September 11 to push through a massive expansion of its power,” he alleges. “Many laws are simply excuses to round up whomever the government wants to imprison.”

Civil rights activists of all stripes point to the USA Patriot Act as one of the biggest threats to civil liberties. The act gives the federal government, among other things, the power to spy on its own citizens, access all their private records and even strip them of citizenship.

“The Patriot Act is obscene,” says Lance. “It is an assault on all this country is supposed to stand for.”

Many Muslims and Arabs feel that the Patriot Act purposely targets them. Several prominent community organizations have joined civil rights groups in filing suit against the government, charging the act is unconstitutional.

“Ultimately, any oppressive law becomes a threat to everyone,” Saeed claims. “Right now it is specifically focused against Muslims and Christian Arabs … but [the government] is beginning to apply it to peace groups.”

They point out that the US has a long history of legalized oppression of minorities, whether they were enslaved African-Americans, interned Japanese-Americans in the Second World War or witch-hunts against “Communists” in the 1950s.

However you cut it, the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 has been a deafening wake-up call for Muslims and Arabs in the States.

“There is a huge disconnect between the ideals of this country and the reality of it,” says Mirza, a second-generation Pakistani-American. “The American dream, the whole idea that anyone can come here from a different place, work hard and based on merit succeed and be accepted, has been shattered by the actions of the government after 9/11.”

As Laila Al-Arian sees it, “the American judicial system is under scrutiny. The whole world is watching this case, and if [Americans] really want to say they have a fair system that gives everyone a chance to defend themselves, then they need to prove it to us.”

Writing from his prison cell while on a hunger strike in the month following his arrest, Sami Al-Arian summed it up best.

“I am not the enemy,” he declared, “the forces of intolerance and exclusion are.”