"Anti-Terror" Show Trial

Defend Muhammad Salah, Abdelhaleem Ashqar!

CHICAGO, January 27—A jury is meeting to decide the verdict in the case of two men tried on trumped-up “racketeering” conspiracy charges of providing support to the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist outfit Hamas. Muhammad Hamid Khalil Salah, a 53-year-old Palestinian-born U.S. citizen and a businessman in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeview, and Abdelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar, a 48-year-old Virginia resident and former Howard University professor, face up to 30 years in prison. A third man in the alleged conspiracy, Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, is currently in Syria. This latest “anti-terror” show trial, which began in mid October, rested on “confessions” Salah signed nearly 14 years ago in an Israeli interrogation center after weeks of torture. We say: Drop the charges!

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. imperialism’s murderous 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 outrageous racketeering charges against Salah and Ashqar, the latter accused of opening bank accounts for Hamas and linking phone calls between Hamas members.

The trial reveals how the Feds use “racketeering” conspiracy laws to prosecute anyone on whom they cannot otherwise pin criminal activity. The charges include that Salah “obstructed justice” when, during the 2000 lawsuit, he denied under oath ever being a Hamas supporter, contradicting the statements extracted by Shin Bet. Ashqar’s “conspiratorial” activities consist of his refusing to testify in grand jury investigations of Hamas supporters in 1998 and 2003. Shortly before the current trial began, the government dropped its charge that Salah had provided “material support to a terrorist organization” by attempting to recruit people for Hamas who would scout terrorist targets in Israel. But the jury did get to hear of another recruiting effort: a 1996 letter from the CIA to Ashqar seeking his services as an overseas “operations officer”!

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 Zionist dungeons. Salah recounted that he had gone to the Occupied Territories in January 1993 to distribute money raised for families of deported Palestinian activists. He was arrested at an Israeli checkpoint. Soldiers threw him in the back of a jeep and drove him around for hours, stomping and kicking him and hitting him in the groin with a rifle butt. After being deposited at the Ramallah interrogation center, Salah was stripped, threatened and forced to stay awake for 48 hours. When he asked for a lawyer, his interrogators laughed and told him he was in a military occupation zone “where no law applies—the only law is what we say.”

Salah was chained for hours to a forward-slanted, child-sized chair, causing unbearable back pain. He was then forced into a “dark, freezing, closet-sized cell in which I could not stand upright, sit or lie down…. Most of the time, my head was covered with a filthy, foul-smelling hood reeking of urine, vomit, and other unpleasant substances.” This barbaric abuse continued for 53 days. Ultimately Salah signed several statements, including two in Hebrew, a language he does not speak. Salah was then placed among a group of Palestinian prison informants who physically abused him for days, after which he signed yet another “confession” that he was a Hamas operative.

In an attempt to refute Salah’s accounts of torture, the prosecution called Judith Miller as its star witness. This is the same Miller who, beginning shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, churned out garbage about nuclear and chemical weapons sites in Iraq; about aluminum tubes intended for production of atomic bombs that were in fact simply rocket components; about Iraq planning to use nerve gas against U.S. troops. Reprising 1950s Cold War-type hysteria, a Miller “exclusive” in the New York Times (3 December 2002) was headlined: “C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox.” 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, with Salah bantering with his jailers about how much sweetener is in his coffee and calmly describing his role in Hamas’ international monetary and political structure. Six days later, Miller dutifully printed a story in the Times, deviously failing to mention her presence at the interrogation and instead attributing the account to notes provided by the Israelis.

In contrast to the tales of Iraq’s WMDs, Israeli torture of Palestinians is well documented, acknowledged by sources as diverse as Amnesty International, rabid Zionist “civil libertarian” Alan Dershowitz, the Israeli Supreme Court and the thousands of prisoners who survived. In 1989 during the first Palestinian Intifada, Rabin, then defense minister, ordered the Zionist army to “break the bones” of the Palestinians, including women and children. Miller herself wrote that she initially suspected Salah had been tortured. As Salah’s lawyers demonstrated at a hearing last spring, the specific torture techniques he describes have been shown to be standard Shin Bet methods in the 1990s.

Miller made headlines in 2005 when she was jailed for 85 days for refusing to testify and reveal her government sources before a grand jury looking into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose husband, Joseph Wilson, had exposed the administration’s lie that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq tried to import uranium from Niger. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former assistant to Dick Cheney, currently faces trial on charges of obstructing justice for lying to a grand jury investigating who revealed Plame’s identity.

Many liberals and some leftist groups defended Miller on the grounds that her jailing was an attack on the democratic rights of the press. But as we stated in “Judith Miller and Bush Disinformation: Big Lies and Imperialist War” (WV No. 856, 14 October 2005), “This is not a case of the press being harassed for exposing government lies—it is, in fact, the polar opposite. The ‘confidential source’ protected by Miller was not some whistle-blower who needs protection from vindictive government higher-ups, but those selfsame higher-ups, the Bush administration.”

Among those who took up Miller’s cause was the centrist Internationalist Group (IG). While noting Miller’s role as “a conduit for official disinformation,” the IG falsely portrayed her jailing as “an ominous attempt to throttle the press” and proclaimed that “class-conscious workers and all defenders of democratic rights should demand that Judith Miller be freed in order to defend their right to know the secrets of the government that oppresses them and the rest of the world” (“Free Judith Miller!” Internationalist, Summer 2005). In its solidarity with this shill for the government, the IG turned the question of free speech and the public’s right to be informed totally on its head. Miller played the victim precisely to cover up, not reveal, government secrets and lies.

Marxists are intransigent defenders of democratic rights. For example, we have publicized the case of anarchist journalist Josh Wolf, who has been imprisoned in San Francisco since September for refusing to turn over unedited protest film footage to the state, which wants to use it to prosecute protesters (see “Free Journalist Josh Wolf!” WV No. 882, 8 December 2006). But we view all issues, including questions of democratic rights, from a proletarian class standpoint—the standpoint of the interests of the working class in advancing the fight for socialist revolution. Thus we wrote that Judith Miller’s “right to not divulge her sources is decidedly secondary to the need for the fullest possible exposure of the Bush administration’s lies, which she duly retailed, that served as the pretext for the colonial war of occupation of Iraq. Such exposure aids in further tearing through the ‘national unity’ hysteria whipped up after the September 11 terrorist attacks.”

Today, Judith Miller spreads her disinformation from the witness stand of a federal courtroom to assist a frame-up that threatens to send Salah and Ashqar to prison for decades. It is in the direct interest of the working people, black people and defenders of democratic rights to defend Salah, Ashqar, Jose Padilla and all victims of “anti-terror” repression. The “war on terror,” endorsed by both the Democratic and Republican parties of capital, is a formula for imperialist rampages in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere and for a massive growth in the government’s repressive powers at home. In the fight against government repression, we look to mobilizing the working class—the only class with both the power and objective interest to sweep away the capitalists’ entire murderous state machinery through socialist revolution.