A
Response To Maxwell's Silver Hammer: Syracuse University
Enlists In The Global War On Terror
By Katherine Hughes
07 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Thank you for publishing "Maxwell's
Silver Hammer: Syracuse University Enlists in the Global War on Terror"
by Linda Ford and Ira Glunts. The concern expressed in this article
is well founded.
In the summer of 2005, I
contacted the Syracuse University Institute for National Security and
Counterterrorism (INSCT) about a local "terrorism" case; that
of Dr. Rafil Dhafir and his charity Help the Needy (HTN). Two defendants
in the HTN case graduated from Syracuse University with doctoral degrees
and Dr. Dhafir served as imam at the university for several years until
a full time imam was hired.
I met with the INSCT Director,
William Banks, and Executive Director, Melissa Kim, to see if there
was some way in which the law school might provide a platform for information
about Dhafir's case that was not receiving coverage in the local media.
Banks told me that INSCT couldn't do anything about Dr. Dhafir¹s
case but that, possibly, it might arrange an event to coincide with
the renewal of the Patriot Act, in the fall of 2005. I left with the
understanding that we would be in touch about a possible event related
to civil liberties; I subsequently wrote three times to both Banks and
Kim and received no reply.
As a direct response to the
humanitarian catastrophe created by the Gulf War and U.S. and U.K. sponsored
UN sanctions on Iraq, Dhafir had founded the charity Help The Needy
(HTN). For 13 years he worked tirelessly to help publicize the plight
of the Iraqi people and to raise funds to help them. According to the
government, Dhafir donated $1.25 million of his own money over the years.
As an oncologist, he was also concerned about the effects of depleted
uranium on the Iraqi population which was experiencing skyrocketing
cancer rates.
On the morning of Dhafir's
arrest, February 26, 2003, 150 local Muslim families were interrogated
in their homes because they had donated to HTN. Different government
agents were sent to individuals according to their immigration status:
American citizens were interrogated by FBI agents; INS agents interrogated
Muslims who were non-citizens; and Muslims who had their own businesses
were interrogated by IRS agents as well as FBI. Many of those interrogated
have ties to Syracuse University, as faculty, staff, students or alumni.
Magda Bayoumi, an S.U. alumna, and one of the few people willing to
speak out about her experience on that morning said, ³They had
come, not to arrest me, but to intimidate me, and put fear into my heart.²
From the outset of Dhafir's
case the government was duplicitous. Using unfair tactics and innuendo,
with the aid of a complicit media, the government transformed Dhafir
from a compassionate humanitarian into a crook and supporter of terrorists.
On the day of Dhafir's arrest,
then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that ³funders of
terrorism² had been arrested. Just before Dhafir¹s trial began
in October 2004, then-New York Governor Pataki described the case as
a ³money laundering case to help terrorist organizations S conduct
horrible acts,² an announcement perfectly timed to reach potential
jurors. Yet prosecutors successfully petitioned the presiding judge,
who denied Dhafir bail on four occasions, to prevent the charge of terrorism
from being part of the proceedings. No charges of terrorism were ever
brought.
Despite being convicted of
only International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) violation and
white-collar crime, in October 2005, Dhafir was sentenced to 22 years
in prison for a crime he was never charged with in a court of law
INSCT AND THE HTN CASE
Within weeks of Dhafir¹s sentencing, INSCT sponsored a lecture
at Syracuse University Law School entitled, ³A Law Enforcement
Approach to Terrorist Financing,² in which Dhafir and the HTN case
was highlighted. Jeff Breinholt, then-Deputy Chief of the Counterterrorism
Section at the U.S.Department of Justice (currently a Senior Fellow
and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment
and Strategy Center, IASC) and Greg West, one of the Dhafir prosecutors,
presented the lecture. The other two Dhafir prosecutors, Michael Olmstead
and Steve Green were also present, along with students and law school
faculty.
Breinholt told the students
at the lecture that Dhafir¹s case had been under-prosecuted. In
the context of the lecture title -- ³A Law Enforcement Approach
to Terrorist Financing² -- the implication was clear. He told students
about the statutes being used as powerful tools for prosecution of terrorist
financing and explained that these tools were not widely known even
among prosecutors. And he voiced a hope that law schools could serve
as a kind of farm system educating students in this new field of law
and that this in turn would create lawyers who would be familiar with
and who could use these new prosecution tools.
He explained that because
the ³American public won¹t tolerate anything less than the
rule of law,² creative ways had to be figured out to draft laws
that can be used to prosecute what they are trying to prevent. According
to Breinholt, this task was addressed by a Department of Justice Terrorist
Financing Task Force that came together to craft ways to apply white-collar
expertise to the problem of terrorism. At the lecture and in an article
on ³Terrorist Financing,² (U.S. Attorney Bulletin, July 2003,
Volume 51, number 4) Breinholt explained,
³Persons cannot be convicted
of the federal crime of terrorism because there is no such crime. Instead,
terrorism crimes have developed in the same manner as other crimes,
policymakers determine what evil (or ³mischief²) should be
prevented, and then craft criminal laws that take into account how such
mischief is generally achieved. On occasion, acts that are criminalized
are not ones that should necessarily be discouraged, if committed by
persons not otherwise involved in the targeted conduct. In such cases,
laws are crafted to criminalize such conduct only when in particular
circumstances.²
A major tool that emerged
from the work of this task force, Breinholt told students, is the use
of IEEPA violations to gain convictions in terrorist financing cases.
Breinholt said that to convict under IEEPA all that was necessary was
to build a chain of inferences from available circumstantial evidence.
Mr. West, one of the Dhafir prosecutors, explained to the class
that one of the biggest frustrations of his career was having access
to intelligence and not being able to share it.
Neither Breinholt nor West
told the class that these ³powerful prosecution tools² are
being used mostly against Muslim charities and individuals associated
with those charities, while violations by large corporations like Halliburton,
which did billions of dollars worth of business in defiance of IEEPA,
go largely unpunished. At the most these corporations have gotten a
lap on the wrist and a fine, but no individual board member or officer
has ever faced prosecution. And although many non-Muslim charities work
in the same troubled regions of the world as Muslim charities, not a
single non-Muslim charity has been closed. None of this was mentioned
at the
lecture.
By hosting this lecture on
Dhafir and HTN, Syracuse University Law School gave credence to a charge
never brought against Dhafir, and in doing so they became an accomplice
in the government¹s subterfuge. After the lecture a request was
made that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) court watchers who
attended the trial be provided with ³equal time² to speak
to the students. Syracuse Law School Dean Hannah Arterian denied this
request. A copy of the email sent to Dean Arterian at that time is available
here:
http://www.dhafirtrial.net/2005/11/27/
email-from-me-to-the-dean-of-the-lawsc
hool-requesting-that-aclu-courtwatchers-
be-provided-with-a-forum-to-speak/
Muslims and Arabs in the
U.S. are currently being subjected to an ad hoc redefinition and contraction
of their basic freedoms; the consequences for Muslim charity and Muslims
are enormous and unjust. Whether we are a society willing to struggle
to regain the protection of freedom for all and equitable application
of the law remains to be seen.
Katherine Hughes
is a student at Syracuse University. She attended almost every day of
the seventeen-week Dhafir trial, taking notes for five hours each day.
More information about the case can be found at her website: www.dhafirtrial.net
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