The
True Story Of Free Speech
In America
By Robert Fisk
10 April, 2007
The
lndependent
Laila
al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one
of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to
telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina
prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he
was growing steadily weaker.
Sami al-Arian is 49 but he
stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage
committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course,
largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in
New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
All praise, then, to the
journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s
little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter
Punch.
The story so far: Sami al-Arian,
a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the
University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate
the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according
to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian’s
family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation
of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring
“to murder and maim” outside the United States and with
raising money for Islamic Jihad in “Palestine”. He was held
for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile,
his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.
Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m)
Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21
from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence
of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for
it - a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks
about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution
242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the
jurors.
In December, 2005, al-Arian
was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the
jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make
further charges, al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that
would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however,
al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed
by deportation - found Moody talking about “blood” on the
defendant’s hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11
months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian
prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed
his plea bargain had been dishonored and refused to testify. He was
held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.
Not so, of course, most of
America’s torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice
in the name of Ric Fair, a “contract interrogator”, who
has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the
way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation
“facility” of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been
having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning
“by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his
clothes”. Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. “A man
with no face stares at me … pleads for help, but I’m afraid
to move. He begins to cry. It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me.
He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.”
Thank God, Fair didn’t
write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives
got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse
in Basra. They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony
Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far
less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 “Servicepersons”
- by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat
up on the local Iraqis. As the reporter who first revealed the death
of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we
must always refer to his demise as “death” now that the
soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder
- I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined
our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who
are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it
- and who knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it
for The Independent on Sunday.
Because it’s really
all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It’s
to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral
and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And
in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in the country’s schools. Now the principal of
a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the
letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Entitled Voices in
Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow
pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and
others - including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq
- to create their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those
“who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we
speak”, proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal.
And - my favorite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal
time to ensure the play would provide “a legitimate instructional
experience for our students”.
And of course, I can quite
see Mr Canty’s point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any,
have gone unrecorded - that it wasn’t their place to tell audiences
what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being
inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think
Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his
students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of
massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing. It would
make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A
“legitimate instructional experience” if ever there was
one.
© 2007 Independent News
and Media Limited
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