Dr. Rafil
A. Dhafir At Terre Haute Prison’s New Communications Management
Unit
By Katherine Hughes
18 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
At
precisely 7 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 11, 2006, 17 federal prisoners across
the country were taken out of their cells, held in isolation for two
days, then bused to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre
Haute, Indiana. Here the government quietly began implementing the first
stages of a secret new program, the Communications Management Unit (CMU).
A completely self-contained unit housing almost exclusively Arab and/or
Muslim inmates, it eventually will hold approximately 85 prisoners.
Special new rules set out
in a “CMU Institutional Supplement” dated Nov. 30, 2006
include severe restrictions on prisoner communication. Contact with
family and friends is limited; outgoing and incoming mail is monitored
and copied, with a one- to two- week delivery delay; and no contact
visits are allowed. Instead of 300 minutes of phone time a month, prisoners
may receive only one 15-minute call a week, which the warden has the
power to reduce to just three minutes a month. Unlike the usual weekly
or biweekly all-day contact visits, visits in the CMU are for two hours,
just twice a month, and are restricted to non-contact only. Calls and
visits must be conducted in English unless prior arrangement is made.
According to Jennifer Van
Bergen, the journalist who broke the CMU story, there are only three
government offices—all within the Justice Department—that
have authority to issue changes to federal prison operations: the Office
of the Director of the Prisons Bureau, the Office of Legal Counsel,
and the Office of the U.S. Attorney General. Van Bergen was unable to
get confirmation of where the authorization originated. The Bureau of
Prisons Web site (<www.bop.gov>) does not list CMU among its facility
abbreviations, and a search of the site for “CMU” or “Communications
Management Unit” yields no result.
In a Dec. 18, 2006 letter,
however, CMU inmate Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir wrote:
“No one seems to know about this top-secret operation until now.
It is still not fully understood. The order came from the Attorney General
himself. The staff here is struggling to make sense of the whole situation.
There are 16 of us, all Muslims but two, with one non-Arab Muslim. We
are housed in what we are told was the holding area for those on death
row!!!!! We are told this is an experiment, so the whole concept is
evolving on a daily basis.” [emphasis added] According to Howard
Keiffer, executive director of Federal Defense Associates, an Institution
Supplement cannot exist without the authorization of a National Program
Statement, and the CMU has no such authorization. The Administrative
Procedures Act (APA) requires that all prison regulations be promulgated
under the law, yet there was no public notice of any changes to prison
programs and no opportunity for opposition to be heard. Civil libertarians
are concerned that the CMU operates by racial and religious profiling
and that the severe restrictions placed on inmates’ communication
inhibit their ability to mount an appeal. Keiffer says the CMU “violates
not only the Constitution, but [also federal] statute[s and] regulation[s],
and its implementation almost certainly is also violative of the APA.”
Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman
Traci Billingsley said that although the CMU’s present population
consists of inmates convicted of terrorism-related cases, the unit will
not be limited to prisoners who fit that definition. Many of those currently
held there, however, are not considered high-risk prisoners, meaning
the government definition of a terrorism-related case needs to be examined
closely.
CMU Prisoner Dr. Rafil A.
Dhafir and The War on Muslim Charities Some of the major casualties
in the government’s “war on terror” have been Muslim
charities and their principals. Two CMU inmates, Enaam Arnaout of Benevolence
International Foundation (BIF) and Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir of Help the Needy
(HTN), were defendants in Islamic charity cases. Neither has been convicted
of charges that have anything to do with terrorism: Arnaout accepted
a plea agreement by pleading guilty to one charge of “racketeering
conspiracy,” and after a long trial Dhafir was convicted of violating
the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) and white-collar
crime.
The government justifies
its targeting of Islamic charities by saying it is going after the money
funding terrorism. Just three months after 9/11, in December 2001, the
government raided and closed down the country’s three largest
Islamic charities: the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the Global Relief
Foundation (GRF), and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF),
accusing them of supporting terrorism. In each case, alleged “guilt
by association” meant that the charities’ assets were frozen
and their principals imprisoned without bail. Since then the government
has shut down several additional smaller Islamic charities. However,
“Muslim Charities and the War on Terror,” a 2005 report
by OMB Watch—which describes itself as “a nonprofit research
and advocacy organization…formed in 1983 to lift the veil of secrecy
shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)”—concluded
that despite their new investigative powers, government authorities
have failed to produe evidence of terror financing by Muslim charities.
Dhafir and other HTN associates
were arrested in the early morning of Feb. 26, 2003, just weeks before
the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Between the hours of 6 and 10 a.m. that day,
law enforcement agents interrogated 150 Muslim families who had donated
to the charity. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that a
number of “funders of terrorism” had been arrested.
A founding member of the
mosque in Syracuse, New York, Dhafir is a leader among the local Muslim
community. An Iraqi-born oncologist, he has been a U.S. citizen for
almost 30 years. Before his arrest, he and his wife, Priscilla, were
very active in Syracuse civic affairs, and Dhafir often spoke at events
and on local TV and radio about health and cancer care. In the early
1990s, in direct response to the humanitarian catastrophe caused by
the brutal embargo on Iraq, he founded Help the Needy. For 13 years
it sent food and aid to civilians suffering under U.N. sanctions imposed
on Iraq at the insistence of the U.S. and Britain. Dhafir devoted much
of his life to prayer and charity, and government records showed that
he donated half his income to charity every year. In his oncology practice
he treated those without medical insurance for free, paying for their
chemotherapy out of his own pocket.
Confident in his innocence
and the American system of justice, Dhafir refused to accept a plea
bargain, and the government piled on charges. When his case finally
came to trial 19 months after his arrest, he faced a 60-count indictment
of white-collar crime.
The government employed many
tools to inhibit Dhafir’s ability to mount a defense. Despite
the facts that Syracuse’s Muslim community put up $2.3 million
in bond money and that Dhafir offered to wear an electronic tag, he
never was granted bail; his assets were frozen, making it more difficult
to hire defense counsel; and he was denied access to both his records
and his counsel. The government’s unlimited resources, moreover,
allowed it to present its case in minutiae—seven government agencies
had investigated Dr. Dhafir for five years before the case came to trial.
The limited resources of the defense counsel, on the other hand, enabled
it to call but a single witness, who testified for a mere 15 minutes.
Although state and national
officials smeared Dhafir in the press and New York Gov. George Pataki
described Dhafir’s case as “money laundering…to help
terrorist organizations,” local prosecutors successfully petitioned
Judge Norman Mordue, the presiding judge who had denied Dhafir bail
on four occasions, to prevent the charge of terrorism from being part
of the trial. This ruling made his defense a nightmare: throughout the
trial the prosecution hinted at more serious charges, but the defense
was prohibited from addressing these inflammatory innuendos.
As a direct result of the
lack of terrorism charges, only the local Syracuse newspaper, The Post
Standard, covered the proceedings. The paper proved to be little more
than a mouthpiece for the government, however. On the rare occasion
that it did provide coverage of a cross-examination, it immediately
followed with a restatement of the charges in the indictment. Convicted
on 59 counts of white-collar crime and held without bail for 31 months,
Dhafir was sentenced to 22 years in prison for a crime that he was never
charged with in a court of law—money laundering to help terrorist
organizations.
The government continues
to hound Dhafir. In January of 2007 it successfully overturned an appeals
court order to release his transcripts to him at the court’s expense.
The three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals gave no
reasons and did not address the points in opposition.
Nor are Islamic charities
free from government harassment. The Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case
will come to trial this July—six and a half years after its assets
were seized and its principals arrested. It is imperative that members
of the public attend this trial to monitor its proceedings.
For more information visit
www.dhafirtrial.net
. Non-tax-deductible contributions in any amount may be
sent to the Dr. Dhafir Appeal Fund, c/o Peter Goldberger, Esq., Attorney
at Law, 50 Rittenhouse Place, Ardmore, PA 19003. Checks should be made
payable to “Dr. Dhafir Appeal Fund.”
Katherine Hughes attended nearly every day of the 17-week
Dhafir trial, and for the last two and a half years has tried to educate
people about Dhafir’s case and the plight of Islamic charities
in the U.S.
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