[Ppnews] CMUs - The guard told me ‘you are nothing like the Muslim prisoners’. He was wrong.

[Political Prisoner News]

APRIL 7, 2011

The guard told me 'you are nothing like the Muslim prisoners'. He was wrong

by ANDY STEPANIAN


http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/the-guard-told-me-you-are-nothing-like-the-muslim-prisoners-he-was-wrong.html

My friend Noor (above left) has beautiful eyes, but today they look 
sad.  Noor's grandfather passed away and she has had no way of 
letting her father know because the simple forms of communication all 
of us take for granted can't help her reach out to her father with 
this news.  Noor's father, Ghassan Elashi, (at right) is a political 
prisoner incarcerated in a highly restrictive and secretive federal 
prison program called the Communications Management Unit (CMU), in 
which I was also incarcerated.

Ghassan is imprisoned for providing humanitarian aid to the people of 
Gaza, a selfless deed that the Bush administration argued was 
analogous to indirectly supporting Hamas, by sending charity to Zakat 
Committees that prosecutors allege were fronts for Hamas. In the same 
year US AID, The Red Cross, the UN and dozens of other NGOs 
contributed to the same Zakat committee to which Ghassan and his 
charity, The Holy Land Foundation, is accused of giving aid.  The US 
attorney's office appeared to be selectively applying one's freedom 
to give, and selectively prosecuting some charitable groups, while 
sliding on others. For this alleged charity, Ghassan is being denied 
all contact with the outside world and the news that comes from it, 
including the news of his father-in-law's passing.

The Communications Management Unit is a designer penal program that 
focuses specifically on isolating and silencing its inmates.  The 
demographic of the CMU's designees is made up of an overwhelming 64% 
Muslim majority and a smaller minority group of designees that have 
either highly politicized cases or ones with abundant press 
attention.  This apparent racial disparity and the political nature 
of these prisons was the focus of a recent two-part investigation on 
National Public Radio entitled "Guantanamo North." CMU inmates are 
isolated and silenced by administrative segregation and through heavy 
vetting or complete denial of contact with the outside world.  To 
make things worse for Ghassan, he was recently stripped of what 
little communication he was previously able to have with his loved 
ones from within the CMU, and is now being denied all phone calls, 
all visits, and all emails.

The United States prides itself on not having any political prisoners 
and yet the federal CMU programs in Marion, Illinois, Terre-Haute, 
Indiana, and the Administrative-Maximum Unit at Carswell, Texas (an 
institution for female inmates) are filled with a disproportionate 
amount of inmates who are Muslim, and a smaller group of non-Muslims 
with cases related to tax protests, environmental advocacy, and 
animal rights activism, all of which are considered political causes. 
The CMU violates federal designation protocols because most of the 
inmates sent to the CMU have federal custody classification points 
congruent with that of prisoners normally designated to low and 
minimum security prison facilities, and yet they are housed in 
conditions that at times exceed that of the US's most restrictive 
"super-max" prison, ADX in Florence, Colorado. (See Alia Malek's 
story, Gitmo in the Heartland, in the Nation.)

When the CMU was first implemented it may have been done so illegally 
because it side-stepped the Administrative Procedures Act (a law that 
demands that federal programs such as these must first be brought to 
the attention of congress and made available for public 
comment.)  Moreover the Center For Constitutional Rights has argued 
in Aref v. Holder that the CMU violates constitutionally mandated 
laws of due process because as of yet there is no administrative 
process to challenge an inmate's designation to or transfer out of a CMU.

Ghassan Elashi was accused of providing humanitarian aid to the 
people of Gaza through his charity The Holy Land 
Foundation.  Specifically, the government alleges that Ghassan's 
charitable contributions of humanitarian aid could be deemed as 
indirect criminal material support of Hamas under the newly 
redesigned and over-broad Material Support for Terrorists 
statute.  When Ghassan was arrested in 2004, he immediately saw a 
Dallas judge and was released pending trial because the judge 
determined that he would not be considered a threat to the community 
or a flight risk.  Ghassan stood trial once in Dallas in 2007, was 
acquitted on some of the counts levied against him and the jury 
deadlocked on the remaining counts against him.

A mistrial was declared on the counts the jury could not render a 
verdict upon and only after a second trial in 2008 were Ghassan and 4 
other men found guilty of allegedly giving Material Support for Palestinians.
Ghassan was later sentenced in 2009 to 65 years in federal prison.

Noor, who has often told me "I am my father's daughter," is currently 
working on a memoir about her father's experience with the working 
title Eyes Like My Father.  Noor's pen is her expression and in her 
writing, she seeks to provide her father a voice.  Noor works 
tirelessly to advocate for her father while he awaits appeal, and 
continues her father's work towards a free and peaceful Palestine by 
using the mediums she knows best, visual arts, design, and the 
written and spoken word. As a graduate student at The New School in 
Manhattan, Noor has combined all of these mediums in a program called 
Project Palestine, an initiative by New School students to re-center 
Palestine in contemporary dialogue. Project Palestine'smonthly 
programs began in the fall and the programming continues to outdo 
itself each month, by bringing artists, poets, writers, scholars, and 
musicians to the school's midtown NYC campus.  One of the programs, 
Mainstreaming Palestine, consisted of a panel of artists moderated by 
a student, a performance by Israeli-born hip hop artist by way of 
Detroit named Invincible, a talk from documentarian Fida Qishta, and 
a reading from a young  woman from Oklahoma named Pamela Olson, who 
shared excerpts from her new book Fast Times in Palestine, a 
recollection of her experiences as a press coordinator for a 
Palestinian presidential candidate.  Hundreds of New Yorkers from all 
walks of life, all religions, identity, race, and orientation 
attended the program helping to build an open-ended community 
dialogue around the continued plight of Palestinians.  Re-centering 
Palestine in contemporary dialogue is of the utmost importance to 
Noor and through her work with Project Palestine, she is able to 
connect with and reach out to additional supporters who view the 
issue as having been a polarizing force for far too long in the hands 
of extremists on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I recently attended one of Project Palestine's programs at The New 
School and Noor invited me to join her and her friends for a cup of 
coffee afterwards.  Noor introduces me to her friends--they are 
Iraqi, Jewish, Korean, a wildly diverse group that transcends all 
boundaries of race, ethnicity, and identity.  Noor wears a 
contemporary and stylish hijab but some of her friends who are Muslim 
do not.  Noor is not to be pigeon-holed, nor can the group at this 
table be.  They are a new generation of American justice seekers 
who  are able to look past what those in power on both sides of the 
green line sometimes can't and to see the hearts of the people with 
whom they share a table.  I could only imagine what the world would 
look like if the microcosm at this table was projected upon the rest 
of society.

One of the women at the table asks me if I was in the CMU with Noor's 
father. I explain that I was not, that I was released about a month 
before he was transferred there.   She then asks me to explain what 
it was like. I did not know if I had it in me to fully explain and I 
worried about revisiting it in front of Noor, considering that this 
time out with friends over coffee could be a pleasant distraction 
away from the pain of thinking about her father.  Fighting back tears 
felt like a rock rested in the back of my throat.  In 2008 I spent 
the last six months of a three-year federal sentence for animal 
advocacy activism in the CMU in Marion, Illinois.  The guards called 
me a "balancer," presumably to offset the numbers in an 
anti-discrimination lawsuit the Bureau of Prisons is now 
facing.  During the half a year I spent there I was told in 
confidence that I was, "nothing like these Muslim terrorists" and 
that I "would be going home shortly." Indeed I did go home, but 
Ghassan Elashi and nearly sixty other men with stories similar to his 
have yet to come home.

  That guard was gravely mistaken when he said I was "nothing like" 
those men.  While I am not a Muslim, I am everything like those men. 
And just like them I felt the same uncontrollable sadness and anxiety 
when I could not use the phone to call home, when I could not touch 
my wife, or talk with my mother. Those men had stories exaggerated by 
prosecutors just as I did, their cases were compounded by politics 
and amplified by sensationalism in the press just like mine was.  At 
the end of the day they were fathers, husbands, brothers, and friends 
who yearned to be free with their loved ones again as much as I 
did.  These men showed such grace and selflessness towards each other 
and to strangers like me despite the glaring injustice and political 
repression inside the CMU.

  Showing empathy towards these men and attempting to understand what 
it would be like to be in their shoes does not mean that one needs to 
have a bleeding heart.  I lose sleep thinking of the men at the CMU 
with no way out--the ones with long sentences, the ones with 
administrative holds against them, the Palestinian stateless citizens 
who the US refuses to release on its soil and no other country is 
willing to accept them.

I knew of Noor for about four months before I finally reached out to 
her.  I wondered if talking to her as someone who was where her 
father is now would be supportive and helpful to her.  We met over 
coffee and I was not sure what to say when I saw her so I asked her 
if it was OK if I hugged her.  I suddenly remembered what it felt 
like to sit in my cell thinking about hugging my wife again and then 
I thought of Ghassan.  My head buzzed with possible things to talk 
about. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right yet 
I was certain that I didn't know if that was true or not.  I wanted 
to say the most encouraging things even though something malignant 
was gnawing away at her.  She smiled at me.  Her resilience was surreal.

Writing about the CMU consumes me emotionally.  I pray that I can 
lend the best voice to Ghassan and all of these men stripped from 
their loved ones; it scares me to think that my voice is only one of 
a few who are willing to advocate on their behalf.  They need more 
voices to demand accountability and reconciliation from our governing 
powers.  They need you to break the silence of this secretive unit, 
to talk about it over dinner and to work draw it into the national discourse.

Imagine being told you can't speak to your father.  Imagine what it 
would feel like to not know whether or not he was well, if he was 
hurt, sick, or simply needed someone to talk to. Imagine living your 
life in constant fear of never being able to touch him again.  This 
is how Noor feels everyday.  I remember vividly how it felt to be 
inside the CMU and to want so desperately to hug my wife and yet I 
can only imagine how it must feel to be a father in that 
situation.  Ghassan deserves to be free to be with Noor again. For 
many people the grief would be debilitating, but in Noor's case we 
see the opposite--she shares with the world a renewed zeal to 
continue her father's struggle from outside the prison gates through 
creative dialogue and grassroots community building.   When I ask her 
where she derives such resilience, she simply says that she "is her 
father's daughter."  Reading her father's sentencing transcript 
reveals a man who was deeply patriotic, incredibly charitable and a 
shining example of what it means to be a strong, moral 
person.  America should not bury Ghassan behind razor wire, concrete, 
and steel bars, instead we each should strive to mirror the brave 
example he and Noor have set for us to follow.

Stepanian is the co-founder of The Sparrow Project, a grassroots PR 
outfit that aims to braid popular culture, the arts, and 
revolutionary activism. In 2002 The Financial Times characterized 
SHAC as "succeeding where Karl Marx, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the 
Red Brigades failed." Their actions drew the attention of Wall Street 
and the FBI resulting in a politically charged free speech case 
called the SHAC 7 trial where Stepanian and 5 others were charged and 
convicted as terrorists for their activism. Sentenced to 3 years in 
prison, Stepanian spent his last 6.5 months in a secretive federal 
prison program that NPR would later name 'Guantanamo North'. 
Stepanian's activism as part of the SHAC7 is the subject of a 
feature-length documentary due out in 2012 from Finngate Pictures. 
Since his release from prison Stepanian works for a publisher, 
consults for social justice groups, and speaks on his experiences at 
universities.



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