[Ppnews] Tarek Mehanna - You will be punished if you don’t become an informant

[Political Prisoner News]

"You will be punished if you don’t become an 
informant": ACLU’s Nancy Murray on Tarek Mehanna case

Submitted by Maureen Clare Murphy on Wed, 04/18/2012 - 21:05
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/you-will-be-punished-if-you-dont-become-informant-aclus-nancy-murray

Last week, a federal judge sentenced 29-year-old 
Boston-area pharmacist Tarek Mehanna, convicted 
earlier this year of various material support for 
terrorism charges, to 17.5 years in a supermax 
prison. Mehanna has been in lockdown for most of 
the past four years, held in solitary confinement 
for 23 hours a day in a cell “the size of a small 
closet,” as Mehanna described during his powerful 
statement to the judge at the hearing.

Mehanna’s case fits into the wider pattern of 
civil liberties violations related to the 
prosecution of Muslims in domestic terror cases. 
Like in other prosecutions, including that of 
three young American Muslim men in North Carolina 
that I have covered on my blog, the government’s 
case focused on Mehanna’s opposition to US 
foreign policy and Internet activity, as well as 
travel he made abroad — all activity thought to 
be protected by the First Amendment.
FBI coercion

Before prosecuting him, the government tried to 
coerce Mehanna into becoming an FBI informant and 
spying on his community, approaching him after a 
hospital shift and telling him that he could go 
the “easy” way and never see the inside of a 
prison cell, or Mehanna could choose the “hard” 
way. Mehanna chose the hard way, which his lawyer 
says he is being punished for. Indeed, 
defendants’ refusal to become informants is a 
troubling commonality in a number of terror prosecutions.

And during the trial the prosecution used the 
tried and true tactic of invoking the specter of 
the 11 September 2001 attacks, even though 
Mehanna has no connection to those events 
whatsoever. When the word “terror” is invoked, 
even in cases like Mehanna’s where no act of 
violence is alleged to have been perpetrated, 
government prosecutors are nearly universally 
able to secure guilty verdicts — so much so that 
defendants are more likely to take plea deals than have their day in court.
Opposition to US foreign policy

There are noteworthy exceptions to Mehanna’s 
case. One is that Mehanna cannot be described as 
“low-hanging fruit” — vulnerable members of the 
community who are easy targets for the FBI’s 
unscrupulous paid agents provocateur. In his 
sentencing statement last week, Mehanna 
resolutely asserted his principles. He described 
a lifelong framework of understanding the world 
in terms of the oppressor versus the oppressed, 
his opposition to the horrors perpetrated by US 
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the right of 
Muslims to defend themselves from foreign 
invaders, whether they be “Soviets, Americans or 
Martians.” Mehanna concluded by telling the 
courtroom, “The government says that I was 
obsessed with violence, obsessed with ‘killing 
Americans.’ But, as a Muslim living in these 
times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”

Mehanna’s case also stands apart from others 
because people beyond his community are actually 
aware of it and outraged, thanks to the important 
advocacy done around it by Mehanna’s brother, 
Tamer, and civil libertarian and human rights 
advocates in the Boston area — not least of which 
is the American Civil Liberties Union of 
Massachusetts. The day of Mehanna’s sentencing 
hearing, the ACLU-Mass’ education director, Nancy 
Murray, published a guest blog on The Boston 
Globe outlining the injustices of Mehanna’s case 
titled “It’s official. There’s a Muslim exception to the First Amendment.”
“Muslim exception” to First Amendment

In her article, and in the below interview I did 
with her over the phone yesterday, Murray 
contrasts Mehanna’s case with that of Sami 
al-Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student in Idaho 
who was in 2004 acquitted by a jury of similar 
terror charges related to his Internet activity. 
Murray attributes the different outcomes in 
verdicts in part to “the widespread acceptance of 
the notion of a ‘domestic radicalization process’ 
promoted through Internet activity,” first put 
forward by the New York Police Department and now 
the foundation of anti-terror policy at many levels of government.

In the below interview, edited for length, Nancy 
Murray explains why she believes a “Muslim 
exception” is being carved out of the First 
Amendment, how a juror came to Mehanna’s 
sentencing hearing to ask the judge for mercy, 
and why Tarek Mehanna’s case has wide-reaching implications.

Maureen Clare Murphy: How is Tarek Mehanna’s case 
a free speech case, and how does it fit into a 
wider pattern of Muslims’ rights being undermined 
for the sake of so-called national security?

Nancy Murray: I think this case really 
highlighted for us here in Boston the way the 
government has set around criminalizing expression which it doesn’t like.

When you look at the Tarek Mehanna case, they 
started zeroing in on him when he was a teenager, 
when he was, like many young people, very overt 
in his opinions. He was really upset about what 
was happening, the threats to go to war in Iraq, 
everything that was going on in Afghanistan. So 
when he was 19, 20 they started throwing 
everything they could at him in terms of 
surveillance, including a sneak-and-peek search 
of his parents’ home, intercepting emails, 
wiretapping his phones and so on. He apparently 
had a lot of people who really respected him 
because he was a very serious young man, he 
seemed very fearless, he would stand up and say what was wrong.

What [government prosecutors] had against him is 
that he went on a trip to Yemen in 2004. 
According to the government, they were trying to 
find a training camp, which they didn’t succeed 
[in finding], he and a friend. The defense has 
said that he went there looking for religious 
study opportunities, and I can’t judge which of 
those is true. But on his return, he never, ever 
got involved in any plot. What he did was he 
translated documents, he downloaded some, he 
shared them with friends, and he engaged in 
chats. There’s never been any evidence presented 
that he did any of this in coordination with 
al-Qaida or any other terrorist group.

But what the government is saying is that he 
constituted himself as the media wing of 
al-Qaida. That is a big leap, because they have 
no evidence. The government never showed that 
what we call his expressive activity, [Mehanna’s] 
rights under the First Amendment, were ever in 
any way coordinated with a terrorist group. 
[Author’s note: The controversial 2010 Supreme 
Court decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project 
drastically expanded the government’s definition 
of what constitutes material support of 
terrorism, including political advocacy if done 
in a “coordinated way” with a group on the State 
Department’s designated foreign terrorist 
organization list.] But they skirted around this 
in the trial. And what they did during the trial 
was just use visuals of 9/11, to mention al-Qaida 
about every other sentence, and to really give 
the impression to the jury that he was acting in 
coordination with al-Qaida when they didn’t 
actually present any evidence saying that he was. 
So it was inflammatory, and the jury found him 
guilty of conspiracy to give material support.

The defense did a very good job trying to bring 
up the First Amendment, but they were continually 
rebuffed by the judge. The judge not only didn’t 
allow an ACLU brief to be entered in — in the 
very beginning we had written a brief saying that 
many of these charges should be dropped because 
they were protected by the First Amendment. But 
the judge refused to have that brief admitted at 
the beginning. He said it would be more 
appropriate for a later court preceding. He then 
continually refused to allow First Amendment to 
enter into the defense, and he made no mention of 
it in his instructions to the jury. At the 
[sentencing hearing], one of the jurors was 
present. Before the judge sentenced Mehanna, the 
defense attorneys had tried to get the judge to 
listen to what this juror had to say. The judge 
said no, that she could submit something in 
writing afterwards, but he wasn’t going to allow her to speak in that hearing.

People [who had attended the trial] were 
flabbergasted when the jurors came out and voted 
him guilty. But I think they did so just because 
the instructions didn’t bring up that this is 
protected expression, and the whole inflammatory 
nature of having 9/11 constantly invoked. And I 
must say, it was really grim hearing the 
prosecution at the sentencing hearing talk about 
Mehanna, because they didn’t just say that he 
went and looked for a camp and tried to train. 
What they were saying was that this was 
incredibly dangerous what he had done, its impact 
will linger, it had done extreme harm, because 
now this is all over the Internet, what he translated and so on.

Basically, [government prosecutor Aloke 
Chakravarty said] that he deliberately set out to 
radicalize others and that there’s a lasting 
impact which will harm the community for years to 
come. Clearly, they were trying to make this a 
very big deal, that [Mehanna was] a mastermind 
who was out there using the Internet to create 
this huge legion of radicalized Muslims around 
the world who will seek to create violence 
against the United States. And the fact of the 
matter is, Tarek Mehanna went on to get his PhD 
in pharmacy — he knew he was under surveillance, 
the FBI apparently asked him twice to be an 
informant. The final time they asked him they 
said, we’ll do this the easy way or the hard way. 
You either go along with us, that’s the easy way, 
and the hard way, we’ll see what happens.

And he chose the hard way, whereas his former 
friends agreed to testify against him, although 
some of them testified on the stand that 
basically he hadn’t done what the government had 
said he had done. It’s a case of the jury really 
being played on, in my view, by the prosecution, 
to basically say that this is really one of the 
worst things you can do, recruiting others to the 
cause, and it’s all done through the Internet 
without any demonstrated proof that doing these 
translations has made all these radical converts. 
And for that, the prosecution asked for 25 years.

There had been a big effort on the part of the 
defense to try and present another image of Tarek 
to both the US attorney and the judge by having 
the community and others write letters, talking 
about what he was like. That must have had some 
impact with the judge, who decided to go with a 
17.5-year sentence instead of a 25-year one.

MCM: He’s being sentenced to 17.5 years in a 
supermax prison. Can you describe the kind of 
conditions he will be held in, and the kind of 
conditions he has been held in, as I understand 
he has been in lockdown for four years now.

NM: The conditions he faces are conditions which 
are meant to destroy people. The supermax 
conditions are not just that you’re in solitary 
for 23 hours a day, but that you are under strict 
SAM — special administrative measures — which 
restrict how much contact you can have with 
anyone. I believe his parents won’t even be 
allowed to have direct contact visits with him, 
it’ll probably be through glass. Very infrequent 
visits, very infrequent telephone calls, very 
controlled the amount of pages of letters you are 
allowed to write, all of this. It’s really 
designed to break people. The fact that he 
managed [to endure] the solitary confinement in 
Plymouth County jail is pretty amazing. The kind 
of solitary [confinement] of these supermaxes is 
clearly inhuman, inhumane, no matter what the 
European Court says. I mention that because the 
European Court basically said British Muslims can 
be extradited by the United States because the 
treatment they get here will not be cruel and 
unusual punishment, even if they end up in 
solitary confinement supermaxes, which we think 
is really wrong, because it’s a form of 
psychological torture designed to break people down.

And let me just give you a flavor of what the 
defense had to say during the sentencing hearing. 
[Defense attorney] Jay Carney doesn’t make 
political speeches, that’s not what he does, but 
here’s what he had to say about Tarek. He said, 
it’s clear from what [US attorney] Mr. 
Chakravarty has written and said that the 
government wants the defendant to be punished for 
statements made which are protected by the First 
Amendment and for his refusal to become an 
informant. And he goes on and on, talking about 
how not only were all of these statements 
protected, but the message the government sent 
through the Tarek case is that you will be 
punished if you don’t become an informant. Then 
he goes on to say that the government is 
breathtaking in its hypocrisy in how it treated 
[Kareem] Abuzahra, who is the chief guy who 
became an informant and testified against Tarek, 
because it was Abuzahra who was really saying we 
have to bomb a mall, and it was Tarek saying, 
well no, this is not what we’re gonna do. We’re 
here in America, this is our country, we cannot 
go to war here in the United States.

What Tarek did say in his amazingly cogent talk 
that he delivered at his hearing — which was not 
read, he didn’t have a single piece of paper that 
I could see — he talked about the need of Muslims 
to be able to defend [themselves] from foreign 
invaders, and that was his focus. His focus was 
Iraq, his focus was Afghanistan, his focus was 
being extremely critical of American foreign 
policy, not “let’s go kill Americans in the United States.”

This is what I thought was so interesting, 
[defense attorney Carney is] speaking to judge 
George O’Toole, and tells him he remembers that 
when he was a high school student, how much he 
hated the occupying British army, what it was 
doing to northern Ireland, and he thought of 
joining the IRA when he was in college. And he 
said that deliberately to the judge, just to get 
him to try to understand the parallels here. Then 
he went on and talked about how Tarek’s views 
moderated over the decade, and he objected to 
almost all the views of al-Qaida, with the 
exception that Muslims have got to be able to 
defend themselves in their own land.

For at least eight years, probably longer, the 
FBI had [Mehanna] under scrutiny. And if he was 
so dangerous, as Carney said, why did it wait so 
long to arrest him? They arrested him once in 
2008 for making a false statement, then they 
allowed him to be released on bail. So [Carney] 
said if he was so dangerous, why did they allow 
him to be released on bail? But it was after that 
they tried again to make him an informant.

It’s just really demoralizing to think that so 
many years after 9/11, it is getting easier for 
the government to bring these prosecutions, 
rather than harder, because people have just been 
so indoctrinated. You don’t really have to 
produce evidence to get a conviction, you just 
have to play with inflammatory imagery and make 
assertions that this man is dangerous. I won’t 
say all juries, but this particular jury was swayed by it.

And if you contrast that with the jury in Idaho, 
and I mention this in the piece I wrote, the Sami 
al-Hussayen case, the Saudi graduate student at 
the University of Idaho — in that it was the 
biggest news because the governor and [former 
Attorney General] John Ashcroft stated they had 
just uncovered this terror cell and the way they 
did that was by having a giant military plane 
come with a swat team of over 150 people who took 
over the campus at five in the morning and raided 
the rooms where foreign students lived, and 
captured this young Saudi student who was living 
with his wife and young children.

And so they get a jury to try the case, and it 
was a case again about using the Internet. He had 
been a webmaster, Sami al-Hussayen, for what the 
government considered to be radical groups. And 
in this case, the jury said that this was 
protected First Amendment activity. And the 
government relied only on a single witness, a 
former CIA agent who said this is not how you 
make dangerous radicals, by just doing web posting.

So if you contrast what happened in Tarek’s case 
with that, and if you contrast it with what 
happened in the Hutaree case in Michigan — I kept 
thinking, what if Tarek and his friends had 
actually stockpiled weapons and had been talking 
about particular details about killing a police 
officer and bombing his funeral, which is what 
these Hutaree militia people had did. [In that 
case] the judge said this is protected by the 
First Amendment, and they were just venting, and 
the plot was not sufficiently ripened to say that 
this was a real plot. I mean, can you imagine 
that happening [in Mehanna’s case]? That’s why in 
my view, it really is that the First Amendment is 
having a Muslim exception carved out of it, not 
so much for all people who are wanting to vent against the government.

MCM: Lastly, what do you think is the bottom line 
that people should take away from Tarek Mehanna’s 
case, and why do people need to pay closer attention to these cases?

NM: We really are now on a slippery slope. If we 
care about the First Amendment, if we care about 
being able to criticize foreign policy, to 
criticize what our government is doing, this case 
is really relevant. Just like with the Supreme 
Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law 
Project, this case shows that the First Amendment 
is now just a convenience. When the government 
says it can exist, it can exist, when they say 
no, forget it, then they can move in and use other language.

It’s so much the kind of guilt by association 
that we saw during the McCarthy period in the 
first red scare and the second red scare. Well, 
that is really back. The really low points in our 
history include red scares, just like they 
include Japanese American internment and slavery 
and so on. We are now in danger of that kind of 
scapegoating, having the fear of the so-called 
enemy within again, using thought crime, guilt by 
association, in ways which we will later really come to regret.

And not only that, but once one group is seen as 
the dangerous enemy within, it’s so easy to then 
say, what about other groups that might be 
critical of US policy, [to say] that they must be 
linked in with this conspiracy. Everything is so 
vague, you could just pump it up to be whatever 
the government says it is, and that is extremely dangerous.

It’s a pattern that I hope we can really 
denounce, that we can courageously stand up 
against, because I think a lot of people will be 
chilled, they won’t want to criticize what the 
government is doing, because they do see it could 
end up putting you in hot water. I think that if 
we intend to have a democracy, the First 
Amendment has to be part of it. Otherwise, forget 
it, we will have a pure and simple police state. 
It’s up to all of us to care about this and the 
implications not just for Muslims, not just for 
Tarek and his family, but for our constitutional 
rights generally and the kind of democracy we say we are.




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