Posted by Carol Rose, On Liberty April 12, 2012 05:00 PM
ACLU of Massachusetts Education Director Nancy Murray contributed the following guest post:
Tarek Mehanna is no David Stone.
David Stone and members of his Hutaree anti-government militia amassed a huge arsenal of weapons, including the ingredients for explosives, and allegedly plotted to kill a police officer and bomb his funeral. A federal judge in Michigan said they were just venting and exercising their First Amendment rights.
Mehanna, a 29-year-old pharmacist from Sudbury, Massachusetts, emailed friends, downloaded videos, translated and posted documents on the web, and traveled to and from Yemen in 2004.
No evidence was presented in court directly linking him to a terrorist group. He never hatched a plot – indeed, he objected when a friend (who went on to become a government informer and has never been charged with anything) proposed plans to stage violent attacks within the United States. He never had a weapon. He did lie to the FBI. And he has just been sentenced by US District Court Judge George O’Toole to 17.5 years in a supermax prison on various material support to terrorism charges.
Over 220 of Mehanna’s supporters in an overflow room watched on a screen as prosecutor Aloke Chakravarty in his pre-sentencing remarks stressed the “gravity” of Mehanna’s offenses. Over a decade ago, he claimed, “this defendant began to radicalize” and to radicalize others to “visit violence” on Americans. Although he failed in his efforts to find a terrorist training camp when he visited Yemen in 2004, he found his niche, the prosecutor stated, serving as the “media wing” of al Qaeda, translating documents, and sharing videos.
“The impact of the harms created through that work is huge,” Chakravarty asserted. “We don’t know how many have been radicalized…people around the world are consuming his work…The damage he has done will linger.”
The prosecutor went on at length about Mehanna’s “reticence to assist the government” – that is, become an informant. He maintained that nothing is wrong with soliciting cooperation if it is necessary to keep the country safe.
Defense attorney Jay Carney countered that Tarek Mehanna was being punished for activity protected by the First Amendment, for translating documents freely available in Arabic on the Internet and for his refusal to be an informant. The government, Carney said, does not want people to be able to read the views that other people hold. “This case goes further than any other in attacking speech protected by the First Amendment,” and involved important constitutional issues at every turn.
The attorney asked the judge to focus on “what the defendant did and did not do” – he went to Yemen for one week eight years ago. He refused to go to Iraq with the friend whom the government later enlisted as an informer. He was under close FBI scrutiny for more than eight years – if he was so dangerous, why did the FBI wait so long to arrest him?
When Tarek Mehanna personally addressed the court he described the moment when he was approached by two federal agents who said he could do things the easy way or the hard way: if he chose the easy way, he would never see the inside of a cell.
Mehanna then eloquently talked about the world view he adopted during his childhood when he avidly read Batman comics and then books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and began to see the world in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed. He talked of learning about the struggles against slavery and for civil rights, and how impressed he was by Malcolm X and his transformation from a petty criminal to a devout Muslim. It was this, he said, that made him look more deeply into Islam and become increasingly devout.
And then he began to look to what was happening to Muslims around the world. He was horrified by the suffering caused by the sanctions on Iraq and Secretary of State Albright’s comment that the death of half a million children because of the sanctions was “worth it.” Deeply angered by the “shock and awe” US invasion, he described how affected he was by atrocities committed by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In his view, what the government had really put on trial was his belief that Muslims in other countries had the right to defend their own land from foreign invaders, including Americans. He thinks “one day America will change. One day people will look back with horror at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed by American soldiers.” Meanwhile, he is the one who will go to prison as a “terrorist.”
The Mehanna case ruling and sentencing suggest that Muslims do not have the right to protected speech, and that “venting” can cost them the long years in prison spared the Hutaree militia.
Read the rest here.
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dem muSlums bee’s extempt from da messiah’s hef cair bil 2.reed it,it bee’s in der
Oh yes and I’m sure this Muslim’s lawyer is telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what his client did or did not do. And the ACLU has nothing to gain by assuming such and then slandering the prosecutors on account of it. Nothing to gain.