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Many of Bush Administration’s Claimed “Terrorism” Arrests Are Misleading

July 28, 2004 by staff

Non-crimes and misdemeanors among Ashcroft’s examples of success in “war on terror”

By Bert Dalmer
First published by the Des Moines Register, July 18, 2004

Editor’s note: Mr. Dalmer again investigated this topic in early 2005 and found more of the same.

Federal prosecutors say they built 35 terrorism-related cases in Iowa in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But a Des Moines Sunday Register analysis of the cases found that most defendants had questionable links to violent extremism. Those defendants who could be identified by the newspaper were, in most cases, charged with fraud or theft and served just a few months in jail.

The number of terrorism-related cases even took one court official by surprise.

“If there have been terrorism-related arrests in Iowa, I haven’t heard about them,” said U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt.

Ironically, Pratt presided over courtroom proceedings in at least six of the criminal cases that federal prosecutors had cataloged as terrorist in nature.

Included among the 35 cases were:

Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.

The Iowa arrests were part of a national compilation of statistics cited by the U.S. Department of Justice in requests to Congress for $400 million this year for federal anti-terrorism efforts. The department’s figures were again cited last week when Attorney General John Ashcroft lobbied lawmakers for continued support of the controversial U.S.A. Patriot Act, which gives law-enforcement officials greater authority to surveil and search foreigners and U.S. citizens.

Skeptics of the Bush administration’s response to the terrorist threat said that lumping minor crimes under the terrorism label could wrongly heighten public anxiety and provide a questionable rationale for more anti-terror resources.

“When people read that they’re doctoring the numbers, aren’t they going to have less confidence in the Justice Department and the war on terror?” asked U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Ia. “You can’t say that somebody’s a terrorist when he isn’t a terrorist.”

Prosecutors interviewed by the Sunday Register stressed that many of the Iowa cases were classic examples of illegal activities that are perpetrated by terrorist groups. And though any evidence of terrorist connections or motives was rarely mentioned in the courtroom, officials implied that some of the suspects might still be under suspicion, even since their release.

” ‘Bona fide’ terrorism is a matter of semantics,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Cedar Rapids. “I don’t think you can draw conclusions based on what a person is convicted of.”

Prosecutors decline to explain most cases
With few exceptions, Murphy and his fellow prosecutors declined to explain why any of the 35 cases were classified as terrorism, citing attorney rules and orders from Justice Department officials in Washington, D.C. Since 9/11, the Justice Department has largely equated secrecy with security, even in court.

Top Justice Department officials have told Congress that some foreign suspects have been deported rather than being charged with terror-related crimes because authorities are afraid to reveal their evidence before they have built cases against the ringleaders. Local prosecutors say they have been instructed to charge such suspects with “spit-on-the-sidewalk” crimes if necessary, just to get them out of the country.

Beginning in late 2001, federal prosecutors in Cedar Rapids filed charges against nine people and issued arrest warrants for at least 11 more in connection with Youssef Hmimssa, a document forger whose customers included members of a suspected terrorist cell in Detroit. None of those in Iowa who bought fake IDs from Hmimssa answered to charges more serious than fraud or conspiracy to commit fraud. All who were convicted served between two and 11 months in jail.

Yet all of their cases were listed by Iowa prosecutors as terrorist-related.

“We charged them with readily provable offenses,” explained U.S. Attorney Charles Larson, who heads the Justice Department’s Cedar Rapids office. “We haven’t had a shoe bomber or a McVeigh,” he said, referring to Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for his role in the April 1995 Oklahoma City federal building blast. “But if we’ve disrupted one part of what might have developed into a cell, we’ve done something important in prevention.”

In the two full years prior to the 9/11 attacks, there were no federal criminal prosecutions in Iowa related to terrorism, according to a Justice Department database obtained by researchers affiliated with Syracuse University.

Nationally, the trend was similar. The number of terrorism-related cases in the two years after Sept. 11 was 3,555 – a number six times greater than the sum for the prior two years, the Syracuse researchers said.

No pressure from D.C., prosecutors assert
Federal prosecutors in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids denied any suggestion that their bosses in Washington ordered them to label cases “terrorism” more liberally. Rather, they say, the Justice Department has become more proactive in its hunt for would-be terrorists.

When four Iowans were indicted on Jan. 29, 2003, for making false statements to Des Moines airport officials on job documents, the cases were marked internally by federal prosecutors as “anti-terrorism.”

Officials did not appear to consider the defendants a threat to the public. Most were charged months after their offenses, and all four were released on bond while awaiting trial.

Lawyers for the men said they could not recall hearing, either in court or during plea discussions, any allegations from prosecutors about terrorist motives. But to be safe, some defense lawyers filed motions to prevent prosecutors from describing the men’s alleged crimes to jurors as terror-related.

“It had nothing to do with terrorism at all. It’s just that it happened after 9/11,” said one defense lawyer, who asked not to be identified because of federal rules on out-of-court statements by attorneys.

Most of the defendants contended that they had signed the airport forms without reading them or had misunderstood the disclosures they were required to make as part of their jobs or their job applications. Their arguments were effective. Two of the airport suspects, one an employee of an asphalt paving company and the other a delivery service job applicant, were found not guilty by a jury. A case against an air-freight handler was dismissed when he agreed to report to a probation officer. The fourth man, an applicant for a freight-handler job, pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.

A fifth man who was indicted separately was an immigrant from Mexico who worked as an electrician. He was the only airport suspect convicted by a jury. He was sentenced to six months in jail and was deported because he was in the United States without proper immigration documents.

Charges are linked to anti-terror initiative
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Patrick O’Meara, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Des Moines, said the “anti-terrorism” label was used in the airport cases because the crimes were discovered as part of a specific initiative to snare potential terrorists.

In retrospect, O’Meara said, he still believes the cases were coded correctly, given the Justice Department’s directives that assign credit for an arrest during a targeted terrorism operation, “even where the offense is not obviously a federal crime of terrorism.”

Researchers and advocates who are tracking the government’s post-9/11 policing methods said that classifying routine arrests as terrorism related helps to justify the resources that government security forces receive. But they also noted that the Justice Department, in public statements, generally does not distinguish between “anti-terrorism” cases and “terrorism” cases, which focus on genuine terrorists.

That approach, the researchers and advocates said, renders the Justice Department’s statistics practically useless as a measure of the presence of terrorists in the United States.

“You can’t objectively know whether it’s a gross mischaracterization designed to puff their stats or a case in which we have hearty intelligence out of Afghanistan,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former federal prosecutor and now senior legal researcher at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. “I think record-keeping is the least important thing in their minds.”

O’Meara, the prosecutor in Des Moines, acknowledged that the government’s statistics are at times imprecise and should be used with caution.

“The real purpose in all of this isn’t in any situation to label someone a terrorist,” he said. “But where those statistics are used, that’s something we have to be more particular with.”

A handful of the other Iowa terrorism cases seemed to fit the more conventional definition.

Luke Helder, who is accused of planting mailbox bombs in Iowa and four other states in 2002, was listed among federal statistics as Iowa’s only domestic terrorist in the two years after 9/11.

The Hmimssa forgery case was classified as terrorism-related financing, although he was never shown in court to have funneled money to a terrorist group. Convicted immigrants who bought fake IDs from Hmimssa came from several locations, including Algeria, Eritrea, France, Palestine, Pakistan and Morocco. None was jailed for as long as a year.

Hmimssa’s co-defendant, Brahim Sidi, who was alleged to have solicited business for Hmimssa, had his case classified as international terrorism. Sidi served seven months for fraud and was deported to Morocco.

Hmimssa eventually agreed to testify against his Detroit associates and was portrayed during the trial as more an opportunistic criminal than a murderous ideologue. Later, he voluntarily testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which Grassley is a member. Hmimssa told senators about his methods of forging Social Security cards and talked about the vulnerabilities of the government’s ID-making system.

Hmimssa’s guilty plea to credit card and document fraud charges, if accepted, will get him a maximum of 46 months in prison. Two of the four men he testified against were acquitted of terrorism charges. The others were convicted of providing material support to a plan to blow up an American military air base in Turkey, although the verdicts are in question because of alleged prosecutorial misconduct.

Publicity about cases kept to a minimum
Although the Hmimssa case received national attention as one of the government’s first terrorism prosecutions, the majority of the government’s terrorism cases have not been well-publicized – by design.

Attorney General Ashcroft, for the first time, provided some details last week on a few dozen of the 310 arrests and 179 terrorism convictions nationwide that he had referred to during a recent appearance before Congress. But most of the cases were not discussed, and others were shown to be unrelated to terrorism activities.

Ashcroft’s terrorism figures are very different from those cited in President Bush’s proposed budget to Congress, which claims 1,283 such arrests in 2003 alone. A Justice Department spokesman could not explain the discrepancy.

In general, members of Congress have not succeeded in coaxing much substantive case information from the Justice Department. The curtain of secrecy has frustrated lawmakers, particularly in light of a report that questioned the department’s claims of anti-terrorism successes.

Investigators challenge Justice’s statistics
Congress’ investigating arm, the General Accounting Office, found in a small-sample survey last year that nearly half of the cases called terrorist-related by the Justice Department had been mislabeled. The GAO said the department’s statistics were inaccurate and unreliable.

The Justice Department officially agreed with the GAO’s findings and promised to make its statistics more precise.

Since then, federal prosecutors have expanded their definition of terrorism and have declined to make public case details that they previously had released. Department officials have cited national security as the reason.

Grassley and Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Ashcroft to complain, but they have not received a reply.

“You never get every question answered, or you never get every question answered fully,” Grassley said in an interview. “In order to have confidence in the government, it’s very important that we have as much transparency as possible.”

© 2004 Des Moines Register

Filed Under: Activism

The Dark Side of America

May 24, 2004 by staff

Conditions In Many U.S. Prisons Make Abu Ghraib Photos Seem Mild

By the New York Times editorial board
First published by NY Times, May 16, 2004

Editors’ Note: The first paragraph of this editorial is flat wrong — there was nothing inevitable about corporate media outlets suddenly addressing the horrific and systemic problems that it had ignored for years. But many astute human rights groups recognized the opportunity presented by the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and succeeded in launching the issues covered here into the public eye. Weeks later, it’s good to see that the editorial boards at major newspapers like the Times are responding to activists’ concerns.

The sickening pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners have led inevitably to questions about the standards of treatment in the corrections system at home, which has grown tenfold over the last 30 years and now jails people at eight times the rate of France and six times the rate of Canada. Conditions vary widely from state to state and community to community. But as The Times’s Fox Butterfield reported recently, some of the chilling pictures from Iraq – such as the ones of inmates being paraded around naked – could have been taken at some American prisons. And humiliation by prison guards is far from the first thing on most American inmates’ list of worries.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees – and used by inmates who share needles – have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

It is hard to quantify how many American prisoners are abused, or allowed to suffer from untreated illnesses, since the system operates largely in the shadows, outside public scrutiny. The maze of federal, state and local institutions defies easy assessment.

Things are more transparent in Europe, thanks to a powerful, independent prison commission, informally known as the Committee for Prevention of Torture. Established in 1987, The C.P.T. has unlimited access to places of detention, including prisons, juvenile centers, psychiatric hospitals and police station holding areas. Human rights violations – including medical problems – quickly become public. Such a system is long overdue in the United States.

The need for such a body was underscored last year, when Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, ordering the Justice Department to collect data on this serious problem and to create a mechanism for dealing with it. Prison officials predictably play down rape as a problem, but a harrowing report from Human Rights Watch suggested that prisoner-on-prisoner rape accompanied by savage violence was commonplace, and that officials often looked the other way.

Psychiatric care for psychotic inmates is poor to nonexistent. A recent study by the Correctional Association of New York found that nearly a quarter of inmates assigned to disciplinary lockdown – confined to small cells 23 hours a day – were mentally ill. Their symptoms worsened in isolation; nearly half had tried to commit suicide. Dissociated and sometimes violent, these people are dumped onto the streets when they finish their sentences.

The prison system can no longer be seen as the province of prison officials who cover up or mismanage problems that eventually come back to haunt the rest of the society. The country needs to formulate national prison standards and create an independent body that enforces them, if only by opening prisons to greater public scrutiny.

© 2004 NY Times

Filed Under: Activism

“Patriot” Act II Bush Administration Escalates Its War on Americans’ Freedom

February 18, 2003 by staff

By Jeff Milchen
First published by Pacific News Service
February 11, 2003

Last October, Senator Russell Feingold (the only Senator with the courage to oppose the “Patriot Act”) asked the Department of Justice to “describe what efforts are being made within the department to broaden the powers of the USA Patriot Act.” He never received a response, but now the American people have the answer.

A leaked copy of the Bush administration’s draft “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003” (DSEA) indicates that even after the 2001 Patriot Act expanded federal police powers while curtailing privacy rights, the Bush administration thinks Americans are still too free and government too small. Like the Patriot Act, the massive “Security Act” draft contains a few measures that could help catch a terrorist, surrounded by many that merely propel us further toward a secretive police state.

For starters, the DSEA would revoke key elements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), enacted to prevent government from keeping secrets from the public unless a legitimate security concern exists. Currently, FOIA gives us the right to know if a missing person is in the custody of any government agency. But under DSEA, anyone — even U.S. citizens — could be detained secretly in connection with any “terrorist” investigation, a term lacking legal definition.

Does abandoning this bedrock principle of freedom make us safer? Not likely. The Freedom of Information Act already allows the government to withhold such information if disclosure could hamper investigation of other suspects or events. Under the government veil of secrecy established last year, we have no legal right to know who among the 1,000 plus-people secretly detained by the Bush administration since Sept. 11 was charged with a terror-related crime.

Chemical and nuclear corporations may be among the few entities cheering the DSEA. The Act would grant a long-standing dream of chemical corporations: stripping citizens of our right to know about threats posed by toxic chemicals and the risks of spills or explosions in our communities. Like many Bush Administration proposals, this draft smells like a case of waiting for the right opportunity to provide cover for pre-existing agendas.

When asked about the document, a Department of Justice spokesperson claimed that it represented merely “staff discussions.” But the DSEA clearly is ready for introduction any time — perhaps while the public is distracted by an attack on Iraq.

The DSEA contains many proposals disturbing for immigrants, including increased punishments for violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act by aliens. But perhaps the most alarming proposal (Section 501) would give the Justice Dept. power to revoke a person’s permanent resident alien status or even U.S. citizenship for participating in, or “providing material support to … a terrorist organization.”

Since the 2001 “Patriot Act” redefined “terrorist activity” so broadly that minor vandalism could qualify, donating to a nonprofit organization that, unknown to you, is on Ashcroft’s hit list could end your life as an American citizen and resident.

Section 312 would revoke laws that prohibit police from spying on citizens without substantive evidence of criminal activity. This effectively reauthorizes the CIA and FBI to engage in domestic terrorism against activist groups — practices that became illegal after the well-documented COINTELPRO program abuses of the 1960s ruined the lives of many citizen activists.

Denver area activists don’t need to be warned. Last year, they learned that Denver police had created “spy files” on more than 3,000 activists and 200 civic organizations for their organizing activities or participation in rallies. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Quaker group, the American Friends Service Committee, is among the groups labeled “criminal extremist” by Denver police.

This would be laughable if the news hadn’t prompted many calls to targeted groups by people asking to have their names removed from databases. Imagine the damage to human rights organizations so labeled at the national level.

These threats are just a few among dozens of concerning proposals within the DSEA. Thanks to a brave soul at the Justice Department who values freedom over obedience to his employer, we have a chance to examine this assault on civil liberties and debate it rationally before it is thrown upon us amid the fervor of attacking Iraq or terrorist threats.

Now is the time to recall the words of James Madison: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” People who value their freedom must fight the oppressive measures proposed in the draft “Security Enhancement Act.” Please visit ReclaimDemocracy.org for ideas on heading off this attack on our freedom.

Jeff Milchen directs ReclaimDemocracy.org

Filed Under: Activism, Civil Rights and Liberties

Montanans Organize to Stop Coal Trains, Exports

September 3, 2001 by staff

Plans by coal corporations could create five-fold increase in train traffic, extensive traffic delays and large increases in noise and air pollution

Note: City Commission Vote! Gallatin Valley residents: come speak or express your opposition to exporting coal through Bozeman and show your support for this proposed city resolution at the Bozeman City Commission meeting on Monday August 13 (time TBD) at City Hall, 121 North Rouse Avenue (old library building). Thanks to all who came out to the July 9 Commission meeting to exporess your views and push this forward.

Please see bottom of this page for information on submitting letters to the editor of Montana daily newspapers and (for Bozeman residents) to City Council members.

Imagine dozens more trains than existing traffic levels passing through your town…every day and night. Trains with 70 or more cars carrying uncovered carloads of crushed coal. Time and money wasted in traffic back-ups of 8 or more minutes every half-hour. More noise pollution. Coal dust pollution. Higher taxes to pay for massive “externalities” created by transnational mining corporations like Arch, Peabody and Cloud Peak. All this so they can extract coal from Montana and Wyoming, transport it to Pacific ports and ship it across the ocean, while creating almost no new Montana jobs.

Citizens of Bozeman, Billings, Livingston and other many other communities in Montana, Oregon and Washington would suffer directly while the planet will endure environmental impacts from burning huge amounts of oil to ship cheap coal to China and other Asian nations, where it can be burned with inadequate pollution controls. Virtually no new jobs or revenues would be created in any Montana communities.

This disturbing picture already is coming into focus. We now see an average of five more trains daily passing through communities on the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe rail line through Montana and into Washington (many through Oregon as well). We believe the harms caused to our communities and the environment as a whole are unacceptable and must be halted through a grassroots uprising.

Perhaps we can learn from the lead of Coal-Free Bellingham, which is pushing to implement the Bellingham Community Bill of Rights. Instead of asking the EPA or Army Corps of Engineers to limit the number of coal trains, reduce the 500 pounds of dust that falls of each rail car, or seek help for traffic problems, their resolution says, “Whereas, the residents of the City of Bellingham possess the inherent and inalienable right to govern their own community…” and goes on to prohibit exportation of coal through their port. The group, working through our allies at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, also has compiled an informative FAQ (pdf). The people of Bellingham are choosing to act as sovereign citizens, not as subjects. Will we?

Elsewhere, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a resolution on May 29 opposing the development of coal-export terminals in Washington, while Missoula took the modest step of passing a resolution asking the Army Corps of Engineers to study the health impacts of the proposed expansion of coal trains and export.

Contact info@ReclaimDemocracy.org or call 406-582-1224 to get involved and get contacts in your community. In Bozeman, an inaugural organizing meeting yielded four action groups: public education, state-level policy, developing city ordinances and networking to build alliances with sister communities and organizations. Contact us for the point person in any group of interest to you.

Background Links on the Coal Train/Export Controversy

News

  • Day and Night Trains Through Bozeman (Bozeman Magpie, March 22, 2012)
  • Train Traffic Could Have Ill Effects for Bozeman (Daily Chronicle, April 8, 2012)
  • Coal Backlash (Missoula Independent, April 19, 2012)
  • Rising Coal Exports Have Montana Rail Communities Braced for Worst (The Daily Climate, May 3, 2012)
  • Montana Chamber of Commerce Tells Helena Not to Interfere with Wishes of Coal Corporations (Helena Independent Record, May 24, 2012)
  • Fights Brewing over Massive Coal Exports Plan (Seattle Times, May 27, 2012)
  • Seattle City Council Opposes Coal-export Ports (Associated Press, May 29, 2012)
  • (of related interest) Roots of Rebellion: Why Montana is the Only State to Reject Citizens United

Key Resources and Organizations

  • Coal-Free Bellingham shows how citizens act when they believe corporations are subordinate to democracy with the Bellingham Community Bill of Rights. Why do we support this approach? See Why do we need a local initiative when we have all those environmental laws?
  • Coal Free Northwest is a Sierra Club portal for more information on the struggle in Oregon and Washington.
  • Coal Export Action also provides resources for those working to stop coal trains and exports in the Northwestern U.S.
  • Coal Train Facts is a Washington-based site with anti-coal export information.
  • Montana Rail Link, a subsidiary of Washington Companies, provides a coal facts page from an industry perspective.
  • The Northern Plains Resource Council has a fine collection of information and a more in-depth white paper (pdf).
  • Power Past Coal has many more useful resources.
  • No Coal Eugene is advancing a Community Bill of Rights (draft).

Bozeman, MT Organizing Updates and Resources
(contact us to engage or join local announcement list). See report on inaugural community organizing meeting of May 29.

Speak Up in Print! Express you thoughts in a letter to the editor to one of the Montana newspapers (below) in impacted communities. Reclaim Democracy! created this thorough free primer on writing effective letters to help you (and we’re happy to offer editing assistance).

  • Billings Gazette (250 word limit )
  • Bozeman Chronicle (300 word limit)
  • Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, 300 word limit)
  • Great Falls Tribune (250 word limit)
  • Helena Independent Record (200 word limit)
  • Livingston Enterprise
  • Missoulian (250 word limit)
  • Montana Standard (Butte, 400 word limit)

Bozeman City Commission

  • Sean Becker, Mayor, sbecker@bozeman.net
  • Jeff Krauss, Deputy Mayor, jkrauss@bozeman.net
  • Carson Taylor, Commissioner, ctaylor@bozeman.net
  • Chris Mehl, Commissioner, cmehl@bozeman.net
  • Cynthia Andrus, Commissioner, candrus@bozeman.net

Filed Under: Activism, Food, Health & Environment, Globalization, Local Groups

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