The Persecution of Political Prisoner Sami Al-Arian

WASHINGTON, Jul 2 (IPS) -- Palestinian activist and former university professor Sami Al-Arian was arraigned Monday in U.S. federal court on two counts of criminal contempt for his refusal to testify in a grand jury investigation of a Northern Virginia Muslim think-tank.

The indictment is the latest episode of a long, Kafka-esque process that has violated nearly every tenet of Al-Arian's plea agreement following the end of his first trial in 2005, and kept Al-Arian in prison for over five years.

"The government has made a complete mockery of the plea agreement," Al-Arian's attorney, Jonathon Turley, told IPS. "Dr. Al-Arian has received zero benefit from his plea agreement."

Supporters of Al-Arian cited the charges as an attempt by an overzealous Justice Department prosecutor to keep Al-Arian behind bars indefinitely despite an inability to secure a jury conviction. There is no maximum penalty for criminal contempt.

"The whole case against him is a vindictive act by sore losers that lost the Florida case badly because there was no evidence," Al-Arian's daughter, Laila, told IPS. "So they're manufacturing crimes to keep him in prison as long as possible. It's almost as if the whole plea agreement was just a way to buy time."

The indictment said that Al-Arian had refused to testify in violation of a court order. But Al-Arian's defense holds that his subpoena was out of line with his original agreement, which included an express promise that Al-Arian did not have to cooperate further with the government.

On Monday, Al-Arian was moved from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail to the Alexandria courthouse where he was arraigned. He had been in ICE custody for over three months awaiting an expedited deportation as part of the 2005 plea.

In ICE prisons, which have been the target of frequent criticism for their harsh conditions, Al-Arian was only allowed one visitor per month. When arraigned on Monday, Al-Arian and his defense did not enter a plea because they had not had the chance to discuss the charges yet, Turley wrote on his blog. The court entered a not guilty plea.

The think-tank, the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), is under investigation for alleged ties to terrorism. Al-Arian's defense contends that he gave two affidavits making clear that he has no knowledge of crimes committed by IIIT, and he has offered to take a polygraph lie-detection test to back them up.

Turley told IPS that this constituted cooperation and that Gordon Kromberg, the assistant U.S. attorney who signed the indictments, had agreed -- sending Turley an e-mail saying that it looked like the proposed resolution would work. The next day, Turley learned of the indictments from the media.

Kromberg has been criticized for prosecutorial abuses ranging from stoking Islamophobia among jurors to get convictions, to outright anti-Muslim comments as recorded in court motions, and -- perhaps most shockingly -- punishing defendants that a jury will not convict.

In 1999, at a Cato Institute event on asset forfeiture reform to curb abuses, Kromberg spoke out in favor of broad governmental powers to seize belongings. In Reason Magazine, Michael Lynch's retelling of the Cato event noted that jaws hit the floor when Kromberg, opposed by much of the crowd in defending forfeiture, said that prosecutors should be able to punish wrongdoing if they are convinced it occurred.

"He knew these people were guilty and was certain they needed to be punished," Lynch paraphrased Kromberg's position. "Should we let these people get away, he asked, before answering in an illuminating way: Not if we can punish them through other means."

While the forfeiture battle was a far cry from prosecuting terrorism suspects, Kromberg's assertions about prosecutorial powers is germane to Al-Arian's case in that it reveals his thinking about punishing those he deems guilty even if a jury refuses to do so.