My Family's Nightmare Caught on Film

By Laila Al-Arian, Huffington Post. Posted December 8, 2007.

For nearly one year, my father, Sami Al-Arian, has been imprisoned on civil contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in Virginia. During plea negotiations in early 2006, federal prosecutors in Florida promised him he would not have to testify in any other cases. The moment he signed that agreement, his business with the government was supposed to have ended. He would serve the remainder of his sentence and finally be deported.

But a vindictive prosecutor from Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, resented that my father and his three co-defendants were largely acquitted by a jury following a lengthy trial in 2005. Kromberg is using every legal maneuver in his arsenal to prolong my father's imprisonment. A U.S. Attorney in Florida admitted, during a hearing regarding the plea agreement, that the boilerplate language dealing with cooperation was deleted from my father's agreement precisely because it was negotiated away. In Kromberg's world, his colleagues' words to my father, and the plea agreement both sides signed in good faith, are meaningless.

In his zeal to see my father locked away for as long as possible, Kromberg has shown an almost shameless degree of anti-Muslim animus. Perhaps it is no wonder he is the toast of neoconservative ideologues like Daniel Pipes, who hailed Kromberg's bigotry-laden rant about the "Islamization of the American justice system" as "courageous and valiant." Amnesty International has questioned Kromberg's motives, declaring that the biases he has demonstrated "raise[] further concern as to whether these proceedings are being taken to punish [Dr. Al-Arian] for his political profile rather than for legitimate purposes."

Prosecutors in Northern Virginia may soon charge my father with criminal contempt, according to a recent report in The New York Sun. This maneuver would be a shameless abuse of the criminal justice system and an abominable waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars. If prosecutors charge my father with criminal contempt, it will be obvious to everyone watching that it's nothing more than a case of sour grapes.

According to some estimates, the government has already squandered $50 million in its prosecution against my father. The trial was a resounding defeat for the government, which failed to prove its case that my father provided material support to terrorists. With the time in prison for civil contempt, my father has already served more time than he was sentenced. In February, he will have spent five years in prison. According to the plea agreement, my father was supposed to have been released from prison last April at the latest. But Kromberg and his DOJ cronies are abusing their power to lock him up indefinitely.

"From the beginning, it has been clear that this was a political prosecution and the pursuit of contempt by the rogue prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia have underscored this," said Linda Moreno, one of my father's trial attorneys. "As I have often said, I support my government going after terrorists and those who wish to do harm against my country. But I have never represented a terrorist, and an American jury found that Dr. Al Arian was no terrorist."

In May, at a sold-out screening in Tampa, Florida of USA vs. Al-Arian, an award-winning documentary about the trial and the toll it took on my family, I met Ron, one of the jurors who acquitted my father. "I'm sorry," Ron told me repeatedly. He said he wished he could have done more and fully acquitted my father. Two women on the jury refused to acquit my father of some charges, he explained. When asked why by other jurors, they refused to present any reasons. They disregarded the evidence in the case. Ron later elaborated at a panel discussion following the screening:

"They wouldn't tell us why they said guilty," the juror said. "They came up with really bad reasons, but most of the time it was 'I don't have to tell you. I don't even need a reason. I can just say he's guilty because I think he's guilty, and that's all'."

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Laila Al-Arian is a freelance journalist living in New York.

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