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United States of America v Rafil A.Dhafir:
Individual Responsibility and Complicity
By Katherine Hughes
11/02/05 "ICH
" -- -- Are we a society that now calls this justice?
Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison on
Thursday, October 27th, 2005 for sending humanitarian aid to
starving Iraqi civilians through his charity Help the Needy. Dr.
Dhafir is an esteemed member of the Muslim community here in
Syracuse, New York, and he is respected nationally and
internationally. His sentencing follows 31 months of detention
without bail and a 17-week trial. The government presented its case
in minutia 7 government agencies investigated Rafil Dhafir for 5
years. The defense called one witness for 15 minutes. One of Dr.
Dhafir¹s lawyers commented in summation that the only government
agency not represented was the Fish and Wildlife Service. The
60-count indictment included International Emergency Economic Powers
Act, IEEPA, violation, money laundering, wire fraud and Medicare
fraud, and the government won conviction on every count except one
where they had mistakenly listed the wrong bank.
I believe it is impossible to overstate the message that has been
sent to the Muslim community via this detention, prosecution and
sentencing. It says, in no uncertain terms: ³If we can get Rafil
Dhafir, we can get anyone². It also lets them know that a pillar of
their society can be felled without so much as a call for equal
justice from the non-Muslim community. Even as a person who is not
Arab or Muslim, these messages frighten me. I have spent my entire
life secure in the knowledge that my civil rights would be
respected, as a consequence of attending this trial I no longer
believe that to be true.
Attorney General Ashcroft announced on the day of Dr. Dhafir¹s
arrest, February 26, 2003, that supporters of terrorism had been
apprehended. And in August 2004, just before the trial started, New
York Governor Pataki reiterated this charge. Yet local prosecutors
successfully lobbied the judge to deny Dr. Dhafir the right to
defend himself against this charge at trial, but they then brought
it back into his sentencing.
I attended virtually all of the 17-week trial and took notes for 5
hours each day. I am extremely troubled by Dr. Dhafir¹s detention,
the presentation of the government¹s case during the trial, and the
fact that a jury gave the government a unanimous verdict, on what I
perceived as an extremely weak case. I believe other people should
have grave concern for what is happening, not only in this case, but
also in similar cases across this country. I am presently going
through the 60-Count indictment to show why I do not believe the
government proved their case.
I did not know Dr. Dhafir before attending his trial. Everything I
know about this man comes directly from the proceedings. I thought
my sharply different experience of the proceedings would be cause
for discussion in the press, at least, if not concern. The trial
struck me as similar to the show trials of the former Soviet Union
in the 1930s that I have seen. There were days when I literally
cringed because the evidence of the government was so weak. One
small example of this weakness was a bar chart that the government
had made about Dr. Dhafir¹s billing practices to Medicare, as
compared to some other physicians. The bar graph showed Dr. Dhafir¹s
bar as being about 7 inches tall and the other 6 or 7 physicians as
having bars of between approximately 1 and 3 inches (people should
check the transcript for exact details of the bar graph). The woman
who presented the bar chart as evidence, Nina Carousella, did not
know the area that the bar graph covered, or what types of
physicians the other physicians were. Given that Dr. Dhafir was the
only oncologist in Rome, New York, it¹s unlikely that many, if any,
of these other physicians were Oncologists using expensive
chemotherapy drugs.
My concern for civil liberties and equal justice originates from my
upbringing, and from a British documentary series ³World at War²,
that I watched as a 14 years old. I usually watched this with my
family, but I was alone on a night the Allies were shown entering
the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Footage in the documentary
showed bulldozers pushing heaps of skeletal bodies into pits and
people who were walking cadavers. This left an indelible impression
on me and spurred a lifelong search for understanding of how
ordinary people could let something like this happen.
I have read for 30 years, hundreds of first hand accounts of what
happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The similarities I see
in this country at the present time are alarming. I could not
understand how it had happened in Germany until this last year of
trying to tell people about Dr. Dhafir's case. I took a year out
from my studies at school because I believe passionately in the need
to preserve civil liberties for all. I also wanted to alert others
to the danger I perceived and worked at this like a full time job. I
put in many 60 hour weeks, contacting individuals, religious groups,
local institutions of higher education and media outlets about Dr.
Dhafir¹s detention and trial, as well as keeping up my website about
the case. I believed that if I alerted people they would want to
find out more, but this belief proved to be totally naïve. Knowledge
is a terrible thing; it throws you out of the Garden of Eden.
Three of the defendants in the Help the Needy case have graduated
from Syracuse University with advanced degrees, and many of the 150
mainly Muslim families interrogated between 6am and 10am on the
morning of Dr. Dhafir¹s arrest, have ties to Syracuse University. I
was present when one of the men told how the government agents had
gone back 20 years in his bank records because he had donated
$150.00 to Help the Needy. And because he pays principal on his
mortgage as well as interest each month, one agent asked him if his
children had enough to eat. In a year of trying, I found a total
lack of willingness to move anyone in the University community to
even have forums on what was happening in front of our noses.
Dr. Dhafir¹s case is one that sets legal precedents, right here on
our doorstep. And it also raises questions about selective
prosecution and freedom of speech - Dr. Dhafir was a vociferous
critic of the US policy in Iraq, as I witnessed in a fund raising
video during the court proceedings. I believe this extreme
outspokenness was a major contributing factor to Dr. Dhafir¹s
present situation. Barrie Gewanter, Director of the ACLU-CNY, has
stated that her organization has concerns about selective
prosecution because comparable violations have been addressed with
civil fines. This case is a remarkable teaching tool to have for law
students, students of journalism, or any students. However, the
faculty that I contacted at Syracuse University¹s Law School,
Maxwell School of Citizenship and the Newhouse School of Journalism,
had no interest in finding out anything about this case, or in
making their students aware of the case.
Dr. Dhafir wrote a 46-page pamphlet that was handed out to the media
after he was sentenced. In one paragraph toward the end of the piece
Dr. Dhafir says:
³What was the result of Feb 26, 2003 besides imprisoning of innocent
people? Scores of innocent elderly American cancer patients died
needlessly, innumerable tens of thousands of Iraqi needy (children,
women and men) died, and more than that suffered malnutrition and
the humiliation of poverty. An entire segment of our society here
was treated as criminals, intimidated, interrogated and threatened.
Never in the history of the Islamic Society of Central New York had
we had so many cases of depression and suicide that the mosque had
to engage the services of a psychiatrist to help out. The dream of
this Republic being a sanctuary for the oppressed was shattered on
that day and a new sad reality was erected in it¹s place.² P.36
Last year, in France, two novels from a Jewish writer who was killed
in Auschwitz were posthumously published to wide acclaim. Talking
about the second book, one reviewer says: ³The second, Dolce, is a
more studied and literary portrait of a small village, Bussy, at the
very beginning of the occupation, and of the first tentative
complicities of collaboration.² The words, ³first tentative
complicities of collaboration² have stayed powerfully with me since
I read them. Unfortunately over the last year, I have seen these
complicities all around me.
We express concern about journalists being embedded in war zones
like Iraq, but we should be every bit as concerned about journalists
being embedded in local Federal Buildings. My experience of the
newspaper articles was that the prosecutors could not have written
the articles better themselves. The media has also been unwilling to
address any of the burning questions raised by the government¹s
duplicitous approach to this case. I now believe I know exactly how
the Holocaust likely happened in Germany. A complicit media and a
willfully ignorant public are all that is needed and we have both.
If you care about freedom of speech and civil liberties and would
like to find out more about this case, please visit:
www.dhafirtrial.net
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Katherine Hughes <khughes@syr.edu> is a concerned citizen, a
potter and a voracious reader of history and current events.
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