The True Story of Free Speech in America
By Robert Fisk
04/07/07 "The
Independent" -- -- Laila al-Arian was wearing her
headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York
publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone
her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina
prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course -
and he was growing steadily weaker.
Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days
to protest the government outrage committed against him, a
burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to
rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York,
Washington and Los Angeles.
All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa,
Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for
months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.
The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was
a respected computer professor at the University of South
Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real
tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according
to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons -
al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in
2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was
arrested and charged with conspiring “to murder and maim”
outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic
Jihad in “Palestine”. He was held for two and a half years in
solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet
shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.
Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the
government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400
intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation
that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a
dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any
remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security
Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger
the impartiality of the jurors.
In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious
charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for
acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges,
al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any
further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however,
al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment,
followed by deportation - found Moody talking about “blood” on
the defendant’s hands and ensured he would have to spend another
11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that
the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think
tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonored and
refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to
languish in prison.
Not so, of course, most of America’s torturers in Iraq. One of
them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a “contract
interrogator”, who has bared his soul in the Washington Post -
all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades
in the Fallujah interrogation “facility” of the 82nd Airborne
Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he
deprived of sleep during questioning “by forcing him to stand in
a corner and stripping him of his clothes”. Now it is Fair who
is deprived of sleep. “A man with no face stares at me … pleads
for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a
pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I
realize the screams are mine.”
Thank God, Fair didn’t write a play about his experiences and
offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The
Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They
quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony
Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far
less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15
“Servicepersons” - by angering the Muslim world with tales of
how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the
reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa
in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to
his demise as “death” now that the soldiers present at his
savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that
Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys
are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are
not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it
- and who knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it
for The Independent on Sunday.
Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle
East off from us. It’s to prevent the British and American
people from questioning the immoral and cruel and
internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the
Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East
reality continues even in the country’s schools. Now the
principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by
pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in
Iraq. Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski,
James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School
compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a
19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create
their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those “who had
lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak”,
proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal. And - my
favorite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal
time to ensure the play would provide “a legitimate
instructional experience for our students”.
And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty’s point. Students who
have produced Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were told by Mr Canty
- whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that
it wasn’t their place to tell audiences what soldiers were
thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with
offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty
may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his
students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of
massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing.
It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of
Connecticut. A “legitimate instructional experience” if ever
there was one.
© 2007 Independent News and Media LimitedClick here
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