My Father Will Not be Forgotten

The Holy Land Five Appeal

by NOOR ELASHI Counterpunch.org

Exactly three days following the tenth anniversary of the Bush administration shutting down the largest Muslim charity in the United States, the Fifth Circuit Court dismissed the appeal for the Holy Land Foundation case, affirming the conviction of my father, the co-founder of the HLF who’s serving a 65-year sentence for his humanitarian work.

On Wednesday, Dec. 7, the three-judge panel, based in New Orleans, filed their opinion, concluding that “the district court did not clearly err.”

Upon hearing this news, it initially all rushed back to me at once, nostalgia on overdrive. I saw the relentless accusations by pro-Israeli lobby groups, the pressure by pro-Israeli politicians and the defamatory news reports in the 1990’s. I saw the raid on the HLF in 2001, the pre-sunrise arrests and “material support” charges in 2004, the first trial and hung jury in 2007, the second trial and guilty verdicts in 2008, the sentencing in 2009. I saw the plethora of prison phone calls and visitations. And finally, I saw my father being transferred in 2010 to the Southern Illinois city of Marion’s Communications Management Unit—what The Nation has called “Gitmo in the Heartland”—and where my father’s significantly diminished phone calls and visitations are scheduled in advance and live-monitored from Washington D.C.

The case of the Holy Land Five comes down to this: American foreign policy has long been openly favorable towards Israel, and therefore, an American charity established primarily for easing the plight of the Palestinians became an ultimate target. As my father said during our 15-minute phone call on Thursday, “The politics of this country are not on our side. If we had been anywhere else, we would’ve been honored for our work.”

This month could have marked a milestone. The leaders of our country could have learned from our past. The day the towers fell could have been a time to stop fear from dominating reason instead of a basis to prosecute. The HLF would have continued to triumph, providing relief to Palestinians and other populations worldwide in the form of food, clothing, wheelchairs, ambulances, furniture for destroyed homes, back-to-school projects and orphan sponsorship programs. And more notably, my father would not have been incarcerated. My family and I would have been able to call him freely and embrace him without a plexiglass wall.

Yet my father was charged under the ambiguous Material Support Statute with sending humanitarian aid to Palestinian distribution centers known as zakat committees that prosecutors claimed were fronts for Hamas. He was prosecuted despite the fact that USAID—an American government agency—and many other NGO’s were providing charity to the very same zakat committees. Instead of the Fifth Circuit Court taking this fact into account and transcending the politics of our time, the language used in the opinion, drafted by Judge Carolyn King, echoed that of the prosecutors:

“The social wing is crucial to Hamas’s success because, through its operation of schools, hospitals, and sporting facilities, it helps Hamas win the ‘hearts and minds’ of Palestinians while promoting its anti-Israel agenda and indoctrinating the populace in its ideology.”

Even more disappointing is the Fifth Circuit Court’s opinion regarding one of the main issues in the appeal: The testimony of the prosecution’s expert witness, an Israeli intelligence officer who, for the first time in U.S. history, was permitted to testify under a pseudonym. The opinion states:

“When the national security and safety concerns are balanced against the defendants’ ability to conduct meaningful cross-examination, the scale tips in favor of maintaining the secrecy of the witnesses’ names.”

I refuse to let this language bring me down, especially knowing that the battle for justice continues. In the next few weeks, defense attorneys plan to ask the entire panel of appellate judges to re-hear the case, and if that petition is denied, they will take it to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, my father waits in prison. This Thursday, when I spoke to him, it had been the first time in several weeks since he received a phone call ban for writing his name on a yoga mat, which prison officials saw as “destruction of government property.” I told him that during the tenth anniversary of the HLF shutting down, the name of the charity is still alive and that he will not be forgotten. My father is my pillar, whose high spirits transcend all barbed-wire-topped fences, whose time in prison did not stifle his passion for human rights. In fact, when I asked him about the first thing he’ll do when he’s released, my father said, “I would walk all the way to Richardson, Texas carrying a sign that says, ‘End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine.’ ”

Noor Elashi is a writer based in New York City. She holds a Creative Writing MFA from The New School.

Echoes of Korematsu

August 31, 2011 Counterpunch.org

The Holy Land Five Case

by NOOR ELASHI

As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and my father remains incarcerated in a modern-day internment camp, the time in which we live begins to feel less like 2011 and more like 1942. But this week could determine whether today’s justice system is capable of rewriting the sad chapters of our history. I say this week because on Thursday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the long-awaited oral arguments in the Holy Land Foundation case, involving what was once our country’s largest Muslim charitable organization.

Meet my father, Ghassan Elashi. The co-founder of the HLF. Inmate number 29687-177, sentenced to 65 years in prison for his charity work in Palestine. He is an American citizen from Gaza City, who before his imprisonment, took part in the immigration rally in Downtown Dallas, joining the half a million people wearing white, chanting ¡Si, se puede! The prison walls have not hindered his voice, as he writes to me, heartbroken about the homes destroyed during the earthquake in Haiti, the young protesters killed indiscriminately in Syria, the children lost to the famine in Somalia. Most frequently, he writes to me about the Japanese-American internment.

Now meet Fred T. Korematsu, who after Peal Harbor was among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans ordered to live in internment camps. This was in 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military detainment of Japanese-Americans to ten concentration camps during World War II. Mr. Korematsu defied orders to be interned, because he viewed the forced removal as unconstitutional. So on May 30, 1942, Mr. Korematsu was arrested. His case was argued all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against him, stating that his incarnation was justified due to military necessity.

Nearly forty years later, in 1983, Mr. Korematsu’s case was reopened, and on Nov. 10, 1983, the conviction was overturned. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel notably said, “It stands as a caution that, in times of international hostility and antagonisms, our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.”

Fast-forward six years. It’s already 1989, when my father co-finds the HLF, which becomes a prominent American Muslim charity that provides relief—through clothes, food, blankets and medicine—to Palestinians and other populations in desperate need. Then, in 1996, President Clinton signs the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, giving birth to the Material Support Statute, a law that in time would come under fire by civil libertarians for profiling and targeting Arab and Muslim Americans.

Two years later, in 1998, Clinton awards Mr. Korematsu with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest citizen honor, condemning Mr. Korematsu’s persecution as a shameful moment in our history.

Three years later, the towers fall.

And President Bush declares a “War on Terror.”

In 2001, President Bush signs the Patriot Act, which strengthens the Material Support Statue. The law’s language is so vague that it gives prosecutors the authority to argue that humanitarian aid to designated terrorist organizations could be indirect, and therefore, a crime.

In my father’s case, he is charged with conspiring to give Material Support in the form of humanitarian aid to Palestinian distribution centers called zakat committees. Prosecutors admit the zakat committees on the indictment were not designated terrorist groups, but according to the indictment released in 2004, these zakat committees are “controlled by” or act “on behalf of” Hamas, which was designated in 1995. Their theory is that by providing charity to zakat committees, the HLF helped Hamas win the “hearts and minds” of the Palestinian people.

The HLF case was tried in 2007, lasting three months, and after 19 days of deliberations, the jury deadlocked on most counts. The judge declared a mistrial and the case was tried the following year.

In 2008, after essentially the same arguments, the retrial ended with the jury returning all guilty verdicts, and in 2009, my father was sentenced to 65 years in prison, for essentially giving humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

In 2010, my father was transferred to a “Communications Management Unit” in Marion, Illinois—the aforementioned modern-day internment camp. The CMU received the nickname “Guantanamo North” by National Public Radio since two-thirds of its inmates are Middle Eastern or Muslim. The purpose of this prison—which has another branch in Terre Haute, Indiana—is to closely monitor inmates and limit their communications with their families, attorneys and the media. Thus, I only get to hear my father’s voice once every two weeks, for fifteen minutes. And our visitations take place behind an obtrusive Plexiglass wall.

My father and his co-defendants—now called the Holy Land Five—are in the final stages of the appeal as the oral arguments approach on Thursday. In the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans, defense attorneys will urge the panel of three justices to reverse the HLF convictions based on errors that took place in the trial process.

According to the appellate brief, there’s a major fact that undermines the prosecution’s claim that Hamas controlled the zakat committees: “The United States Agency for International Development—which had strict instructions not to deal with Hamas—provided funds over many years to zakat committees named in the indictment, including the Jenin, Nablus, and Qalqilia committees,” writes my father’s attorney, John Cline. He continues stating that in 2004, upon the release of the HLF indictment, “USAID provided $47,000 to the Qalqilia zakat committee.”

Furthermore, defense attorneys will argue that the district court:

a) Violated the right to due process by allowing a key witness to testify without providing his real name, thereby abusing my father’s right to confront his witness. They are referring to an Israeli intelligence officer who became the first person in U.S. history permitted to testify as an expert witness using a pseudonym.

b) Abused its discretion by allowing “inflammatory evidence of little or no probative value,” which included multiple scenes of suicide bombings.

c) Deviated from the sentencing guidelines when they sentenced my father to 65 years.

When putting the lawyerly language aside, human rights attorneys have deemed the HLF case as purely political, perpetrated by the Bush administration. Likewise, the decision to intern Japanese-Americans was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership,” according to a 1982 report by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.

I can only hope that my father’s vindication won’t take 40 years as it did for Mr. Korematsu. Let us learn from our old wrongs.

Noor Elashi is a writer based in New York City. She holds a Creative Writing MFA from The New School.

This op-ed was inspired by a forward written by Karen Korematsu in the upcoming book, “Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice,” which includes a chapter about my father. You can purchase a copy here:

http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.detail/object_id/29fec7a1-b963-47b4-be9f-c3bce89cf612/PatriotActsNarrativesofPost911Injustice.cfm

The guard told me ‘you are nothing like the Muslim prisoners’. He was wrong

by Andy Stepanian on April 7, 2011 mondoweiss

My friend Noor (above left) has beautiful eyes, but today they look sad. Noor's grandfather passed away and she has had no way of letting her father know because the simple forms of communication all of us take for granted can't help her reach out to her father with this news. Noor's father, Ghassan Elashi, (at right) is a political prisoner incarcerated in a highly restrictive and secretive federal prison program called the Communications Management Unit (CMU), in which I was also incarcerated.

Ghassan is imprisoned for providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, a selfless deed that the Bush administration argued was analogous to indirectly supporting Hamas, by sending charity to Zakat Committees that prosecutors allege were fronts for Hamas. In the same year US AID, The Red Cross, the UN and dozens of other NGOs contributed to the same Zakat committee to which Ghassan and his charity, The Holy Land Foundation, is accused of giving aid. The US attorney's office appeared to be selectively applying one's freedom to give, and selectively prosecuting some charitable groups, while sliding on others. For this alleged charity, Ghassan is being denied all contact with the outside world and the news that comes from it, including the news of his father-in-law's passing.

The Communications Management Unit is a designer penal program that focuses specifically on isolating and silencing its inmates. The demographic of the CMU's designees is made up of an overwhelming 64% Muslim majority and a smaller minority group of designees that have either highly politicized cases or ones with abundant press attention. This apparent racial disparity and the political nature of these prisons was the focus of a recent two-part investigation on National Public Radio entitled "Guantanamo North." CMU inmates are isolated and silenced by administrative segregation and through heavy vetting or complete denial of contact with the outside world. To make things worse for Ghassan, he was recently stripped of what little communication he was previously able to have with his loved ones from within the CMU, and is now being denied all phone calls, all visits, and all emails.

The United States prides itself on not having any political prisoners and yet the federal CMU programs in Marion, Illinois, Terre-Haute, Indiana, and the Administrative-Maximum Unit at Carswell, Texas (an institution for female inmates) are filled with a disproportionate amount of inmates who are Muslim, and a smaller group of non-Muslims with cases related to tax protests, environmental advocacy, and animal rights activism, all of which are considered political causes. The CMU violates federal designation protocols because most of the inmates sent to the CMU have federal custody classification points congruent with that of prisoners normally designated to low and minimum security prison facilities, and yet they are housed in conditions that at times exceed that of the US's most restrictive "super-max" prison, ADX in Florence, Colorado. (See Alia Malek's story, Gitmo in the Heartland, in the Nation.)

When the CMU was first implemented it may have been done so illegally because it side-stepped the Administrative Procedures Act (a law that demands that federal programs such as these must first be brought to the attention of congress and made available for public comment.) Moreover the Center For Constitutional Rights has argued in Aref v. Holder that the CMU violates constitutionally mandated laws of due process because as of yet there is no administrative process to challenge an inmate’s designation to or transfer out of a CMU.

Ghassan Elashi was accused of providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza through his charity The Holy Land Foundation. Specifically, the government alleges that Ghassan's charitable contributions of humanitarian aid could be deemed as indirect criminal material support of Hamas under the newly redesigned and over-broad Material Support for Terrorists statute. When Ghassan was arrested in 2004, he immediately saw a Dallas judge and was released pending trial because the judge determined that he would not be considered a threat to the community or a flight risk. Ghassan stood trial once in Dallas in 2007, was acquitted on some of the counts levied against him and the jury deadlocked on the remaining counts against him.

A mistrial was declared on the counts the jury could not render a verdict upon and only after a second trial in 2008 were Ghassan and 4 other men found guilty of allegedly giving Material Support for Palestinians.

Ghassan was later sentenced in 2009 to 65 years in federal prison.

Noor, who has often told me "I am my father's daughter," is currently working on a memoir about her father's experience with the working title Eyes Like My Father. Noor's pen is her expression and in her writing, she seeks to provide her father a voice. Noor works tirelessly to advocate for her father while he awaits appeal, and continues her father's work towards a free and peaceful Palestine by using the mediums she knows best, visual arts, design, and the written and spoken word. As a graduate student at The New School in Manhattan, Noor has combined all of these mediums in a program called Project Palestine, an initiative by New School students to re-center Palestine in contemporary dialogue. Project Palestine's monthly programs began in the fall and the programming continues to outdo itself each month, by bringing artists, poets, writers, scholars, and musicians to the school's midtown NYC campus. One of the programs, Mainstreaming Palestine, consisted of a panel of artists moderated by a student, a performance by Israeli-born hip hop artist by way of Detroit named Invincible, a talk from documentarian Fida Qishta, and a reading from a young woman from Oklahoma named Pamela Olson, who shared excerpts from her new book Fast Times in Palestine, a recollection of her experiences as a press coordinator for a Palestinian presidential candidate. Hundreds of New Yorkers from all walks of life, all religions, identity, race, and orientation attended the program helping to build an open-ended community dialogue around the continued plight of Palestinians. Re-centering Palestine in contemporary dialogue is of the utmost importance to Noor and through her work with Project Palestine, she is able to connect with and reach out to additional supporters who view the issue as having been a polarizing force for far too long in the hands of extremists on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I recently attended one of Project Palestine's programs at The New School and Noor invited me to join her and her friends for a cup of coffee afterwards. Noor introduces me to her friends--they are Iraqi, Jewish, Korean, a wildly diverse group that transcends all boundaries of race, ethnicity, and identity. Noor wears a contemporary and stylish hijab but some of her friends who are Muslim do not. Noor is not to be pigeon-holed, nor can the group at this table be. They are a new generation of American justice seekers who are able to look past what those in power on both sides of the green line sometimes can't and to see the hearts of the people with whom they share a table. I could only imagine what the world would look like if the microcosm at this table was projected upon the rest of society.

One of the women at the table asks me if I was in the CMU with Noor's father. I explain that I was not, that I was released about a month before he was transferred there. She then asks me to explain what it was like. I did not know if I had it in me to fully explain and I worried about revisiting it in front of Noor, considering that this time out with friends over coffee could be a pleasant distraction away from the pain of thinking about her father. Fighting back tears felt like a rock rested in the back of my throat. In 2008 I spent the last six months of a three-year federal sentence for animal advocacy activism in the CMU in Marion, Illinois. The guards called me a "balancer," presumably to offset the numbers in an anti-discrimination lawsuit the Bureau of Prisons is now facing. During the half a year I spent there I was told in confidence that I was, "nothing like these Muslim terrorists" and that I "would be going home shortly." Indeed I did go home, but Ghassan Elashi and nearly sixty other men with stories similar to his have yet to come home.

That guard was gravely mistaken when he said I was "nothing like" those men. While I am not a Muslim, I am everything like those men. And just like them I felt the same uncontrollable sadness and anxiety when I could not use the phone to call home, when I could not touch my wife, or talk with my mother. Those men had stories exaggerated by prosecutors just as I did, their cases were compounded by politics and amplified by sensationalism in the press just like mine was. At the end of the day they were fathers, husbands, brothers, and friends who yearned to be free with their loved ones again as much as I did. These men showed such grace and selflessness towards each other and to strangers like me despite the glaring injustice and political repression inside the CMU.

Showing empathy towards these men and attempting to understand what it would be like to be in their shoes does not mean that one needs to have a bleeding heart. I lose sleep thinking of the men at the CMU with no way out--the ones with long sentences, the ones with administrative holds against them, the Palestinian stateless citizens who the US refuses to release on its soil and no other country is willing to accept them.

I knew of Noor for about four months before I finally reached out to her. I wondered if talking to her as someone who was where her father is now would be supportive and helpful to her. We met over coffee and I was not sure what to say when I saw her so I asked her if it was OK if I hugged her. I suddenly remembered what it felt like to sit in my cell thinking about hugging my wife again and then I thought of Ghassan. My head buzzed with possible things to talk about. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right yet I was certain that I didn’t know if that was true or not. I wanted to say the most encouraging things even though something malignant was gnawing away at her. She smiled at me. Her resilience was surreal.

Writing about the CMU consumes me emotionally. I pray that I can lend the best voice to Ghassan and all of these men stripped from their loved ones; it scares me to think that my voice is only one of a few who are willing to advocate on their behalf. They need more voices to demand accountability and reconciliation from our governing powers. They need you to break the silence of this secretive unit, to talk about it over dinner and to work draw it into the national discourse.

Imagine being told you can't speak to your father. Imagine what it would feel like to not know whether or not he was well, if he was hurt, sick, or simply needed someone to talk to. Imagine living your life in constant fear of never being able to touch him again. This is how Noor feels everyday. I remember vividly how it felt to be inside the CMU and to want so desperately to hug my wife and yet I can only imagine how it must feel to be a father in that situation. Ghassan deserves to be free to be with Noor again. For many people the grief would be debilitating, but in Noor's case we see the opposite--she shares with the world a renewed zeal to continue her father's struggle from outside the prison gates through creative dialogue and grassroots community building. When I ask her where she derives such resilience, she simply says that she "is her father's daughter." Reading her father's sentencing transcript reveals a man who was deeply patriotic, incredibly charitable and a shining example of what it means to be a strong, moral person. America should not bury Ghassan behind razor wire, concrete, and steel bars, instead we each should strive to mirror the brave example he and Noor have set for us to follow.

Stepanian is the co-founder of The Sparrow Project, a grassroots PR outfit that aims to braid popular culture, the arts, and revolutionary activism. In 2002 The Financial Times characterized SHAC as “succeeding where Karl Marx, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades failed.” Their actions drew the attention of Wall Street and the FBI resulting in a politically charged free speech case called the SHAC 7 trial where Stepanian and 5 others were charged and convicted as terrorists for their activism. Sentenced to 3 years in prison, Stepanian spent his last 6.5 months in a secretive federal prison program that NPR would later name ‘Guantanamo North’. Stepanian’s activism as part of the SHAC7 is the subject of a feature-length documentary due out in 2012 from Finngate Pictures. Since his release from prison Stepanian works for a publisher, consults for social justice groups, and speaks on his experiences at universities.