A Dangerous Mind?

April 21, 2012 By ANDREW F. MARCH New York Times

LATE last year, a jury in Boston convicted Tarek Mehanna, a 29-year-old pharmacist born in Pittsburgh, of material support for terrorism, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to kill in a foreign country, after a 35-day trial in which I testified as an expert witness for the defense.

WHDH-TV, via Associated Press

A video image of Tarek Mehanna outside federal court in Boston in 2009.

On April 12, Mr. Mehanna was sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison. Hearing this, most Americans would probably assume that the F.B.I. caught a major homegrown terrorist and that 17 and a half years is reasonable punishment for someone plotting to engage in terrorism. The details, however, reveal this to be one of the most important free speech cases we have seen since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. 

As a political scientist specializing in Islamic law and war, I frequently read, store, share and translate texts and videos by jihadi groups. As a political philosopher, I debate the ethics of killing. As a citizen, I express views, thoughts and emotions about killing to other citizens. As a human being, I sometimes feel joy (I am ashamed to admit) at the suffering of some humans and anger at the suffering of others. 

At Mr. Mehanna’s trial, I saw how those same actions can constitute federal crimes.

Because Mr. Mehanna’s conviction was based largely on things he said, wrote and translated. Yet that speech was not prosecuted according to the Brandenburg standard of incitement to “imminent lawless action” but according to the much more troubling standard of having the intent to support a foreign terrorist organization. 

Mr. Mehanna was convicted and sentenced based on two broad sets of facts. First, in 2004, Mr. Mehanna traveled with a friend to Yemen for a week, in search, the government said, of a jihadi training camp from which they would then proceed to Iraq to fight American nationals. The trip was a complete bust, and Mr. Mehanna returned home. 

Some of his friends continued to look for ways to join foreign conflicts. One even fought in Somalia. But Mr. Mehanna stayed home, completed a doctorate in pharmacology and practiced and taught in the Boston area. But the Yemen trip and the actions of his friends were only one part of the government’s case. 

For the government, Mr. Mehanna’s delivery of “material support” consisted not in his failed effort to join jihadi groups he never found, nor in financial contributions he never made to friends trying to join such groups, but in advocating the jihadi cause from his home in Sudbury. 

MR. MEHANNA’S crimes were speech crimes, even thought crimes. The kinds of speech that the government successfully criminalized were not about coordinating acts of terror or giving directions on how to carry out violent acts. The speech for which Mr. Mehanna was convicted involved the religious and political advocacy of certain causes beyond American shores. 

The government’s indictment of Mr. Mehanna lists the following acts, among others, as furthering a criminal conspiracy: “watched jihadi videos,” “discussed efforts to create like-minded youth,” “discussed” the “religious justification” for certain violent acts like suicide bombings, “created and/or translated, accepted credit for authoring and distributed text, videos and other media to inspire others to engage in violent jihad,” “sought out online Internet links to tribute videos,” and spoke of “admiration and love for Usama bin Laden.” It is important to appreciate that those acts were not used by the government to demonstrate the intent or mental state behind some other crime in the way racist speech is used to prove that a violent act was a hate crime. They were the crime, because the conspiracy was to support Al Qaeda by advocating for it through speech. 

Much of Mr. Mehanna’s speech on Web sites and in IM chats was brutal, disgusting and unambiguously supportive of Islamic insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. In one harrowing IM chat, which the government brought up repeatedly during the trial, he referred to the mutilation of the remains of American soldiers in response to the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl as “Texas BBQ.” He wrote poetry in praise of martyrdom. But is the government right that such speech, however repulsive, can be criminalized as material support for terrorism? 

In the 2010 Supreme Court decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared that for speech to qualify as criminal material support, it has to take the form of expert advice or assistance conveyed in coordination with or under the control of a designated foreign terrorist organization. In that decision, Justice Roberts reaffirmed that “under the material-support statute, plaintiffs may say anything they wish on any topic” and pointed out that “Congress has not sought to suppress ideas or opinions in the form of ‘pure political speech.’ ” Justice Roberts emphasized that he wanted to “in no way suggest that a regulation of independent speech would pass constitutional muster, even if the Government were to show that such speech benefits foreign terrorist organizations.” 

The government’s case against Mr. Mehanna, however, did not rest on proving that his translations were done in coordination with Al Qaeda. Citing no explicit coordination with or direction by a foreign terrorist organization, the government’s case rested primarily on Mr. Mehanna’s intent in saying the things he said — his political and religious thoughts, feelings and viewpoints.

The prosecution’s strategy, a far cry from Justice Roberts’s statement that “independent advocacy” of a terror group’s ideology, aims or methods is not a crime, produced many ominous ideas. For example, in his opening statement to the jury one prosecutor suggested that “it’s not illegal to watch something on the television. It is illegal, however, to watch something in order to cultivate your desire, your ideology.” In other words, viewing perfectly legal material can become a crime with nothing other than a change of heart. When it comes to prosecuting speech as support for terrorism, it’s the thought that counts. 

That is all troubling enough, but it gets worse. Not only has the government prosecuted a citizen for “independent advocacy” of a terror group, but it has prosecuted a citizen who actively argued against much of what most Americans mean when they talk about terrorism. 

On a Web site that the government made central to the conspiracy charge, Mr. Mehanna angrily contested the common jihadi argument that American civilians are legitimate targets because they democratically endorse their government’s wars and pay taxes that support these wars.

Mr. Mehanna viewed Muslim attacks on foreign occupying militaries as justified but rejected the Qaeda doctrine that the civilian citizens of a foreign country at war with Muslims can be targeted. His doctrine was that “those who fight Muslims may be fought, not those who have the same nationality as those who fight.” 

The centerpiece of the government’s case against Mr. Mehanna’s speech activities was a translation of a text titled “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad.” The government described this text, written by a late pro-jihad Saudi religious scholar, as a “training manual for terrorism.” It is nothing of the sort. It is a fairly routine exercise of Islamic jurisprudence explaining to pious Muslims how they can discharge what many of them believe to be a duty to contribute to wars of self-defense.

This text does explain that in Islamic law a Muslim may “go for jihad” or “collect funds for the mujahidin.” But it also explains that, in place of fighting or sending money, a Muslim can assuage his conscience and take care of widows and children, praise fighters, pray for fighters, become physically fit, learn first aid, learn the Islamic rules of war, have feelings of enmity for one’s enemies, spread news about captives and abandon luxury. 

The act of translating this text is far from incitement to violent action. The text in fact shows Muslims numerous ways to help fellow Muslims suffering in their own lands, without engaging in violence. Instead of this common-sense reading, however, the government did something extraordinary. It used this text of Islamic law to help define for us what should count as a violation of our own material support law. 

Everything Mr. Mehanna did, from hiking to praying, was given a number in the indictment based on this text as an act of material support for jihad. For example, his online discussion with a friend about working out and exercising should, in the government’s words, be “placed next to the directives in 39 Ways (Step 25: ‘Become Physically Fit’).” Federal prosecutors, in effect, used a Saudi religious scholar to tell us what our “material support” statute means. 

The Mehanna case presented an excruciating line-drawing exercise. How pro-Al Qaeda is too pro-Al Qaeda, legally speaking? 

We have the resources to prevent acts of violence without threatening the First Amendment. The Mehanna prosecution is a frightening and unnecessary attempt to expand the kinds of religious and political speech that the government can criminalize. The First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston should at least invalidate Mr. Mehanna’s conviction for speech and reaffirm the Supreme Court’s doctrines in Brandenburg and Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Otherwise, the difference between what I do every day and what Mr. Mehanna did is about the differences between the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts, and I don’t trust prosecutors with that jurisdiction.

"You will be punished if you don’t become an informant": ACLU’s Nancy Murray on Tarek Mehanna case

April 18, 2012 by Maureen Clare Murphy Electronic Intifada

 

Last week, a federal judge sentenced 29-year-old Boston-area pharmacist Tarek Mehanna, convicted earlier this year of various material support for terrorism charges, to 17.5 years in a supermax prison. Mehanna has been in lockdown for most of the past four years, held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in a cell “the size of a small closet,” as Mehanna described during his powerful statement to the judge at the hearing.

Mehanna’s case fits into the wider pattern of civil liberties violations related to the prosecution of Muslims in domestic terror cases. Like in other prosecutions, including that of three young American Muslim men in North Carolina that I have covered on my blog, the government’s case focused on Mehanna’s opposition to US foreign policy and Internet activity, as well as travel he made abroad — all activity thought to be protected by the First Amendment.

FBI coercion

Before prosecuting him, the government tried to coerce Mehanna into becoming an FBI informant and spying on his community, approaching him after a hospital shift and telling him that he could go the “easy” way and never see the inside of a prison cell, or Mehanna could choose the “hard” way. Mehanna chose the hard way, which his lawyer says he is being punished for. Indeed, defendants’ refusal to become informants is a troubling commonality in a number of terror prosecutions.
And during the trial the prosecution used the tried and true tactic of invoking the specter of the 11 September 2001 attacks, even though Mehanna has no connection to those events whatsoever. When the word “terror” is invoked, even in cases like Mehanna’s where no act of violence is alleged to have been perpetrated, government prosecutors are nearly universally able to secure guilty verdicts — so much so that defendants are more likely to take plea deals than have their day in court.

Opposition to US foreign policy

There are noteworthy exceptions to Mehanna’s case. One is that Mehanna cannot be described as “low-hanging fruit” — vulnerable members of the community who are easy targets for the FBI’s unscrupulous paid agents provocateur. In his sentencing statement last week, Mehanna resolutely asserted his principles. He described a lifelong framework of understanding the world in terms of the oppressor versus the oppressed, his opposition to the horrors perpetrated by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the right of Muslims to defend themselves from foreign invaders, whether they be “Soviets, Americans or Martians.” Mehanna concluded by telling the courtroom, “The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with ‘killing Americans.’ But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.”

Mehanna’s case also stands apart from others because people beyond his community are actually aware of it and outraged, thanks to the important advocacy done around it by Mehanna’s brother, Tamer, and civil libertarian and human rights advocates in the Boston area — not least of which is the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. The day of Mehanna’s sentencing hearing, the ACLU-Mass’ education director, Nancy Murray, published a guest blog on The Boston Globe outlining the injustices of Mehanna’s case titled “It’s official. There’s a Muslim exception to the First Amendment.”

“Muslim exception” to First Amendment

In her article, and in the below interview I did with her over the phone yesterday, Murray contrasts Mehanna’s case with that of Sami al-Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student in Idaho who was in 2004 acquitted by a jury of similar terror charges related to his Internet activity. Murray attributes the different outcomes in verdicts in part to “the widespread acceptance of the notion of a ‘domestic radicalization process’ promoted through Internet activity,” first put forward by the New York Police Department and now the foundation of anti-terror policy at many levels of government.

In the below interview, edited for length, Nancy Murray explains why she believes a “Muslim exception” is being carved out of the First Amendment, how a juror came to Mehanna’s sentencing hearing to ask the judge for mercy, and why Tarek Mehanna’s case has wide-reaching implications.
Maureen Clare Murphy: How is Tarek Mehanna’s case a free speech case, and how does it fit into a wider pattern of Muslims’ rights being undermined for the sake of so-called national security?
Nancy Murray: I think this case really highlighted for us here in Boston the way the government has set around criminalizing expression which it doesn’t like.

When you look at the Tarek Mehanna case, they started zeroing in on him when he was a teenager, when he was, like many young people, very overt in his opinions. He was really upset about what was happening, the threats to go to war in Iraq, everything that was going on in Afghanistan. So when he was 19, 20 they started throwing everything they could at him in terms of surveillance, including a sneak-and-peek search of his parents’ home, intercepting emails, wiretapping his phones and so on. He apparently had a lot of people who really respected him because he was a very serious young man, he seemed very fearless, he would stand up and say what was wrong.

What [government prosecutors] had against him is that he went on a trip to Yemen in 2004. According to the government, they were trying to find a training camp, which they didn’t succeed [in finding], he and a friend. The defense has said that he went there looking for religious study opportunities, and I can’t judge which of those is true. But on his return, he never, ever got involved in any plot. What he did was he translated documents, he downloaded some, he shared them with friends, and he engaged in chats. There’s never been any evidence presented that he did any of this in coordination with al-Qaida or any other terrorist group.

But what the government is saying is that he constituted himself as the media wing of al-Qaida. That is a big leap, because they have no evidence. The government never showed that what we call his expressive activity, [Mehanna’s] rights under the First Amendment, were ever in any way coordinated with a terrorist group. [Author’s note: The controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project drastically expanded the government’s definition of what constitutes material support of terrorism, including political advocacy if done in a “coordinated way” with a group on the State Department’s designated foreign terrorist organization list.] But they skirted around this in the trial. And what they did during the trial was just use visuals of 9/11, to mention al-Qaida about every other sentence, and to really give the impression to the jury that he was acting in coordination with al-Qaida when they didn’t actually present any evidence saying that he was. So it was inflammatory, and the jury found him guilty of conspiracy to give material support.

The defense did a very good job trying to bring up the First Amendment, but they were continually rebuffed by the judge. The judge not only didn’t allow an ACLU brief to be entered in — in the very beginning we had written a brief saying that many of these charges should be dropped because they were protected by the First Amendment. But the judge refused to have that brief admitted at the beginning. He said it would be more appropriate for a later court preceding. He then continually refused to allow First Amendment to enter into the defense, and he made no mention of it in his instructions to the jury. At the [sentencing hearing], one of the jurors was present. Before the judge sentenced Mehanna, the defense attorneys had tried to get the judge to listen to what this juror had to say. The judge said no, that she could submit something in writing afterwards, but he wasn’t going to allow her to speak in that hearing.

People [who had attended the trial] were flabbergasted when the jurors came out and voted him guilty. But I think they did so just because the instructions didn’t bring up that this is protected expression, and the whole inflammatory nature of having 9/11 constantly invoked. And I must say, it was really grim hearing the prosecution at the sentencing hearing talk about Mehanna, because they didn’t just say that he went and looked for a camp and tried to train. What they were saying was that this was incredibly dangerous what he had done, its impact will linger, it had done extreme harm, because now this is all over the Internet, what he translated and so on.

Basically, [government prosecutor Aloke Chakravarty said] that he deliberately set out to radicalize others and that there’s a lasting impact which will harm the community for years to come. Clearly, they were trying to make this a very big deal, that [Mehanna was] a mastermind who was out there using the Internet to create this huge legion of radicalized Muslims around the world who will seek to create violence against the United States. And the fact of the matter is, Tarek Mehanna went on to get his PhD in pharmacy — he knew he was under surveillance, the FBI apparently asked him twice to be an informant. The final time they asked him they said, we’ll do this the easy way or the hard way. You either go along with us, that’s the easy way, and the hard way, we’ll see what happens.
And he chose the hard way, whereas his former friends agreed to testify against him, although some of them testified on the stand that basically he hadn’t done what the government had said he had done. It’s a case of the jury really being played on, in my view, by the prosecution, to basically say that this is really one of the worst things you can do, recruiting others to the cause, and it’s all done through the Internet without any demonstrated proof that doing these translations has made all these radical converts. And for that, the prosecution asked for 25 years.

There had been a big effort on the part of the defense to try and present another image of Tarek to both the US attorney and the judge by having the community and others write letters, talking about what he was like. That must have had some impact with the judge, who decided to go with a 17.5-year sentence instead of a 25-year one.

MCM: He’s being sentenced to 17.5 years in a supermax prison. Can you describe the kind of conditions he will be held in, and the kind of conditions he has been held in, as I understand he has been in lockdown for four years now.

NM: The conditions he faces are conditions which are meant to destroy people. The supermax conditions are not just that you’re in solitary for 23 hours a day, but that you are under strict SAM — special administrative measures — which restrict how much contact you can have with anyone. I believe his parents won’t even be allowed to have direct contact visits with him, it’ll probably be through glass. Very infrequent visits, very infrequent telephone calls, very controlled the amount of pages of letters you are allowed to write, all of this. It’s really designed to break people. The fact that he managed [to endure] the solitary confinement in Plymouth County jail is pretty amazing. The kind of solitary [confinement] of these supermaxes is clearly inhuman, inhumane, no matter what the European Court says. I mention that because the European Court basically said British Muslims can be extradited by the United States because the treatment they get here will not be cruel and unusual punishment, even if they end up in solitary confinement supermaxes, which we think is really wrong, because it’s a form of psychological torture designed to break people down.

And let me just give you a flavor of what the defense had to say during the sentencing hearing. [Defense attorney] Jay Carney doesn’t make political speeches, that’s not what he does, but here’s what he had to say about Tarek. He said, it’s clear from what [US attorney] Mr. Chakravarty has written and said that the government wants the defendant to be punished for statements made which are protected by the First Amendment and for his refusal to become an informant. And he goes on and on, talking about how not only were all of these statements protected, but the message the government sent through the Tarek case is that you will be punished if you don’t become an informant. Then he goes on to say that the government is breathtaking in its hypocrisy in how it treated [Kareem] Abuzahra, who is the chief guy who became an informant and testified against Tarek, because it was Abuzahra who was really saying we have to bomb a mall, and it was Tarek saying, well no, this is not what we’re gonna do. We’re here in America, this is our country, we cannot go to war here in the United States.

What Tarek did say in his amazingly cogent talk that he delivered at his hearing — which was not read, he didn’t have a single piece of paper that I could see — he talked about the need of Muslims to be able to defend [themselves] from foreign invaders, and that was his focus. His focus was Iraq, his focus was Afghanistan, his focus was being extremely critical of American foreign policy, not “let’s go kill Americans in the United States.”

This is what I thought was so interesting, [defense attorney Carney is] speaking to judge George O’Toole, and tells him he remembers that when he was a high school student, how much he hated the occupying British army, what it was doing to northern Ireland, and he thought of joining the IRA when he was in college. And he said that deliberately to the judge, just to get him to try to understand the parallels here. Then he went on and talked about how Tarek’s views moderated over the decade, and he objected to almost all the views of al-Qaida, with the exception that Muslims have got to be able to defend themselves in their own land.

For at least eight years, probably longer, the FBI had [Mehanna] under scrutiny. And if he was so dangerous, as Carney said, why did it wait so long to arrest him? They arrested him once in 2008 for making a false statement, then they allowed him to be released on bail. So [Carney] said if he was so dangerous, why did they allow him to be released on bail? But it was after that they tried again to make him an informant.

It’s just really demoralizing to think that so many years after 9/11, it is getting easier for the government to bring these prosecutions, rather than harder, because people have just been so indoctrinated. You don’t really have to produce evidence to get a conviction, you just have to play with inflammatory imagery and make assertions that this man is dangerous. I won’t say all juries, but this particular jury was swayed by it.

And if you contrast that with the jury in Idaho, and I mention this in the piece I wrote, the Sami al-Hussayen case, the Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho — in that it was the biggest news because the governor and [former Attorney General] John Ashcroft stated they had just uncovered this terror cell and the way they did that was by having a giant military plane come with a swat team of over 150 people who took over the campus at five in the morning and raided the rooms where foreign students lived, and captured this young Saudi student who was living with his wife and young children.

And so they get a jury to try the case, and it was a case again about using the Internet. He had been a webmaster, Sami al-Hussayen, for what the government considered to be radical groups. And in this case, the jury said that this was protected First Amendment activity. And the government relied only on a single witness, a former CIA agent who said this is not how you make dangerous radicals, by just doing web posting.

So if you contrast what happened in Tarek’s case with that, and if you contrast it with what happened in the Hutaree case in Michigan — I kept thinking, what if Tarek and his friends had actually stockpiled weapons and had been talking about particular details about killing a police officer and bombing his funeral, which is what these Hutaree militia people had did. [In that case] the judge said this is protected by the First Amendment, and they were just venting, and the plot was not sufficiently ripened to say that this was a real plot. I mean, can you imagine that happening [in Mehanna’s case]? That’s why in my view, it really is that the First Amendment is having a Muslim exception carved out of it, not so much for all people who are wanting to vent against the government.

MCM: Lastly, what do you think is the bottom line that people should take away from Tarek Mehanna’s case, and why do people need to pay closer attention to these cases?

NM: We really are now on a slippery slope. If we care about the First Amendment, if we care about being able to criticize foreign policy, to criticize what our government is doing, this case is really relevant. Just like with the Supreme Court decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, this case shows that the First Amendment is now just a convenience. When the government says it can exist, it can exist, when they say no, forget it, then they can move in and use other language.

It’s so much the kind of guilt by association that we saw during the McCarthy period in the first red scare and the second red scare. Well, that is really back. The really low points in our history include red scares, just like they include Japanese American internment and slavery and so on. We are now in danger of that kind of scapegoating, having the fear of the so-called enemy within again, using thought crime, guilt by association, in ways which we will later really come to regret.

And not only that, but once one group is seen as the dangerous enemy within, it’s so easy to then say, what about other groups that might be critical of US policy, [to say] that they must be linked in with this conspiracy. Everything is so vague, you could just pump it up to be whatever the government says it is, and that is extremely dangerous.

It’s a pattern that I hope we can really denounce, that we can courageously stand up against, because I think a lot of people will be chilled, they won’t want to criticize what the government is doing, because they do see it could end up putting you in hot water. I think that if we intend to have a democracy, the First Amendment has to be part of it. Otherwise, forget it, we will have a pure and simple police state. It’s up to all of us to care about this and the implications not just for Muslims, not just for Tarek and his family, but for our constitutional rights generally and the kind of democracy we say we are.

Sentencing statement of Tarek Mehanna

Read to Judge O'Toole during his sentencing, April 12th 2012.

In the name of God the most gracious the most merciful
Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a
local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two
federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do
things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The "easy " way,
as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the
government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a
courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I
am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a
solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down
for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very
hard-and the government spent millions of tax dollars - to put me in
that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me
stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a
cell.

In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people have offered
suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead
for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would
be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about
myself for a few minutes.

When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by
charging me with the "crime" of supporting the mujahideen fighting the
occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or as they like to
call them, "terrorists." I wasn't born in a Muslim country, though. I
was born and raised right here in America and this angers many people:
how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe,
take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his
environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I'm no
different. So, in more ways than one, it's because of America that I
am who I am.

When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic
books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a
paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors,
there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the
oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of
my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that
paradigm - Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I
even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was
learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about
the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European
settlers. I learned about how the descendents of those European
settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III.

I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed
insurgency against British forces - an insurgency we now celebrate as
the American revolutionary war. As a kid I even went on school field
trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet
Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this
country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles
of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne
Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned
dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how
the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one
invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight
against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years
confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that
throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the
oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I
found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently
respecting those who stepped up to defend them -regardless of
nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes
away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom
closet at home.

From all the historical figures I learned about, one stood out above
the rest. I was impressed by many things about Malcolm X, but above
all, I was fascinated by the idea of transformation, his
transformation. I don't know if you've seen the movie "X" by Spike
Lee, it's over three and a half hours long, and the Malcolm at the
beginning is different from the Malcolm at the end. He starts off as
an illiterate criminal, but ends up a husband, a father, a protective
and eloquent leader for his people, a disciplined Muslim performing
the Hajj in Makkah, and finally, a martyr. Malcolm's life taught me
that Islam is not something inherited; it's not a culture or
ethnicity. It's a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no
matter where they come from or how they were raised. This led me to
look deeper into Islam, and I was hooked. I was just a teenager, but
Islam answered the question that the greatest scientific minds were
clueless about, the question that drives the rich & famous to
depression and suicide from being unable to answer: what is the
purpose of life? Why do we exist in this Universe? But it also
answered the question of how we're supposed to exist. And since
there's no hierarchy or priesthood, I could directly and immediately
begin digging into the texts of the Qur'an and the teachings of
Prophet Muhammad, to begin the journey of understanding what this was
all about, the implications of Islam for me as a human being, as an
individual, for the people around me, for the world; and the more I
learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold. This was when I
was a teen, but even today, despite the pressures of the last few
years, I stand here before you, and everyone else in this courtroom,
as a very proud Muslim.

With that, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims
in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the
powers that be trying to destroy what I loved. I learned what the
Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the
Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians
were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done
in Lebanon - and what it continues to do in Palestine - with the full
backing of the United States. And I learned what America itself was
doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted
uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to
skyrocket across Iraq. I learned about the American-led sanctions that
prevented food, medicine, and medical equipment from entering Iraq,
and how - according to the United Nations - over half a million
children perished as a result. I remember a clip from a '60 Minutes'
interview of Madeline Albright where she expressed her view that these
dead children were "worth it." I watched on September 11th as a group
of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings
from their outrage at the deaths of these children. I watched as
America then attacked and invaded Iraq directly. I saw the effects of
'Shock & Awe' in the opening day of the invasion - the children in
hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of
their foreheads (of course, none of this was shown on CNN).

I learned about the town of Haditha, where 24 Muslims - including a 76-year old
man in a wheelchair, women, and even toddlers - were shot up and blown
up in their bedclothes as the slept by US Marines. I learned about
Abeer al-Janabi, a fourteen-year old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five
American soldiers, who then shot her and her family in the head, then
set fire to their corpses. I just want to point out, as you can see,
Muslim women don't even show their hair to unrelated men. So try to
imagine this young girl from a conservative village with her dress
torn off, being sexually assaulted by not one, not two, not three, not
four, but five soldiers. Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read
about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places
like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about
the seventeen Afghan Muslims - mostly mothers and their kids - shot to
death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses.
These are just the stories that make it to the headlines, but one of
the first concepts I learned in Islam is that of loyalty, of
brotherhood - that each Muslim woman is my sister, each man is my
brother, and together, we are one large body who must protect each
other. In other words, I couldn't see these things beings done to my
brothers & sisters - including by America - and remain neutral. My
sympathy for the oppressed continued, but was now more personal, as
was my respect for those defending them.

I mentioned Paul Revere - when he went on his midnight ride, it was
for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching
to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord
to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minuteman. By the time
they got to Concord, they found the Minuteman waiting for them,
weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat
them. From that battle came the American Revolution. There's an Arabic
word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. That word is:
JIHAD, and this is what my trial was about. All those videos and
translations and childish bickering over 'Oh, he translated this
paragraph' and 'Oh, he edited that sentence,' and all those exhibits
revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves
against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did
to America. It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever
plotted to "kill Americans" at shopping malls or whatever the story
was. The government's own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we
put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting
my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was
free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of
their little "terror plots," but I refused to participate.
Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

So, this trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American
civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim
civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from
foreign invaders - Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I
believe. It's what I've always believed, and what I will always
believe. This is not terrorism, and it's not extremism. It's what the
arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the
homeland. So, I disagree with my lawyers when they say that you don't
have to agree with my beliefs - no. Anyone with commonsense and
humanity has no choice but to agree with me. If someone breaks into
your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do
whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that
home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the US military, for some
reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed
"terrorism" and the people defending themselves against those who come
to kill them from across the ocean become "the terrorists" who are
"killing Americans." The mentality that America was victimized with
when British soldiers walked these streets 2 ½ centuries ago is the
same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk
their streets today. It's the mentality of colonialism.

When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death last month, all of the focus in the
media was on him-his life, his stress, his PTSD, the mortgage on his
home-as if he was the victim. Very little sympathy was expressed for
the people he actually killed, as if they're not real, they're not
humans. Unfortunately, this mentality trickles down to everyone in
society, whether or not they realize it. Even with my lawyers, it took
nearly two years of discussing, explaining, and clarifying before they
were finally able to think outside the box and at least ostensibly
accept the logic in what I was saying. Two years! If it took that long
for people so intelligent, whose job it is to defend me, to de-program
themselves, then to throw me in front of a randomly selected jury
under the premise that they're my "impartial peers," I mean, come on.
I wasn't tried before a jury of my peers because with the mentality
gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on this fact, the
government prosecuted me - not because they needed to, but simply
because they could.

I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically
supported the most unjust policies against its minorities - practices
that were even protected by the law - only to look back later and ask:
'what were we thinking?' Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the
Japanese during World War II - each was widely accepted by American
society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed
and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked
'What were we thinking?' Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by
the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time
passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies
were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him
from prison. He even became president. So, everything is subjective -
even this whole business of "terrorism" and who is a "terrorist." It
all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be
at the moment.

In your eyes, I'm a terrorist, and it's perfectly reasonable that I be
standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change
and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at
how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US
military in foreign countries, yet somehow I'm the one going to prison
for "conspiring to kill and maim" in those countries - because I
support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on
how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a
"terrorist," yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to
life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put
her on that witness stand and ask her who the "terrorists" are, she
sure wouldn't be pointing at me.

The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with
"killing Americans." But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can
think of a lie no more ironic.

-Tarek Mehanna
4/12/12

Sentencing statement of Tarek Mehanna

APRIL 12, 2012

Read to Judge O'Toole during his sentencing, April 12th 2012.

In the name of God the most gracious the most merciful
Exactly four years ago this month I was finishing my work shift at a
local hospital. As I was walking to my car I was approached by two
federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do
things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The "easy " way,
as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the
government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a
courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I
am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a
solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down
for 23 hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very
hard-and the government spent millions of tax dollars - to put me in
that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me
stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a
cell.

In the weeks leading up to this moment, many people have offered
suggestions as to what I should say to you. Some said I should plead
for mercy in hopes of a light sentence, while others suggested I would
be hit hard either way. But what I want to do is just talk about
myself for a few minutes.

When I refused to become an informant, the government responded by
charging me with the "crime" of supporting the mujahideen fighting the
occupation of Muslim countries around the world. Or as they like to
call them, "terrorists." I wasn't born in a Muslim country, though. I
was born and raised right here in America and this angers many people:
how is it that I can be an American and believe the things I believe,
take the positions I take? Everything a man is exposed to in his
environment becomes an ingredient that shapes his outlook, and I'm no
different. So, in more ways than one, it's because of America that I
am who I am.

When I was six, I began putting together a massive collection of comic
books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a
paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors,
there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the
oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of
my childhood, I gravitated towards any book that reflected that
paradigm - Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I
even saw an ethical dimension to The Catcher in the Rye.
By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was
learning just how real that paradigm is in the world. I learned about
the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European
settlers. I learned about how the descendents of those European
settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III.

I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed
insurgency against British forces - an insurgency we now celebrate as
the American revolutionary war. As a kid I even went on school field
trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet
Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this
country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, and the struggles
of the labor unions, working class, and poor. I learned about Anne
Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned
dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,
and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how
the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one
invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight
against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years
confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six: that
throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the
oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I
found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently
respecting those who stepped up to defend them -regardless of
nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes
away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom
closet at home.

From all the historical figures I learned about, one stood out above
the rest. I was impressed by many things about Malcolm X, but above
all, I was fascinated by the idea of transformation, his
transformation. I don't know if you've seen the movie "X" by Spike
Lee, it's over three and a half hours long, and the Malcolm at the
beginning is different from the Malcolm at the end. He starts off as
an illiterate criminal, but ends up a husband, a father, a protective
and eloquent leader for his people, a disciplined Muslim performing
the Hajj in Makkah, and finally, a martyr. Malcolm's life taught me
that Islam is not something inherited; it's not a culture or
ethnicity. It's a way of life, a state of mind anyone can choose no
matter where they come from or how they were raised. This led me to
look deeper into Islam, and I was hooked. I was just a teenager, but
Islam answered the question that the greatest scientific minds were
clueless about, the question that drives the rich & famous to
depression and suicide from being unable to answer: what is the
purpose of life? Why do we exist in this Universe? But it also
answered the question of how we're supposed to exist. And since
there's no hierarchy or priesthood, I could directly and immediately
begin digging into the texts of the Qur'an and the teachings of
Prophet Muhammad, to begin the journey of understanding what this was
all about, the implications of Islam for me as a human being, as an
individual, for the people around me, for the world; and the more I
learned, the more I valued Islam like a piece of gold. This was when I
was a teen, but even today, despite the pressures of the last few
years, I stand here before you, and everyone else in this courtroom,
as a very proud Muslim.

With that, my attention turned to what was happening to other Muslims
in different parts of the world. And everywhere I looked, I saw the
powers that be trying to destroy what I loved. I learned what the
Soviets had done to the Muslims of Afghanistan. I learned what the
Serbs had done to the Muslims of Bosnia. I learned what the Russians
were doing to the Muslims of Chechnya. I learned what Israel had done
in Lebanon - and what it continues to do in Palestine - with the full
backing of the United States. And I learned what America itself was
doing to Muslims. I learned about the Gulf War, and the depleted
uranium bombs that killed thousands and caused cancer rates to
skyrocket across Iraq. I learned about the American-led sanctions that
prevented food, medicine, and medical equipment from entering Iraq,
and how - according to the United Nations - over half a million
children perished as a result. I remember a clip from a '60 Minutes'
interview of Madeline Albright where she expressed her view that these
dead children were "worth it." I watched on September 11th as a group
of people felt driven to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings
from their outrage at the deaths of these children. I watched as
America then attacked and invaded Iraq directly. I saw the effects of
'Shock & Awe' in the opening day of the invasion - the children in
hospital wards with shrapnel from American missiles sticking out of
their foreheads (of course, none of this was shown on CNN).

I learned about the town of Haditha, where 24 Muslims - including a 76-year old
man in a wheelchair, women, and even toddlers - were shot up and blown
up in their bedclothes as the slept by US Marines. I learned about
Abeer al-Janabi, a fourteen-year old Iraqi girl gang-raped by five
American soldiers, who then shot her and her family in the head, then
set fire to their corpses. I just want to point out, as you can see,
Muslim women don't even show their hair to unrelated men. So try to
imagine this young girl from a conservative village with her dress
torn off, being sexually assaulted by not one, not two, not three, not
four, but five soldiers. Even today, as I sit in my jail cell, I read
about the drone strikes which continue to kill Muslims daily in places
like Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Just last month, we all heard about
the seventeen Afghan Muslims - mostly mothers and their kids - shot to
death by an American soldier, who also set fire to their corpses.
These are just the stories that make it to the headlines, but one of
the first concepts I learned in Islam is that of loyalty, of
brotherhood - that each Muslim woman is my sister, each man is my
brother, and together, we are one large body who must protect each
other. In other words, I couldn't see these things beings done to my
brothers & sisters - including by America - and remain neutral. My
sympathy for the oppressed continued, but was now more personal, as
was my respect for those defending them.

I mentioned Paul Revere - when he went on his midnight ride, it was
for the purpose of warning the people that the British were marching
to Lexington to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock, then on to Concord
to confiscate the weapons stored there by the Minuteman. By the time
they got to Concord, they found the Minuteman waiting for them,
weapons in hand. They fired at the British, fought them, and beat
them. From that battle came the American Revolution. There's an Arabic
word to describe what those Minutemen did that day. That word is:
JIHAD, and this is what my trial was about. All those videos and
translations and childish bickering over 'Oh, he translated this
paragraph' and 'Oh, he edited that sentence,' and all those exhibits
revolved around a single issue: Muslims who were defending themselves
against American soldiers doing to them exactly what the British did
to America. It was made crystal clear at trial that I never, ever
plotted to "kill Americans" at shopping malls or whatever the story
was. The government's own witnesses contradicted this claim, and we
put expert after expert up on that stand, who spent hours dissecting
my every written word, who explained my beliefs. Further, when I was
free, the government sent an undercover agent to prod me into one of
their little "terror plots," but I refused to participate.
Mysteriously, however, the jury never heard this.

So, this trial was not about my position on Muslims killing American
civilians. It was about my position on Americans killing Muslim
civilians, which is that Muslims should defend their lands from
foreign invaders - Soviets, Americans, or Martians. This is what I
believe. It's what I've always believed, and what I will always
believe. This is not terrorism, and it's not extremism. It's what the
arrows on that seal above your head represent: defense of the
homeland. So, I disagree with my lawyers when they say that you don't
have to agree with my beliefs - no. Anyone with commonsense and
humanity has no choice but to agree with me. If someone breaks into
your home to rob you and harm your family, logic dictates that you do
whatever it takes to expel that invader from your home. But when that
home is a Muslim land, and that invader is the US military, for some
reason the standards suddenly change. Common sense is renamed
"terrorism" and the people defending themselves against those who come
to kill them from across the ocean become "the terrorists" who are
"killing Americans." The mentality that America was victimized with
when British soldiers walked these streets 2 ½ centuries ago is the
same mentality Muslims are victimized by as American soldiers walk
their streets today. It's the mentality of colonialism.

When Sgt. Bales shot those Afghans to death last month, all of the focus in the
media was on him-his life, his stress, his PTSD, the mortgage on his
home-as if he was the victim. Very little sympathy was expressed for
the people he actually killed, as if they're not real, they're not
humans. Unfortunately, this mentality trickles down to everyone in
society, whether or not they realize it. Even with my lawyers, it took
nearly two years of discussing, explaining, and clarifying before they
were finally able to think outside the box and at least ostensibly
accept the logic in what I was saying. Two years! If it took that long
for people so intelligent, whose job it is to defend me, to de-program
themselves, then to throw me in front of a randomly selected jury
under the premise that they're my "impartial peers," I mean, come on.
I wasn't tried before a jury of my peers because with the mentality
gripping America today, I have no peers. Counting on this fact, the
government prosecuted me - not because they needed to, but simply
because they could.

I learned one more thing in history class: America has historically
supported the most unjust policies against its minorities - practices
that were even protected by the law - only to look back later and ask:
'what were we thinking?' Slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of the
Japanese during World War II - each was widely accepted by American
society, each was defended by the Supreme Court. But as time passed
and America changed, both people and courts looked back and asked
'What were we thinking?' Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by
the South African government, and given a life sentence. But time
passed, the world changed, they realized how oppressive their policies
were, that it was not he who was the terrorist, and they released him
from prison. He even became president. So, everything is subjective -
even this whole business of "terrorism" and who is a "terrorist." It
all depends on the time and place and who the superpower happens to be
at the moment.

In your eyes, I'm a terrorist, and it's perfectly reasonable that I be
standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change
and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at
how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US
military in foreign countries, yet somehow I'm the one going to prison
for "conspiring to kill and maim" in those countries - because I
support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on
how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a
"terrorist," yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to
life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put
her on that witness stand and ask her who the "terrorists" are, she
sure wouldn't be pointing at me.

The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with
"killing Americans." But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can
think of a lie no more ironic.

-Tarek Mehanna
4/12/12

Tarek Mehanna Sentenced to 17.5 Years

Hundreds of Supporters Stand With Him, Vow to Continue the Fight

Dr. Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to 210 months today at the Moakley
Federal Courthouse, with more than 300 supporters packing the
courtroom and overflow rooms. In a landmark case that has mobilized
civil liberties and Muslim groups nationwide, Dr. Mehanna was
sentenced for providing 'material support' to a terrorist
organization, amidst hundreds of protesting supporters.

Mehanna addressed the court, stating: "Everything I learned [as a
young adult] confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was six:
that throughout history there has been a constant struggle between
the oppressors and the oppressed. And with each struggle I learned
about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed and
consistantly siding with those that defend them."

Dr. Mehanna remained composed throughout the day's proceedings,
thanking supporters and exiting with a firm "assalaam alaikum." In a
moving expression of solidarity, Dr. Mehanna's supporters stood up
and applauded as he exited. While supporters were not allowed to wear
symbols of support, such as FREE TAREK shirts, into the main
courtroom, their presence was greatly felt.

"Today has been yet another travesty of justice, a continuation of
this whole trial," Rev. Jason Lydon declared outside the courthouse,
following the hearing, where friends, family, and supporters rallied
in protest of the heavy sentence. Family friend, Sarah Moawad,
stated, "Dr. Mehanna is an outspoken Muslim leader who was prosecuted
for his criticism of the government's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and his advocacy for the right of people to defend themselves. The
first amendment is dead. A member of our community is going to prison
for 17.5 years because of conversations he had and beliefs he held."

With sentencing over, Dr. Mehanna will be transferred to a federal
prison out of state in the coming weeks, but supporters don't seem to
be going anywhere. Laila Murad, of the Tarek Mehanna Support
Committee, vowed, "This is not over. We will continue to fight for
justice for Tarek and the countless others who have been imprisoned
for their political beliefs, and we will expose the outrageous,
vindictive practices of the FBI and the US Attorney's Office."

Despite the sentence, supporters stated that they had seen concrete
results. A coordinator for Dr. Mehanna's support campaign, Kate
Bonner-Jackson, attributed the prosecutors' recommendation of 25
years, rather than the possible sentence of life without parole, to
community support for Dr. Mehanna and public outcry, including almost
100 pages of support the court received prior to sentencing. She
stressed the need for continued solidarity.

Dr. Mehanna's parents thanked supporters and affirmed that they stand
behind their son. "We're proud of Tarek and the stances he took," his
brother, Tamer Mehanna stated. "Our attorneys will be filing an
appeal immediately."

As the large crowd dispersed, a long-time friend of Dr. Mehanna's,
Mohamed Bahi, commented, "Tarek has remained steadfast and so will
we. We won't rest till he's free."

Pack the Court: Tarek Mehanna's Sentencing this Thursday, April 12th!

**Time change alert: Sentencing has been pushed up to 10am**

WHEN: This Thursday, April 12th, 2012 at 10am
WHERE: Moakley Federal Courthouse
1 Courthouse Way, Boston, MA

On Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 10am, Tarek
Mehanna will be sentenced at the Moakley
Courthouse in Boston. His supporters have
repeatedly packed the courthouse to show that we
stand with him, and he has requested that we do
it again! Tarek, convicted on terrorism-related
charges on December 20th, 2011, is facing a life
sentence. This hearing will be our final chance
to show the judge how much support Tarek has from
the broader community and demand a lenient sentence.

This day is especially important because Tarek
will speak at the hearing! This will be the only
time Tarek has given a public statement in the
courtroom. We hope that you will be able to be
present for this undoubtedly powerful testimony!
Following this hearing, Tarek will be moved to a
federal prison outside of Massachussetts. It will
be the last time for a long while that Tarek will
get a chance to see all of us, and for us to see
him. We ask that you join us in our strongest display of support yet!

**Important court reminders**
-A photo ID will be required to get into the
courthouse. Please bring a second form of ID,
such as a bank card or something with your name on it, if possible.
-All electronics including cell phones and
cameras will be held at the front desk by
courthouse officials or should be kept in your car.
-BE THERE EARLY, by 9:00am seats will fill up fast! .

Thank you for your continued support,
The Tarek Mehanna Support Committee
www.FreeTarek.com

____________________________
Boston, MA.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Contact: Rev. Jason Lydon
617-519-4387 |ccbminister@gmail.com

----------
Hundreds Expected at Sentencing of Dr. Tarek Mehanna

Landmark case mobilizes civil liberties and Muslim groups nationwide

ON THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 29 YEAR OLD SUDBURY
RESIDENT TAREK MEHANNA will be sentenced for
providing "material support" to a terrorist
organization, ending the first chapter of the
most high-profile and contentious
terrorism-related cases in recent memory. The
hearing will begin at 10am at the Moakley Federal
Courthouse in Boston. Dr. Mehanna, himself, will
be giving a testimony in court. After the
sentencing, the Tarek Mehanna Support Committee
will give a statement to the media. Dr. Mehanna's
lawyers are expected to appeal the conviction.
The hearing will begin at 10am at the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston.


The conduct of Mehanna's trial last year drew
wide spread criticism, including from Amnesty
International and the American Civil Liberties
Union, for heavily relying on factually and
legally questionable evidence. This evidence
included material acquired during a secret "sneak
and peak" entrance into the Mehanna home while
they were on vacation, thumbnail images taken
from the cache of a shared computer, and
testimony from informants who received
undisclosed clemency deals, admitted to being
liars, and whose testimony in trial directly
contradicted their testimony in the Grand Jury.


Tamer Mehanna, Dr. Mehanna's brother and a key
member of his support committee, drew attention
to the continuing solitary confinement of Dr.
Mehanna. "How can the Muslim community trust a
government which places people for years in
solitary confinement even before they get to
trial?" he asked. "Such measures are used to
break people and make them take any deal the
government offers. But my brother was not
broken." Dr. Mehanna, who has already served 2.5
years in pre-trial solitary confinement, faces possible life in prison.


His conviction in December of last year was a
shock for many communities, especially civil
liberties organizations and Muslim groups in the
United States. The outrage that the trial
generated in these communities has united into a
broad coalition of activists intent on bringing
to light the prejudicial and unfair nature of
domestic terror trials and the role the FBI plays
as instigators. In February, the coalition
organized a large rally attended by anti-war
groups, Muslim and South Asian communities, and
civil liberties organizations, where they read
out a letter from Dr. Mehanna and vowed to expand
and continue the campaign. Supporters have
continued to be active in recent months,
collecting petition signatures, writing character
letters to the judge and the US Attorney in an
attempt to generate community pressure for a fair
sentence. On Thursday, several hundred supporters
are expected to pack the courtroom for Dr. Mehanna's sentencing.


For Laila Murad, a coordinator of the coalition,
the sentencing is just the beginning of what she
sees as a long-term campaign. "We are not done
here. This case is important not just for Dr.
Mehanna and his family, but for the protection of
the rights of all of us. It would be
irresponsible of us to stop now. Motions to
appeal are in the works, but we will keep
fighting on the ground for as long as it takes."


Murad also believes this case has damaged the
already tenuous relationship with law
enforcement: "The key message that comes out of
Tarek Mehanna's case is that the US Muslim
community cannot trust the FBI. His conviction
has been a huge wake-up call to those in the
Muslim community who still believe in the
benevolence of the FBI. We can see that, far from
building "community relations," the FBI and the
US Attorney's office is actively conspiring to
silence and brutalize prominent Muslim leaders,
making examples out of them." The coalition also
plans to create links between support groups of
various other FBI entrapment victims to develop a
broader agenda to protect civil liberties and
denounce the targeting of Muslims.

Tarek Mehanna's Sentencing - One month away

With Tarek Mehanna's sentencing hearing scheduled for a month from
today, we urge you to do what you can to support! We deeply
appreciate all of the support from countless people all over the
world, but the fight is not over! We still need your participation.
There are currently 3 main things we are calling on you to participate in:
* Attend the Sentencing Hearing on April 12th, 2012.
* Write the Judge a Character Letter about Tarek.
* Write US Attorney Carmen Ortiz a letter to recommend a short
prison sentence for Tarek.

For 2 & 3 Please visit
http://www.freetarek.com/help-tarek-now-write-letters/

for instructions on how to write these important letters

_________________________________________
April 12th - Tarek Mehanna's Sentencing Hearing

On Thursday, April 12, 2012 at 2pm, Tarek Mehanna will be sentenced
at Moakley Courthouse in Boston. His supporters have time and again
packed the courthouse to show that they stand with him, and he has
requested that we do it again! It will be the last time for a long
while that Tarek will get a chance to see all of us, and for us to see him.

**Be there at 1:00---seats will fill up fast! For closing arguments,
which started at 9am, there were no seats left in the main courtroom
by 8:25am**

This day is especially important because Tarek will be giving a
statement at the hearing! This will be the only time Tarek has given
a public statement, his story, his beliefs in his own words, in the
courtroom. We hope that you will be able to be present for this
undoubtedly powerful testimony!

Tarek is facing a life sentence. This hearing will be our final
chance to show the judge how much support Tarek has from the broader
community. We must demand that the judge gives him a low sentence.
(Also, writing your letters to the judge and US Attorney is key.
Please visit
http://www.freetarek.com/help-tarek-now-write-letters/

for detailed instructions on writing these important letters.)

Following this hearing, Tarek will be moved to a federal prison
outside of Massachusestts. It is overwhelmingly likely that he will
be transferred to either the ADX Supermax Prison in Florence,
Colorado or one of the two Control Management Units (CMUs) in the
Midwest. Please note, it is highly likely that his ability to
communicate with the world will be even more restricted at whichever
federal prison he is transferred to, than it has been at Plymouth.

Thank you for your continued support,
The Tarek Mehanna Support Committee
WWW.FreeTarek.Com

Unjust Verdict Against Tarek Mehanna

Dec. 20, 2011 freetarek.wordpress.com All who have followed Tarek’s trial with a belief in the possibility of justice through the court system will be shocked to learn that today the jury found him guilty on all seven counts of the indictment. In the six weeks that the prosecution used to present its case, it presented no evidence linking Tarek to an illegal action. Instead, it amassed a large and repetitive collection of videos, e-mails, translated documents, recorded telephone conversations and informant testimony aimed at demonstrating Tarek’s political beliefs. The core belief under scrutiny was one that neither Tarek nor his defense team ever denied: Muslims have a right to defend their countries when invaded. The prosecution relied upon coercion, prejudice, and ignorance to present their case; the defense relied upon truth, reason and responsibility. The government relied upon mounds of “evidence” showing that Tarek held political beliefs supporting the right to armed resistance against invading force; they mentioned Al-Qaeda and its leadership as often as possible while pointing at Tarek. It is clear they coerced Tarek’s former friends and pressured them to lie, and many of them admitted to such. There is a long list of ways this trial proceeded unjustly, to which we will devote an entire post. The government’s cynical calculation is that American juries, psychologically conditioned by a constant stream of propaganda in the “war on terrorism,” will convict on the mere suggestion of terrorism, without regard for the law. Unfortunately, this strategy has proved successful in case after case. Tarek’s case will continue under appeal. We urge supporters to write to Tarek, stay informed, and continue supporting Tarek in his fight for justice. Sentencing will be April 12th, 2012. We will be sending out more information soon. A beacon of hope and strength throughout this ordeal has been Tarek’s strength and the amount of support he has received. Tarek has remained strong from day one, and even today he walked in with his head held high, stood unwavering as the verdict was read to him, and left the courtroom just as unbowed as ever. His body may be in prison now, but certainly this is a man whose spirit can never be caged. His strength must be an inspiration to us all, even in the face of grave circumstances. Before he left the courtroom, he turned to the crowd of supporters that was there for him, paused, and said, “Thank you, so much.” We thank you too. Your support means the world to him.

Tarek Mehanna: From suburban teenager to convicted terrorist

Tarek Mehanna. (Courtesy of the Mehanna family)

( you can read more about Tarek's case and an in depth summary of the trial here: http://freetarek.wordpress.com/ and http://www.freetarek.com/ )

by Michael May on December 19, 2011 Latitude News

UPDATE 12/20 11:30: The jury found Tarek Mehanna guilty on all counts after deliberating for ten hours.

It’s unusual for an accused terrorist to have an American fan base. But that’s the situation with Tarek Mehanna, a second-generation Egyptian American on trial in federal district court in Boston for providing material support to terrorism and other crimes. Mehanna’s supporters crowd the courtroom nearly every day of the eight-week trial – more than a hundred showed up for the closing arguments. The chasm between the competing portrayals of Tarek Mehanna is deep. His supporters say he was a loving teacher and a role model to local Muslim youths, and are convinced the government is pursuing him just for expressing his anger at U.S. foreign policy. The government says he’s the type of guy who would consider killing Americans at a mall in cold blood.

So, who is the real Tarek Mehanna? The Mehannas live in the bedroom community of Sudbury, Massachusetts. His father teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and both Tarek and his brother also graduated from there. His brother, Tamer Mehanna, told me that Tarek grew up a typical American kid. He went through various phases as a teenager in the 1990s. Comic books. Drawing. Grunge music. He was the resident Nirvana expert among their friends. “You go into my brother’s room,” Tamer said, “and he had binders of histories of the band, discographies, rare LPs. My brother always wanted to know everything about what he was interested in. And that carried into Islam as well.”

Listen to Michael May’s story on Tarek Mehanna for PRI’s The World.

Inspired by an unlikely source

But Fundamentalist Islam was more than a phase. The transformation happened in 2000, during Tarek’s senior year in high school. And it was sparked by an unlikely source: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States. His anthropology teacher assigned the book. Zinn’s radical take on U.S. history inspired Tarek to learn more about his faith. “Because before that, we were kids, we didn’t think about the world,” says Tamer. “And neither of us had given much thought to our identity as Muslims here in America.” Soon, Tarek grew his beard and began hanging out with a close-knit group of devout Muslim men.

Tamer Mehanna in front of his brother Tarek's bookshelf. (Credit: Michael May)

Tarek lived with his parents in a plush suburban home until he was taken into custody two years ago. His room, in contrast, is austere and just how he left it. Nothing but a bed. Some weights. And a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with leather-bound texts covered in gilded Arabic script. Tarek’s passion was translating the particulars of Islamic law from Arabic and putting them on his blog for other English-speaking Muslims. His friend Mohamed Bahe, a radiology student, got to know Tarek online. He went to his blog to read ancient texts that he otherwise wouldn’t have had access to. “And he had hundreds and hundreds of translations on marriage, prayer, dealing with fellow kinsman, friends, how to be a good Muslim,” says Bahe. “His blog dealt with all aspects of life, which is what I really liked about it.”

The War Comes Home

Tarek’s spiritual awakening happened at a difficult time for American Muslims. First there was 9/11. Then the U.S. retaliated by invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Tarek viewed the wars as an attack on Muslims. And Tarek felt Muslims had the right to defend themselves by any means necessary. Tarek began to post on a listserve called At-Tibyan Publications where English-speaking muslims praised Al Qaeda. Bahe also frequented the site. “He would always tell me, who am I, living in this comfortable house, to judge those people? One man’s terrorist is another man’s hero,” says Bahe.

Tarek took the grim news from Iraq very personally. His mother, Sawat Mehanna, remembers the day she came home to find Tarek crying. He told her that U.S. soldiers had raped a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her family. “And Tarek hardly cried,” she said. “It was very difficult for him. I can’t forget that day, his dad even talked to him, to try to calm him down.”

Tarek Mehanna and his mother. (Courtesy of the Mahenna family)

This incident was also discussed in court. Afterwards, Tarek and his friends passed around an Al Qaeda video showing the bodies of U.S. soldiers who’d been dragged behind a truck and then set on fire in retaliation. During an online chat intercepted by the FBI, Tarek cheered the insurgents’ bloody response: “Texas BBQ is the way to go,” he wrote.

“This is America, we can say anything”

The government found this photo on Tarek Mehanna's computer, and used it as evidence in his trial. Mehanna (on the right) and two of his friends, both of whom testified for the prosecution, strike a pose at Ground Zero.

Much of the prosecutor’s evidence against Tarek came from chats with his friends. Over the years, he supplied prosecutors with a wealth of crude comments. In public forums, he was considerably more delicate, although he was not shy about sharing his controversial views. He gave a fiery speech at a Massachusetts mosque. Afterwards someone approached his father and said, “If I didn’t know he was your son, I’d think he was an extremist.” Tarek’s parents warned him to tone it down. “He was stubborn,” says Sawat Mehanna. “He would say, ‘I am not doing anything wrong, so you don’t have to worry about anything. This is America, we can say anything.’”

But according to US prosecutors, Tarek did more than just talk. He and two close friends made a trip to Yemen in 2004 and prosecutors say they intended to train with a terrorist group and then go kill Americans in Iraq. Whatever the case, Tarek came home after a couple weeks and went back to school.

But prosecutors say that failure did not dissuade him. They say he turned his attention to translating documents for Al Qaeda. According to the government’s argument, the act of translating in this context is a crime: material support of terrorism. Tarek’s lawyer says hi has the right to freedom of speech like any other American.

The FBI Visits

His mother never suspected he was in serious trouble until two FBI agents knocked on their door in 2008. “They said, ‘we met your son, and we asked to him to cooperate with us and he refused,’” says Sawat Mehanna. “They said, ‘we have a tape with a false statement, he can be charged with serious crime, and your life is going to be hell.’ I felt like they wanted to scare us, so we have to do what they want.”

Tarek had told the FBI that his friend Daniel Maldanado was in Egypt, but the FBI had secretly recorded a phone call where Daniel had told Tarek that he was in Somalia. Shortly afterwards, they arrested Tarek for lying to the feds and then released him on bail. Eight months later they arrested him again, with new charges. The government announced that Tarek and his friends had planned to go on a shooting spree in a local mall. That allegation was dropped from the indictment before trial, presumably because there was not enough evidence.

While Tarek refused to cooperate, six of his friends agreed to work with the government. One of them, Kareem Abu-zahra, who is protected under full immunity, wore a wire for the FBI. On the stand, Abu-zahra admitted to paying for Tarek’s trip to Yemen and coming up with a plot to attack Hanscom Air Force Base. He also said he tried to acquire guns for the attack on the mall. He’s currently living with his family and doing IT work at UMass Lowell. His employers were so concerned about the content of his testimony that he was suspended from work and one of the school’s top executives called prosecutors to discuss whether he was a danger.

Meanwhile, Tarek Mahenna’s been in solitary confinement for two years. And there’s quite a bit of evidence that he actually softened his views considerably by 2005. He posted online that Islamic law prohibited killing civilians and using suicide bombers, in direct contrast to the views of Al Qaeda. Bahe says that the administrators of At-Tibyan Publications finally banned Tarek from the site. “He would bring up arguments against them,” says Bahe. “Like the invasion of Iraq. He would say, ‘most of the protests that happened were not in Muslim countries. They were in western nations in Boston, New York. How are these people your enemies?’ And people on the forum started changing their minds, saying, ‘that is a legitimate point.’ And when the admins saw that, they just banned him from the group. And that’s when I left as well.”

A Community Watches

Mohamed isn’t the only person who says Tarek was a positive influence. At the Worcester Islamic Center, where Tarek taught, his students are watching the trial closely. Kareem Abdel-Kader, 17, learned Islamic studies, math and science with Tarek. If the kids finished their studies, he’d let them go play in the gym. “Everyone loved him. Everyone who had him said he was their favorite teacher,” says Abdel-Kader.

I spoke to several administrators at the Center, who told me that, in the time they knew Tarek, they saw no evidence that he was an extremist. They told me that the Mosque has had official meetings with law enforcement in the past and worry that Tarek’s prosecution could dissuade Muslims from sharing information with authorities.

US man found guilty of conspiracy to assist Al Qaeda

Tarek Mehanna, a Massachusetts resident, was convicted Tuesday of conspiracy to help the militant Islamic group and trying to kill US soldiers overseas.

By Laura Crimaldi, Associated Press / December 20, 2011

Boston - A Massachusetts man was convicted Tuesday of conspiring to help Al Qaeda and plotting to kill US soldiers in Iraq.

Tarek Mehanna, 29, of Sudbury, faced four terror-related charges and three charges of lying to authorities. A federal jury found him guilty of all counts after deliberating for about 10 hours.

Prosecutors said Mehanna and two friends conspired to travel to Yemen so they could receive training at a terrorism camp and eventually go on to Iraq to fight and kill U.S. soldiers there.

When the men were unable to find such a training camp, Mehanna returned home and began to see himself as part of the Al Qaeda "media wing," translating materials promoting violent jihad and distributing them over the Internet, prosecutors said.

Mehanna, who was born in the U.S. and raised in the Boston suburbs, will be sentenced April 12 and could be sent to prison for the rest of his life. His mother, Souad Mehanna, sobbed after the verdict was read and was consoled by her younger son, Tamer. Mehanna's lawyers also wept.

Mehanna's father, Ahmed, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, said he was stunned by the verdict.

"I can't even think," he said. "It was political."

Mehanna attorney J.W. Carney Jr. said the defense team will appeal. He said he was upset with the verdict and what he called the extraordinary leeway prosecutors had to present evidence the defense considered prejudicial, including references to Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The charges scare people. The charges scared us," Carney said. "The more that we looked at the evidence, the more we got to know our client, Tarek, the more we believed in his innocence."

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz disputed that the prosecution's evidence was inflammatory.

"The heart of the case is really this: Did Mr. Mehanna conspire to support terrorists, conspire to kill in a foreign country and then did he lie to federal investigators?" she said. "Today a jury of his peers concluded that he did that."

During the trial, which started in October, Mehanna's attorneys portrayed him as an aspiring scholar of Islam who traveled to Yemen to look for religious schools, not to get terrorist training. They said his translation and distribution of controversial publications was free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Prosecutors focused on hundreds of online chats on Mehanna's computer in which they said he and his friends talked about their desire to participate in jihad, or holy war. Several of those friends were called by prosecutors to testify against Mehanna, including one man who said he, Mehanna and a third friend tried to get terrorism training in Yemen so they could fight American soldiers in Iraq.

Mehanna's lawyers told jurors that prosecutors were using scare tactics by portraying Mehanna as a would-be terrorist and were trying to punish him for his beliefs.

The defense built its case on the testimony of a half dozen terrorism experts. Mehanna did not testify.

His lawyers acknowledged that Mehanna expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden, but said he disagreed with bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders about many things, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.

Jurors began deliberating Friday. In his instructions, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. told them that in order to find Mehanna guilty of conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda, they must find that he worked "in coordination with or at the direction of" the terrorist organization. He said independent advocacy on behalf of the organization was not a violation of the law.