Category: Uncategorized

The press release below concerns the Dallas trial of five top officials for the Holy Land Foundation who go on trial Tuesday. According to an LA Times story, “The indictment accuses Holy Land officials of supporting Hamas by sending money, goods and services through a network of so-called zakat committees, or local charities, and other organizations controlled by Hamas.”–gm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 23, 2007

Please find contact and event information below.

Holy Land Foundation: American Casualties of the “War of Terror”

The Holy Land Foundation provided humanitarian services to families in Palestine and surrounding areas through Zakat (charity) committees when their assets were frozen in December 2001 by an executive order. Zakat, or charity, is one of the five pillars of faith in Islam.

In addition to helping Palestinian refugees, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) provided relief to people in need during the Turkish earthquakes, the wars in Bosnia/Serbia and the Oklahoma City bombing. The group was well known for its generous support of people around the world in crisis.

Three years later, the organization and seven of its officers were indicted on 42 charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. However, the government has since retracted all allegations that any of the Holy Land Foundation’s resources ever went to fund terrorism.

The government does not contest that the money sent from HLF to the Zakat committees went to need-based humanitarian aid. Instead, they contend that the social aid freed up resources for Hamas to spend on violent acts. These Zakat Committees, licensed by the Palestinian Authority government, received aid from many international charities funded by the U.S. In fact, this is still the case, and the U.S. government has never explained why HLF was singled out for prosecution.

Several civil rights and humanitarian issues are at stake in this high profile case. First is the American principle that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. HLF was designated a terrorist organization in May 2002 during what the Legal Intelligencer described as “a hasty and one-sided Treasury Department administrative hearing.” A lawyer working with HLF at the time commented in the same article:

“This administration basically has a free hand with whatever it wants to do insofar as administrative claims it relates to the war on terrorism. The courts are simply not going to check the executive.”

The Supreme Court refused to hear the HLF appeal when the federal courts in the District of Columbia failed to grant the defense a hearing for their challenge to the designation.

The persistence of the media to label this a “terror financing” case, instead of a “charity” or “civil rights” case, shows their willingness to continue to be the mouthpiece for the administration.

The government has also crossed unprecedented lines in what is considered admissible evidence. Israeli military intelligence is providing translated transcripts for the case. An independent translation company has found that the transcripts contain egregious errors, according to the L.A. Times, including the false allegation that the HLF employees used anti-Jewish hate language.

Many of the transcripts admitted also come from warrantless wiretappings, a subject that has caused much controversy among the civil libertarian crowds. Evidence submitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has been amended by the USA Act (part of the USA PATRIOT Act), is often problematic, said Lisa Graybill, Legal Director of ACLU-TX.

“We’re concerned with the constitutionality of this case, and we will be monitoring it,” Graybill said.

In addition to the sketchy evidence, Graybill cited the fact that the Zakat committees had not been designated as terrorists and are still operational. She foresaw religious freedom issues coming up as the trial progresses. Also, Graybill said the publication of unindicted co-conspirators was underhanded, since those groups and individuals listed are not being charged with anything, yet they are now overshadowed with suspicion.

The government is relying heavily on guilt by association. Throughout the indictment, the government references family ties between HLF members and members of Hamas, the Palestinian political party that the U.S. has designated a terrorist.

Even so, most people would be in trouble if they were held accountable for the decisions their relatives make. After all, President Bush’s own grandfather had his assets frozen in 1942 for doing business with Nazi Germany under the Trading with the Enemy Act, but the Jewish population is not demanding reparations from the President for his family’s miscalculated judgments.

This case has caused a chilling effect in the Muslim community, which prides itself on its ongoing tradition of philanthropy. International humanitarian aid has dwindled since the indictment. Ironically, this effect serves to bolster terrorism recruitment, instead of stopping it, like the government claims it intends to do.

According to an OMB Watch report, “Muslim Charities and the War on Terror,” the 9/11 Commission reported, “A comprehensive U.S. strategy should include economic policies that encourage development, more open societies, and opportunities for people to improve the lives of their families and to enhance prospects for their children’s future.”

When international aid slows, poverty grows. As poverty traps people into limited lives, they search desperately for ways to escape. Occupation and embargo are a deadly combination that lead too many to act on “Give me liberty or give me death!” Only education and prosperity, only genuinely helping our fellow human beings, the way that HLF was, will stop the forces that feed terrorism.

Press Conference:

What: Hungry for Justice Press Conference

Who: Rep. Lon Burnam (D-TX), Director, Dallas Peace Center; Imam Mahdi Bray, Executive Director, Muslim American Society; Khalil Meek, President of BOD, Muslim Legal Fund of America; Mustafaa Carroll, Executive Director, CAIR-DFW

When: Tuesday, July 24 at 12:30 p.m.

Where: Commerce Street , across from the Earle Cabell Federal Building

Hungry for Justice Coalition Partners include: Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-DFW); Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA); Muslim American Society (MAS); Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.) Coalition; Dallas Peace Center; Partnership For Civil Justice; American Muslim Alliance (AMA); Reverend Graylan Hagler; and the American Muslim Task Force (AMT)

Press contacts:

Khalil Meek, President, BOD, Muslim Legal Fund of America
972.849.9188, emeek@roctransport.com

Mustafaa Carroll, Executive Director, CAIR-DFW
214.240.7299, muspeaks@yahoo.com

Dr. Parvez Ahmed, National Chairman, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
904.710.6514, pahamed@cair.com

Imam Mahdi Bray, Executive Director, Muslim American Society (MAS)
202.421.3623, imambray@yahoo.com

Beth Freed, Media Relations, Muslim Legal Fund of America
214.684.3773, media@mlfausa.org

By Nick Braune
Mid-Valley Town Crier
by permission

Wednesday, June 20th, was the seventh annual World Refugee Day, honoring the spirit and courage of those who flee economic and political malaise. This official day was established through the United Nations.

Sometimes our country, for certain purposes, will hail the United Nations as important, demanding that other nations abide by its standards. Sometimes major US figures make speeches at the United Nations and occasionally mention the Declaration of Human Rights. But more often than not, concerning international rights and law, the US is a cheap scofflaw. I doubt World Refugee Day even crossed President Bush’s mind.

A former Dutch prime minister, Ruud Lubbers, who is the chief U.N. commissioner on these matters, stressed that helping refugees is “a moral and legal imperative” not just an “optional act of charity.” His World Refugee Day address criticized Western Europe, according to the New York Times, for “inflaming sentiment against refugees by calling them ‘bogus’ asylum seekers who are ‘flooding’ their countries.” Lubbers said that those who talked that way used to be associated with “small extremist parties” but now are in major ones. Lubber’s criticism should sting the US as well as Europe.

In Texas this weekend, I will join two demonstrations in sympathy with World Refugee Day. One (Saturday) is against the detention center in Taylor, near Austin, which is housing children, and another (Sunday) is against the Raymondville detention center, a tent city with maybe 2,000 people, from maybe thirty different countries, sleeping in bunk bed rows and getting outside one hour a day.

These centers are improperly holding people as if they were criminals, even though the inmates have not been convicted of crimes. Some inmates held productive jobs in this country for years and are stuck because of immigration paperwork technicalities; some came to this country recently asking for legal refugee status, having fled a miserable situation.

Amnesty International, co-sponsoring the demonstration in Taylor, states on its website that established conventions assume that asylum seekers are not to be “detained” unless warranted by special circumstances. Make no mistake, these detention centers are “detaining” people.

Raymondville’s tent city center was built adjacent to another prison and has armed guards who yell at the immigrants. It forces people to stand in line, does not have private shower stalls, makes no provision for those held inside to get to a mall or movie or church event. Immigrants are not just residing there; they are detained prisoners, and scared.

Private contractors who run these for-profit prisons are getting up to $10,000 per prisoner per month. (My source is Jay Johnson-Castro, a founder of Border Ambassadors, one of the groups sponsoring the weekend demonstrations.) Juicy federal money flows to Corrections Corporation of America and other companies, although it is known that other ways of monitoring immigrants while they wait for hearings, etc. are far less costly than incarceration.

Actually, detained refugees are treated worse than criminals in a sense. Although the UN 1951 Refugee Conventions state that a refugee should have the same access to courts as a national, we now have an increasingly politicized and capricious special immigration court system under the Justice Department. According to a study last year by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), getting asylum can depend simply on what judge one gets.

The TRAC report, according to Eunice Moscoso of Cox News Service, “directly challenged” the Justice Department that runs these immigration courts. The courts have a mission statement to provide “fair, expeditious and uniform application of the nation’s immigration laws in all cases.” But one Miami judge turned down 97 percent (!) of asylum requests between 2000 and 2005, while one New York judge only turned down 10 percent.

And there even seems to be a problem with the way immigration judges have been picked. (See my June 17 column examining partisanship in Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department). A Washington Post expose this month charged that the administration “increasingly emphasized partisan political ties over expertise in recent years in selecting the judges who decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, despite laws which preclude such considerations.”

Studying immigration judges appointed by Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, the Post article found the appointees greatly lacking in immigration law experience. (Republican fellowship seems like the main hiring criterion.) And with redress in federal courts extremely limited and habeas corpus suspended for immigrants, there goes a refugee’s right to have the same access to fair courts as a national.

Next week I will report on the demonstration at Raymondville’s detention center. I will be in Raymondville promptly at 6 pm Sunday, June 24, with my trusty notebook.

“There are currently 126 Harris County offenders under sentence of death in Texas. Only six states apart from Texas currently have more prisoners on death row – Alabama, California, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Between them, those six states account for 23 times the population of Harris County, and see thousands more murders take place in them each year than occur in Harris County. Together, these six states have executed 185 inmates in the past three decades, only twice the number of Harris County offenders who have been put to death.

“In Texas itself, Harris County is ahead of other local jurisdictions in ensuring a steady flow of individuals for the state’s lethal injection team to kill. The number of Harris County offenders executed or remaining on death row – 225 – is only equalled by grouping together the next seven largest Texas counties of Bexar, Dallas, Tarrant, Travis, El Paso, Hidalgo and Collin – counties whose jurisdictions include the cities of Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth and San Antonio and whose combined populations account for nearly five million more inhabitants than Harris County and around a hundred more murders each year.

For the complete report and suggestions for a letter writing campaign to the Harris County District Attorney, see Amnesty International: One county, 100 executions: Harris County and Texas – A lethal combination–gm

By Rep. David Price (D-NC)
Congressional Record
June 6, 2007 (H6268)

[The DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008] addresses a major immigration vulnerability that exists today. It requires that ICE contact correctional facilities throughout the U.S. on a monthly basis to identify incarcerated immigrants who are subject to deportation. Although ICE deports some number of these individuals now, it is not systematically identifying and deporting them. There is simply no excuse for failing to identify every deportable alien and deporting them immediately upon their release from prison.

These are undocumented individuals who have served time in jail for committing crimes, and we are now, unfortunately, releasing them all too often back into the population. So asking prisons for information about these individuals so they can be deported should be among the first priorities in our illegal immigration enforcement strategy. This bill provides the direction and the funding to ICE to make this happen.

The bill funds the Secure Border Initiative at the requested level of $1 billion, while requiring the Department to clearly justify how it plans to use these funds to achieve operational control of our borders. For each border segment, the Department will have to produce an analysis comparing its selected approach to alternatives based on total cost, on level of control achieved, impact on affected communities, and other factors.

We are also requiring the Department to seek the advice and support of each local community affected by a border infrastructure project. I want to be clear that this does not give border communities a veto on border projects and it will not result in any project delays if the Department efficiently carries out its responsibilities. The provision simply requires the Department to actively and faithfully consult affected communities to ensure that our border security efforts minimize adverse community impacts. That is reasonable to ask of the Department, and the Department agrees that such consultation is appropriate.

We are also directing the Department to increase by over 40 percent the number of Border Patrol agents on the northern border to comply with the levels called for in the Intelligence Reform Act. In addition, the bill addresses a Customs and Border Protection staffing problem that we heard about on a February congressional delegation to the southwest border.

Because CBP officers are not considered law enforcement officers, despite the increasing role of law enforcement in their duties, they don’t receive the same benefits as DHS personnel who are considered law enforcement officers. This has made it extremely difficult to hold on to CBP officers. In a nutshell, the bill would allow eligible CBP officers to transition to law enforcement status beginning in fiscal 2008.

The Transportation Security Administration’s loss of the personal data of thousands of its employees is only the most recent example of the privacy problems plaguing the Department. The bill withholds funding for certain DHS programs until the proper privacy protections are in place because security and privacy can and should go hand in hand.

In conclusion, let me mention a few other provisions, Mr. Chairman. First, the bill includes language mandating that stricter State and local chemical security laws and regulations cannot be preempted by the Federal Government. Secondly, the bill mandates that all grant and contract funds comply with Davis-Bacon prevailing wage requirements. Thirdly, the $101 million in the bill for the new DHS campus facility at St. Elizabeth’s will not be available until the Department submits an explosive detection equipment spending plan and promulgates long overdue regulations on U-Visas for victims of domestic violence, rape, and involuntary servitude.

This withholding of funds should not be interpreted as a signal of lukewarm support for the development of the St. Elizabeth’s campus. On the contrary, the Department and the country would be better served by colocating most of its headquarters components onto this single campus. This is simply our way of signaling that any further delay on an explosive detection plan or on the overdue U-Visa rule is completely unacceptable.

By Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers (R-KY)
Congressional Record
June 12, 2007 (H6269-H6270)

[DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2008] includes a bold mandate for ICE to contact every correctional facility in the country, over 5,000 of them, at least once a month to identify incarcerated aliens and initiate deportation proceedings against them. That is a laudable goal, and I support the policy and the goal. But, Mr. Chairman, it is going to be very, very difficult to do mechanically and it is unfunded.

We are going to be asking the States and localities to pay, assumedly, for the review of who is in their jails.

Number two, they don’t have the authority nor the capability to determine whether or not Joe Blow in cell 18 is an undocumented alien or not. It’s not their job, and they don’t have the capability to do that. So I don’t know what will be the result of this mandate. It is unfunded, and it is going to be very difficult to put in practice. The Department already surveys routinely the most probable jails where the most probable criminal aliens are being held anyway.

Despite the requirement for ICE to report on the resources needed to carry out this unfunded mandate, I am concerned that the bill presupposes ICE can simply transfer or reprioritize monies from other sources within their budget, for example, the fugitive apprehension program. They are out there trying to catch the criminals on the streets that are loose. It seems to me they are a bigger danger than those incarcerated in the jails.

These enforcement activities involve many duties, duties that include tracking down at-large criminals, investigating smuggling networks, preventing child pornography, preventing the exploit of sensitive national security technology, and taking down employers who are exploiting illegal immigrants to the point of abuse.

From which of these critical missions should ICE take monies in order to comb the Nation’s jails and correctional facilities, most of which never have any criminal aliens in them anyway? So to suggest that ICE should refocus its resources almost exclusively on jailed illegal aliens at the expense of trying to catch fugitives on the street who are raping and plundering seems to me as short-sighted as it is potentially very dangerous.

There must be a balance among ICE’s many critical missions. And I am concerned this bill falls short in that regard. I am hopeful the Chairman will work with me and others to develop a more realistic implementation of this policy as we move forward.

I have other concerns as well. Any immigration policy starts out with securing the border. If we can’t control who crosses our Nation’s borders, all other possible immigration initiatives will fail. To address this critical issue, Congress has authorized and appropriated for substantial infrastructure on the southwest border. But the bill contains a number of onerous restrictions on funding for fencing and other tactical infrastructure along our borders until the Department performs certain actions.

At first glance, these individual fencing and tactical infrastructure requirements appear to be based upon sound policy. However, added together, they are a series of obstacles that can potentially impede installation of critical border security systems. I fear that securing the border will be greatly deterred.

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By Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA)
Congres
sion
al Record
June 12, 2007 (H6272)

One of the things Mr. Rogers mentioned that I would like to just disagree with, all of our local law enforcement say that the biggest problem they are having is they arrest people who don’t have papers and then they release them because nobody from INS will come around and check it out. Everybody on the committee was concerned about the fact that there wasn’t enough effort put into what they call “jail checks,” and this committee bill addresses that.