Sometimes I wish I could feel more sympathy for our amiable non-entity of a President, so maybe I should be grateful to the miserable news-whores at Politico.com for inspiring me with a desire to enlist in the Army of Obamabots and bash Politco’s internet servers into smithereens!
Politico begins their smear of President Obama’s new Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, with a ridiculously demeaning and dishonest headline…
“Islam envoy retreats on terror talk!”
President Barack Obama’s new Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, changed course Friday – admitting that he made sharply critical statements about a U.S. terror prosecution against a Muslim professor after initially saying he had no recollection of making such comments.
Hussain’s reversal came after POLITICO obtained a recording of his presentation to a Muslim students’ conference in Chicago during which he can be heard portraying the government’s cases towards professor Sami Al-Arian, as well as other Muslim terrorism suspects, as “politically motivated persecutions.” Al-Arian later pled guilty to aiding terrorists.
So apparently Obama appointed a sympathizer with confessed terrorists as his envoy to Islam!
Get out your impeachment tools! That born-in-Kenya jigaboo is selling us out!
What Politico “forgets” to mention is that the federal prosecution and brutal detention of Professor Sami Al-Arian deserves special prominence even among the many other blatant and sadistic miscarriages of justice inflicted on the victims of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their gang of goddamned tools in the FBI and DOJ.
Professor Al-Arian was indeed tried by the Bush DOJ…
…after 11 years of Federal Bureau of Investigation investigations, wiretaps and searches, three and a half years of trial preparation and process, time Al-Arian spent in jail, most of it in solitary confinement.[21] Amnesty International said Al-Arian’s pre-trial detention conditions “appeared to be ‘gratuitously punitive’” and stated “the restrictions imposed on Dr. Al-Arian appeared to go beyond what were necessary on security grounds and were inconsistent with international standards for humane treatment.
And after so much investigation and so much brutalization of Professor Al-Arian before he was tried, how did the trial turn out?
The six-month trial featured more than 80 witnesses and 400 transcripts of intercepted phone conversations and faxes. At the end of the prosecution’s case, Al-Arian’s attorneys rested without offering a defense. On December 6, 2005, after 13 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted Al-Arian on eight of 17 counts and deadlocked on the others with 10-2 favoring acquittal.
Unanimous acquittal on 8 charges! 10-2 for acquittal on all the others!
In the context of federal courts where typically about 90% of defendants are convicted, these verdicts in favor of Professor Al-Arian were the equivalent of writing “BULLSHIT” across the sky in flaming letters!
But strangely enough, this was only the beginning of the persecution of Professor Sami Al-Arian by the FBI, DOJ, and even a freakishly dishonest federal judge!
Federal prosecutors immediately began preparing to retry Al-Arian on one of the deadlocked charges, which carried a possible life sentence, and, exhausted by years of solitary confinement, Professor Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to one charge which carried a sentence of only 19 months, after subtracting 38 months that Al-Arian had already served before he was ever convicted of anything!
But strangely enough, again, this wasn’t really the end of the persecution of Professor Sami Al-Arian!
“In a verbal agreement that appears in court transcripts, federal prosecutors agreed that Al-Arian would not have to testify in (a pending case) in Virginia,” but a federal judge in Florida abrogated this plea deal, although “federal prosecutors in Virginia acknowledged that when Sami Al-Arian took the plea deal in early 2006, federal prosecutors in Tampa believed that it exempted him from testifying in other cases.”
And it even gets worse, but now I’ve recounted all I can stand to recount of this nauseating episode from the Global War on Terror, and it’s time to return to Obama’s Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, recently smeared by Politico and other news-whores from Fox News and similar right-wing outlets.
What did Rashad Hussain actually say, and where did he say it?
In 2004, when Professor Al-Arian had already been confined in solitary confinement for a year without a conviction for anything, Rashad appeared on a panel with Al-Arian’s stressed-out daughter Laila…
In his presentation, Hussain, then a student at Yale Law School, was careful to insist that he was not offering a view on Al-Arian’s innocence or guilt on charges that he served as a top leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the U.S. But, Hussain said, the treatment of Al-Arian fit a “common pattern … of politically-motivated prosecutions where you have huge Justice Department press conferences announcing that a certain person is a grave threat to American security.”
Hussain refers to some provisions of the Patriot Act as “horrible” and called “dangerous” an aspect of that law that allows intelligence-related surveillance to be used in criminal cases.
And that’s the “case” against Rashad Hussain from the news-whores at Politico.com, and if there’s anything that occasionally makes me feel some honest-to-God sympathy for Obama and his annoying little friends on the internet, it’s watching right-wing trash smear an honest and sympathetic young lawyer like Rashad Hussain.
And if and whenever it comes down to an out-and-out fight between Obama and that goddamned trash, I’ll go with Obama.