Victory for LA8 as gov't 'test case' finally bites the dust

The U.S. government ended its 20-year vendetta against the Los Angeles Eight last week when it agreed that it wouldn’t deport the two remaining defendants, Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide.

The Los Angeles 8 and supporters in 1987. Photo: committee4justice.com

The two Palestinians were arrested in 1987 along with five other Palestinian men and one Kenyan woman. The eight were charged with supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine by distributing its magazine and carrying out fundraising for the Marxist organization, which was at the time the second-largest member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

They were held in a maximum-security prison for 23 days. Those who remained in the U.S. have spent their lives since the arrests fighting for the right to live and work.

The McCarthyite-style frame-up finally ended—too flimsy to go farther—when the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed to halt efforts to deport them.

The government’s case had weaved its way through laws, courts and charges. At different times the U.S. used the McCarran-Walter Act, the 1990 Immigration Act, the Clinton-era Anti-terrorism Act, the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act. Over two decades, the case went before the U.S. Court of Appeals four times, the Supreme Court once, and the Board of Immigration Appeals multiple times.

Each time the government lost, it tried a new way.

When the McCarran-Walter Act was declared unconstitutional and finally repealed in 1990, the Feds kept the case alive by bringing charges under a newly enacted law that made it illegal to aid organizations deemed “terrorist” by the State Department. Never mind that the arrests had occurred three years before the 1990 Immigration Act was effective, or that the PFLP was not designated a “terrorist” organization by Washington until 1997.

Later, provisions of the Patriot Act were actually written to be effective against the LA8, even though their arrests had occurred years earlier.

National Lawyers Guild attorney Marc Van Der Hout has been on the team representing the LA8 from the beginning. In an interview on Pacifica’s “Democracy Now” program, Van Der Hout suggested that the government’s conduct reveals it had picked out a group of people to arrest and pursue their prosecution, but not because of any criminal activity on their part.

He pointed out that during William Webster’s 1987 confirmation hearing to become director of the CIA, the former FBI director admitted to a three-year FBI surveillance effort of the Eight that failed to find any illegal activity. Van Der Hout said the FBI then “turned it over to immigration and said, ‘Can you figure out some way to deport these people?’”

Interviewed on the same program, Michel Shehadeh explained how the attorneys brought up a probable explanation for the FBI’s actions against him and the others while in court:

“[W]e found out that there was a plan that was leaked to the newspapers ... entitled ‘Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan.’ And in the plan there was an outline of a test case, and that test case [was] to establish a legal precedent, so in case of a war, as the plan says, or an incident, then Arab Americans would be rounded up en masse and put in concentration camps, like what happened to the Japanese Americans in 1945 after Pearl Harbor. And this test case would be to establish that legal precedent, so the government will be able to do it. And they said that they learned that from the registrations of Iranians in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, when they wanted to do a registration of the Iranians, and they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the law.

“So our attorneys in court were able to prove and establish that the process of this case followed the outline of the test case that was outlined in their plan to the letter. And so, we believe that we were this test case over the years.”

The government’s failure to deport these activists is a victory for all those who support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, for all those who support immigrant rights, and for all those who are fighting to defend the right to protest and to extend solidarity with workers around the world.