LA8 struggle focus at civil liberties forum
By Bill Massey
Chicago
Michel Shehadeh, a Palestinian activist who
was framed COINTELPRO-style by the U.S. government, was the
keynote speaker at a Feb. 19 Chicago forum on the future of
civil liberties.
More than 150 people turned out on a weekday evening to hear
Shehadeh and a panel of other speakers. The topic was:
"Silencing dissent: political repression and the Patriot
Act."
The event was sponsored by the Chic ago Coalition Against
War and Racism.
One highlight was a solidarity greeting via phone from Rabih
Haddad in Lebanon. Haddad lived in the United States for many
years, went to college, worked in Ann Arbor and was the emir of
the local mosque. He was arrested on Dec. 14, 2001. Haddad was
held in solitary confinement in both Ann Arbor and Chicago for
a good part of his imprisonment, which ended with his
deportation on July 15, 2003. Though the government smeared him
as having "aided terrorism," no charges were ever brought to
back up the allegation.
Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide are green card holders who
have been in the United States for three decades and have
applied for citizenship. The Department of Homeland Security is
targeting both for deportation. The DHS is using provisions of
the McCarran-Walters Act that were declared unconstitutional by
a federal district court in 1989 and repealed by Congress in
1990. The DHS is also seeking to add new charges under the USA
Patriot Act.
Shehadeh and Hamide were first arrested along with six other
student activists in 1987. Seven of the students were
Palestinians and the eighth was from Kenya and married to one
of the other students. They were held for 23 days in maximum
security cells, charged with "aiding terrorism." The basis of
this charge was that they sold the magazines Palestine Focus
and Democratic Pales tine. But so did bookstores around the
country, and the magazines were on file in school
libraries.
Even former FBI Director William Webster testified to
Congress that after an extensive three-year FBI investigation
the Los Angeles 8 "have not been found to have engaged
themselves in terrorist activity." Webster admitted that "if
these individuals had been U.S. citizens there would not have
been a basis for their arrest."
And yet after 17 years the government is still trying to use
its bogus case against Shehadeh and Hamide as a weapon against
the rights of all immigrant peoples, and ultimately against
everyone's freedoms. As Michel Shehadeh states, the government
always attacks the most vulnerable first in order to take
everyone's freedoms away. Thus it is necessary to rally to the
cause of Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide--an attack on them
is an attack on all.
The other speakers included Standish Willis of the National
Council of Black Lawyers, Michelle Morales of the Boriqua Human
Rights Network, Emma Lozano of the immigrant support group
Pueblo Sin Fronteras, Gwen Blakely of Enough Is Enough, an
organization that fights police misconduct and racist
injustice, Suzanne Adely of the Arab American Action Network,
and Emile Schepers of the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill
of Rights. A representative of the Chicago Coalition to Free
the Cuban Five also took part in the discussion period.
Reprinted from the March 4, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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