Don Wycliff at the Chicago Tribune has written a column about the ongoing Muhammad Salah case. Salah, a U.S. citizen, was arrested during a tip to occupied Palestine and held without charge by Israel – a common occurance for Palestinians – for four years. The U.S. government did nothing. Eventually he was released and sent home only to find that the U.S. government had then seized his possesions and indicted him for raising money to support Hamas.
In a bizarre and quite disturbing side-note to this story, Salah reported that he was tortured by Israel interrogators while he was being held – again, standard operating procedure there. At one point an “interrogation” session was witnessed by former New York Times reporter Judith Miller who wrote that she saw no evidence of torture. Because, I suppose, it’s safe to assume that if Israeli questioners were torturing people and invited her to watch, they would demonstrate their blatent violations of international law for a senior reporter from the NYT? Miller neglected to mention that she had been present at this interrogation on the invitation of the Israelis, something that would be another reason to fire her, but the NYT already did for essentially lying about Iraqi wmd’s.
As Wycliff noted in an earlier editorial when Salah was arrested:
Muhammad Salah may be every bit the terrorist the United States government suggests he is. But so far, nobody has proved it by clear and convincing evidence in an open court of law. On the contrary, the government seems to have adopted an approach toward Salah of punishment first, trial later.
So now that the trial is underway, that evidence will presumably come out, right? Enter the diminished civil liberties we all enjoy suffer through now:
this week the Chicago Tribune, along with 20 other groups representing a wide range of interests, filed briefs asking U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve not to close her courtroom when two Israeli security agents testify in March during a preliminary hearing. The hearing is on a motion by Salah to exclude from his trial incriminating statements he made during his interrogation in Israel.
St. Eve on Tuesday rejected the request to keep the hearing open, but the Tribune’s brief, written by attorney Natalie Spears, still merits attention and appreciation. The newspaper’s interest was not in aiding either Salah or the government, but in ensuring public access to a government proceeding of surpassing importance.
“Secret evidence” is a corner stone of Israel’s judicial treatment of Palestinians. I suppose it’s fitting that for years we’ve been exporting weapons to Israel for the repression of Palestinians and now, finally, we’re starting to import the repressive devices of the Israeli state into the U.S. This, coupled with the warrant-less spying, coupled with the growing cooperation between telecom companies and the government to data-mine American citizens on a massive scale is excting. If you were rooting for Big Brother.
