Posted on 12/01/2001 2:48:20 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
TAMPA -- The U.S. government gave Mazen Al-Najjar limited freedom during the 31/2 years he was jailed on secret evidence, accused of having terrorist ties. He visited the jail library, watched TV and made phone calls and had visits from family.
A judge ordered Al-Najjar's release in December 2000, but his freedom was short-lived. Immigration officers arrested him last weekend on a deportation order for overstaying his visa.
Today, Al-Najjar is being held in solitary confinement at a federal prison and cannot see his family.
"It doesn't make sense for someone who was held 31/2 years in minimum security on secret evidence without any problems to now be put in maximum security under solitary confinement with 23-hour lockdown and no visitors except his attorney," David Cole, one of Al-Najjar's attorneys, said from Washington.
Al-Najjar's lawyers intend to challenge his detention in federal court in Miami on Monday. Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, said the Palestinian-born Al-Najjar meets none of the criteria to be kept in custody: that he is a threat to national security, a threat to others or a flight risk.
"The reason they are detaining him is as a national security threat and it already has been determined he is not a threat," said Al-Najjar's brother-in-law, Sami Al-Arian.
Federal officials will not discuss his arrest or detention -- following the same tight-lipped procedure they used during Al-Najjar's lengthy imprisonment.
The government maintained he was linked to an organization with ties to Mideast terrorists. Prosecutors said the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used a University of South Florida think-tank where Al-Najjar had worked as a front.
Al-Najjar has never been charged with a crime.
The courts took up his case last year and ordered him released from the Manatee County Jail in Bradenton where he was held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The INS now has issued a deportation order. Federal officials want to deport him on an immigration violation for overstaying a student visa that expired in 1985. Al-Najjar's lawyers said he is a stateless Palestinian with no homeland to go to.
"Why would you need to detain him while you look for a country to send him?" Cole asked. Lawyers also were preparing a separate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"If they are going to deport him it should be to Gaza where he was born," said Nahla Al-Arian, Al-Najjar's sister. "His country of origin is under occupation."
Federal agents arrested Al-Najjar, 44, as he walked out of his Tampa apartment Saturday to get quarters for the laundry. He suffered cuts and bruises during his arrest, one of his lawyers, Martin Schwartz, said.
His wife, Fedaa, a pharmacist, was at work. His three American-born daughters, ages 6 through 13, were at home alone.
"The kids were crying that they took their father again," Fedaa Al-Najjar said. "We were in this situation before for three years and seven months. It is a miserable life, so painful."
Fedaa Al-Najjar, who worked until 9 p.m., said her bosses have allowed her to transfer to another position so she could get home by 6 p.m. to make dinner for the children.
She has cried. And she has run out of energy.
"This is too much," Fedaa Al-Najjar said. "He has no place to go. If he had a place to go he would go rather than spend his life in jail. He has applied for everything -- including asylum and been turned down. Why this hostility between him and the government? It doesn't make sense."
Al-Najjar is imprisoned at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex near Bushnell, about 75 miles north of Tampa. Only Schwartz, his Tampa attorney, has been able to visit him.
"It's horrible," Schwartz said. "He gets one hour for recreation and spends 23 hours in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell."
Calls to the federal prison were referred to the Justice Department in Washington. Justice Department officials did not return phone messages seeking comment this week.
"It's highly unusual for a foreigner ordered deported for such minor immigration violation as a student visa overstay to be detained at a maximum security federal penitentiary," Schwartz said. "I've never seen it happen before."
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Wednesday rejected the Justice Department's appeal of a district court decision holding Al-Najjar's detention unconstitutional.
The appellate court said another panel upheld the deportation order on Nov. 13 on grounds "completely unconnected to terrorist allegations." That constituted a final order of deportation, the court said.
"The final order of deportation gives the attorney general unambiguous authority under the law to take Al-Najjar into custody now without any regard to confidential information allegedly linking him to terrorist organizations," the court ruled.
Behind Al-Arian's facade (founded the World and Islam Studies Enterprise at USF a decade ago)
We may have to start an Al-Najjar/Al-Arain list to index these stories....if I only knew how.
Check the LINK. One judge kept him in jail AFTER LOOKING at the evidence.
Another judge REFUSED TO LOOK at the evidence and he and Janet Reno said to release him.
I will trust the judgment of the Bush admistration over them.
The St. Pete Times started to report on the depth of this terrorist invasion on the campus of USF
but now they spin for the people who front for terrorists and attack our country for trying to protect us.
I have been linking all the stories I've seen on this at the main LINK in Post #1.
Time to ask the media, "Why the self-imposed moratorium on showing the footage of the planes slamming in to the World Trade Towers?"
[ Mazen Al-Najjar's wife, Fedaa] "Deportation orders would send him to the United Arab Emirates and his wife to Saudi Arabia, their last residences before moving to the United States in the 1980s. But their lawyers say neither country will accept them." Source
He is also taught at the Islamic Academy where Sami A. Al-Arian. (Fedaa's brother) is the principal.
"The facade should have been stripped away years ago. Al-Arian founded the World and Islam Studies Enterprise at USF a decade ago. WISE sponsored events at USF and at other sites around the country, some of which featured radical Islamic speakers such as Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, later convicted in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. WISE was shut down in 1995 after one of Al-Arian's WISE associates, Ramadan Shallah, left USF and popped up in Syria as the new leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad -- the same terrorist organization for which Al-Arian was soliciting funds that year. Al-Arian claimed at the time to be shocked to learn of Shallah's association with PIJ." Source
So much smoke.
(Dec. 1, 2001) Miami Herald Six weeks later, Saudi man questions his arrest AP [Excerpt]While adamant about his innocence, Alqahtani understands why he might fit a suspicious profile.
Like some of the hijackers that toppled the World Trade Center, Alqahtani had attended flight schools in Florida, trying to attain a commercial pilot's license. He said FBI agents questioned him about a Saudi Arabian Airlines seating chart containing a photograph of an airliner.
In his address book seized by authorities, he listed a friend named Ahmed Alghamdi, a Saudi Arabian pilot who shares the same name as one of the alleged hijackers. Alqahtani said he has no connection to the attacks.
``I told him there's over a 1,000 men with the name Alghamdi in Saudi Arabia,'' he said.
Alqahtani said the FBI also questioned him about Mazen Al-Najjar, a Palestinian and former instructor at the University of South Florida who has been the target of a government investigation since the mid-1990s when two groups he helped lead were linked to terrorists. Al-Najjar has denied supporting terrorists.
Al-Najjar spent nearly four years in INS custody on secret evidence and without being charged with a crime before he was released in December. He was arrested Nov. 24 on a deportation order and his attorneys are considering asking the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of the deportation.
Alqahtani said he needed someone to translate his high school graduation certificate from Arabic when he arrived in Tampa in 1994. A friend recommended Al-Najjar and Alqahtani said he paid him $200 and picked up the translation three days later. ``That's it,'' Alqahtani said.
Al-Najjar was a certified translator for the Hillsborough County court system and frequently provided the service, said Sami Al-Arian, his brother-in-law in Tampa.
Alqahtani said about 10 to 15 men inside Krome share similar tales. Some men of the men are from Jordan. An Indonesian pilot told him he has been questioned by the FBI over the past month.
He said he's told his wife they should not be surprised by their detainment following the attacks -- but he hopes they'll release her soon.
``I want her to get out. This is the first time for her that she's been arrested and she can't believe it,'' Alqahtani said. ``I am not a criminal. Why are they putting me through this?'' [End]
All I can say is that apparently Bush has left much of the Clinton apparatus in place (to what I understand is a pretty unprecedented extent). The only thing worse than the enemy we know is the one we don't know.
That said, I do *really* trust and like Donald Rumsfield.
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