Chris Hedges: First They Come For the Muslims

[marmar]

from truthdig:



First They Come For the Muslims

Posted on Apr 16, 2012
By Chris Hedges


Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.

Mehanna, a teacher at Alhuda Academy in Worcester, was convicted after an eight-week jury trial of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq and providing material support to al-Qaida, as well as making false statements to officials investigating terrorism. His real “crime,” however, seems to be viewing and translating jihadi videos online, speaking out against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and refusing to become a government informant.

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled—even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

“People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and ‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them,” Downs told me when we met last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/first_they_come_for_the_muslims_20120416/

[banned from Kos]

1. A jury found this person guilty.

Sorry, Chris. That is no harbinger of a totalitarian state.

[marmar]

2. A jury inundated with 9/11 propaganda and Islamophobic fear-mongering.....

Sorry, but that's no indicator of a fair democratic process.

[banned from Kos]

5. Juries can be persuaded to do wrong no doubt

but to leap to a "totalitarian state" from there is absurd.

[Odin2005]

3. Hedges became dead to me when he started bashing Atheists.

[got root]

6. sorry, a jury in no way garuntees justice

[Bake]

7. And you have a better idea, I'm sure.

The jury system may not be perfect, but it beats the alternatives that I've seen so far.

Bake

[gratuitous]

4. Everything old is new again

And the government has used prejudice and fear as a tool to send people off to prison (or execution) for many, many years. "But it was a jury trial!" So was the Rosenberg trial.

[marmar]

8. "So was the Rosenberg trial."

Exactly.