Wages of Rebellion (22 page)

“I came to this country from Pakistan nearly thirty years ago, in 1982, with my wife and two young boys,” his father said. “Coming from a Third World country, we were full of hope and looked towards America for liberty and opportunity. I had an American dream to work hard and give my sons good educations. I worked as an assistant accountant for the city of New York, six days a week, nine hours a day, including overtime, to support my family and to send both my kids through college. We all became US citizens, and my sons fulfilled my dreams by completing their undergraduate and postgraduate education. I was very proud of them.

“In high school and then as a student at Brooklyn College, Fahad became a political activist, concerned about the plight of Muslims around the world and the civil liberties of Muslims in America,” he went on. “Growing up here in America, Fahad did not fear expressing his views. But I was scared for him and urged him not to speak out. He would remind me that everything he did was under the law. But having grown up in a Third World country, I had seen that it did not always work this way, and so I worried. He was monitored by law enforcement and quoted in
Time
magazine. But he kept speaking out. And then, with his arrest, my fears came true.”

Judge Loretta Preska, who would later oversee the case of the hacker Jeremy Hammond, denied Hashmi bail. His family and friends, who sat crowded together in the courtroom, listened in stunned silence. And then, after five months in jail, Hashmi, already isolated in solitary confinement, was suddenly put under “special administrative measures.” SAMs are the state’s legal weapon of choice when it seeks to isolate and break prisoners. They were bequeathed to us by the Clinton administration, which justified SAMs as a way to prevent Mafia and other gang leaders from ordering hits from inside prison. The use of SAMs expanded widely after the attacks of 2001. They are frequently used to isolate terrorism case detainees before trial. SAMs, which were renewed by Barack Obama, severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world. They end calls, letters, and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members.
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Hashmi, once in this legal straitjacket, was not permitted to see much of the evidence against him under a law called the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from those being prosecuted.
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The weekly visits that Hashmi’s family had made to the jail in Manhattan were canceled. A single family member was permitted to visit only once every two weeks, and on a number of occasions the family member was inexplicably denied admittance. During the last five months of the trial, Hashmi’s family was barred from visiting him. Anyone who has contact with a prisoner under SAMs is prohibited by law from disclosing any information learned from the detainee. This
requirement, in a twist that Kafka would have relished, makes it illegal for those who have contact with an inmate under SAMs—including attorneys—to speak about his or her physical and psychological condition. The measures were imposed because of Hashmi’s “proclivity for violence,” although he had not been charged with or convicted of committing an act of violence.
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Once the SAMs were imposed, “he wrote us occasionally—one letter on no more than three pages at a time—but he was allowed no correspondence or contact with anyone else,” his father said of his son. “In addition, because of Fahad’s SAMs, we were not allowed to discuss anything we heard from him, including his health or any details of his detention or what he was experiencing, with anyone else. It was like being suffocated.”

In a pretrial motion, Hashmi’s lawyer presented the extensive medical and scholarly research that demonstrates the severe impact of solitary confinement on human beings, which often leaves them incapable of defending themselves during their trial. It did not sway the judge. Before ever being sentenced, Hashmi lived in a universe where he had no fresh air and was subjected to twenty-three-hour lockdown and constant electronic surveillance, including when he showered or relieved himself. He was barred from group prayer. He exercised alone in a solitary cage. He was denied access to television or a radio. His newspapers were cut up by censors. And this was all
before
trial.

“These years have brought deep disillusionment for my family in the American justice system,” Syed Anwar Hashmi said. “Fahad was restricted in reviewing much of the evidence against him, and even his attorney could not discuss much of the evidence with him. Secret evidence is something we knew from back home. The judge accepted the prosecutor’s motion to introduce Fahad’s political activities and speeches into the trial to demonstrate his mind-set. Where was the First Amendment to protect Fahad’s speech? Two days before the trial was set to begin, Judge Preska agreed to the prosecutor’s motion to keep the jury anonymous and kept under extra security—even though this could have frightened the jury and affected how they viewed Fahad.”

“On the day before trial [April 27, 2010], nearly four years since he had been arrested, I had just returned from dropping off clothes for
Fahad to wear to court when I received a call from my attorney,” his father said. “The government had offered a deal to drop three of the four charges against Fahad if he accepted one charge which carried a fifteen-year sentence, and Fahad had agreed to this plea bargain. I was shocked by my son’s decision on the eve of his trial, but after I thought more, I wondered how anyone could have decided differently in his situation. Fahad had been in solitary confinement, under SAMs, for nearly three years. The judge had in every instance sided with the government in pretrial motions. If convicted, Fahad faced a possible seventy-year sentence.”

Fahad is serving his sentence at the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. Hashmi’s father added, “The US government is concerned about human rights in China and Iran. I wonder about Fahad’s rights, and how they have been blatantly violated in this great land. It seems like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is only a saying. My son was treated as guilty until proven innocent.”

“The Muslim community supported my son by offering prayers, particularly in the month of Ramadan,” he said. “But they were initially afraid to raise their voices against injustice. This reminds me of the fear the Chinese have under Communist rule, or Iranians under Ahmadinejad. As a citizen, I now have developed fear of my own government.”

“For one charge for luggage storing socks, ponchos, and raincoats in his apartment, he is serving a fifteen-year sentence in the harshest federal prison in the country, still in solitary confinement, still under SAMs,” his father said. “The cooperating witness in the case, the one who brought and delivered the luggage, is now free and able to enjoy his life and family.”

The despair and bewilderment of Hashmi’s father are a reflection of the wider despair and bewilderment that have gripped the lives of many Muslims.

“There are many things I’d like to be able to say about the visit and my son’s continuing detention, but because of Fahad’s SAMs, I am forbidden,” Hashmi’s father said. “Everything has changed for my family. Our first grandchild was born nineteen days after Fahad’s arrest, our second two years later. But now everything has a cloud over it—graduations, birthdays, holidays, going to the store or the park or
visiting family or running errands, and particularly the Eid day. In other words, we have lost our happiness.”

T
he extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi and other political prisoners is far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees than physical abuse is. It is torture as science, the dark art of gradual psychological disintegration. By the time Hashmi was hauled into court, it was questionable whether he had the mental and psychological capability to defend himself or make rational judgments. He was told to stop speaking so quickly at his sentencing; he apologized to the court, saying he had spoken little during his years in isolation, and then burst into tears. This is what the system is designed to do.

Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs, and associations are now a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious.

There will be more Hashmis. In 2006 the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Illinois, where the inmates, again, are mostly Muslim but also have included a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two counts of arson at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.”
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All calls and mail are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. These facilities replicate the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo.
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In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law,” a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits
outside the law court for days, months, and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.
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Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists and black radicals in the United States as it was for Kafka’s frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn African Americans and Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in our impoverished urban ghettos and the Middle East have left many, including Abu-Jamal and Hashmi, wasting away in cages. The state has no intention of limiting its persecution to African Americans and Muslims. They were the first. We are next.

C
ecily McMillan sat in a plastic chair wearing a baggy, oversized gray prison jumpsuit, cheap brown plastic sandals, and horn-rim glasses. Other women, also dressed in prison-issued gray jumpsuits, sat nearby in the narrow, concrete-walled visitation room at Rikers Island in New York. Most were clutching their children, tears streaming down their faces. The children, bewildered, had their arms wrapped tightly around their mothers’ necks. It looked like the disaster scene it was.

“It’s all out in the open here,” said the twenty-five-year-old graduate student at the New School of Social Research in New York City. I spoke with her the day before she was sentenced in a New York criminal court, on May 19, 2014, to three months in jail and five years’ probation. “The cruelty of power can’t hide like it does on the outside. You get America, everything America has become, especially for poor people of color in prison. My lawyers think I will get two years. But two years is nothing compared to what these women, who never went to trial, never had the possibility of a trial with adequate legal representation, face. There are women in my dorm who, because they have such a poor command of English, do not even understand their charges. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the charges to them.”

McMillan endured the last criminal case originating from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. It is also one of the most emblematic. The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that came with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment and bars those with such convictions from serving on juries or working for law enforcement. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism by turning any arrest into a parole violation. McMillan, one of the few who refused to accept a plea deal and have a felony charge on her record, went to court.