[1789] in peace2
Your voice or your teeth? Choose one!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Tue Jun 18 23:47:50 2002
Message-Id: <200206190347.XAA06882@gold.mit.edu>
To: peace-announce@MIT.EDU, greens-announce@MIT.EDU, mitai-announce@MIT.EDU,
anti-hate@MIT.EDU, utr-announce@MIT.EDU
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Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 23:47:27 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
please forward this to every justice loving person or US patriot you know.
Torture, racial profiling, political profiling, intimidation...
Can this be happening in the supposed center of freedom and democracy?
Whether you consider the constitution a sick joke, a nice idea,
or something that used to mean something, please help us make justice a
little more real and help us get Jaoudat back by getting the word out any
way you can.
In hope,
Aimee
Stop the illegal detention and brutalization of
Palestinian Activist Jaoudat Abouazza!
By the Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee
June 17, 2002 - Boston
On Sunday June 16, two members of the Jaoudat Abouazza
Defense Committee were able to visit Abouazza in INS
custody in the Bristol County Correctional Facility in North
Dartmouth, Mass. They learned that at 10:00 AM that
morning, prison guards forcibly took Abouazza from his cell and
restrained him in a chair while a man with a surgical
mask on forced open his mouth and pulled 4 teeth. A broken
piece of a tooth was left in his mouth, leaving Abouazza in
much physical pain, swollen, bleeding and unable to eat.
This brutality followed a week in which prison guards
engaged in other forms of brutality against Abouazza,
including punching, solitary confinement, threats and
continuous epithets of "Taliban" toward him. On
Sunday, June 9, FBI agents attempted to interrogate Abouazza
regarding a defense committee leaflet. When Abouazza refused their
interrogation, they threw him into an isolation cell,
telling him they could keep him there as long as they
wanted.
On the morning of Monday, June 17, -- the day after
his teeth were extracted -- Bristol prison officials
demanded Abouazza sign a form in English that he could not
understand. Guards once again threw Abouazza into
solitary confinement for requesting review of the document by
his lawyer before signing.
BACKGROUND OF THE CASE
On the evening of May 30, Abouazza was stopped by the
Cambridge, Massachusetts police on the pretext of a
minor traffic violation. Without being charged with a crime
or read his rights by the arresting officers, he was
handcuffed and brought to the Cambridge police station. Within
hours, Abouazza would find himself in jail being interrogated
by the FBI for suspicion of "terrorism."
The evidence? He is Palestinian and was in possession
of leaflets calling for the legal, permitted protest of
the Israeli Independence Day Festival on June 9th in Boston.
"The government's shameful policy of racial profiling
is now rapidly expanding to include political profiling,"
said Carl Messineo, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil
Justice and a member of the International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act
Now to Stop War & End Racism) Steering Committee. "This was
always the true goal of the attack on civil rights engineered
by John Ashcroft: to stifle dissent by trying to
intimidate people from speaking out against injustice.
"On June 29, people from around the country will
demonstrate at the FBI's Washington headquarters to show they
won't be intimidated by these tactics," Messineo continued.
"For every one person they place into administrative
detention, as they have done to Abouazza, there will be hundreds
who will take to the streets. It is the mass mobilization of
the people that will turn back this extremist and
repressive government program."
The government circumvented initial motions by
Abouazza's public defender for a bail hearing on the charges of
his arrest, keeping him in jail over the weekend. This
follows a pattern now familiar in the detention of thousands of
Arabs and Muslims across the nation after September 11.
During that weekend in jail the FBI interrogated Abouazza
seven times, sometimes awakening him at 1:00 a.m. for
questioning. Although Abouazza had been appointed counsel, she
was present at none of these proceedings. By the time of
his appearance in court on the following Monday, the INS
had already filed a detainer, requiring he be held in jail
until the INS came to get him. Abouazza was moved to an INS
detention facility in the early hours of the morning
on Tuesday, June 4.
In an Ashcroftian Catch 22, at Abouazza's pre-trial
hearing on June 12, the Cambridge district judge found him in
default for failure to appear at the hearing, after a
court ordered writ of habeus corpus to secure his transfer
to the courtroom was rejected by the INS. Abouazza was of
course unable to appear, because he remains in INS detention.
The judge then found Jaoudat in default, meaning he failed
to show up for court, and issued a warrant for his
arrest.
Expanded powers of FBI domestic surveillance put into
place by Ashcroft's Justice Department in the last week of
May have made it easier to target political dissidents.
The Justice Department and the FBI have begun a new wave
of arrests, specifically targeting Palestinian political
activists. The case of a Palestinian student
organizer, Ahmed Bensouda, in Chicago
http://www.ucimc.org/ahmed/
and the case of Jaoudat Abouazza in Boston are two
prominent examples. Both occur in the context of increasingly
vocal criticism of Israel, and U.S. support for Israeli
policies, in which Arab and Muslim immigrants have played a
significant role. On April 20, 100,000 people marched
on Washington to protest Bush's "war on terrorism." The
large presence of Palestinian activists made itself felt
across the country.
In Boston, Abouazza has been a leading activist in the
Palestinian struggle. His photograph appeared in the
"Boston Globe" as one of the leaders in a local march against
the Israeli occupation on April 6th that drew 2,000
activists--the largest to date in Boston. He has
participated in weekly protest vigils in front of the
Israeli Consulate. Several of those protests have come
under heavy surveillance by the Boston police & plainclothes
agents, who have repeatedly photographed demonstrators
and their license plates.
His arrest on May 30 occurred a little more than a
week before a major legally permitted protest against the
Israel Day Festival planned for June 9th in which Abouazza
had been a key organizer. Flyers for the protest which the FBI
found in his car were cited by the prosecutor in court on
May 31 as a reason to continue holding him.
The increasing criminalization of dissent in the
United States in the aftermath of September 11th endangers
the rights of all of us, citizens and immigrants alike.
Everyone who is concerned for fundamental human rights
and civil liberties can act now in defense of Jaoudat
Abouazza.
SEND LETTERS OF PROTEST to
USINS District Director Steven J. Farquharson
Room 1700, JFK Federal Building
Boston, MA 02203,
with copies to:
Commissioner James W. Ziglar
Immigration and Naturalization Service
425 I Street, NW
Washington, DC 20536
and
Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee
c/o International A.N.S.W.E.R.
(Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)
31 Germania Street
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617/522-6626.
http://www.iacboston.org/ANSWER
abouazzadefense@yahoo.com
Please also send copies of your letters to Jaoudat
himself, and write to Jaoudat, at the address below:
Jaoudat Abouazza
Bristol County Jail and House of Correction
(North Dartmouth)
400 Faunce Corner Road
North Dartmouth, MA 02747
1 West
ID#120541
(Unit and ID number should be written on the lower
left of the envelope.)
