How to ruin a man's life - if he's Muslim

Somehow I missed this story earlier. So that you don't:

The Democrats may have taken control of the House and Senate, but we still live in George Bush’s America. It is an America the imprisoned Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who has spent over two years in isolation, knows intimately. Dr. Al-Arian, who was a tenured professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida until being fired, was given the maximum sentence earlier this year for what the judge, in a case that bordered on the farcical, said was his support of a radical Palestinian organization.

The imprisoned professor, who will be deported when he is released, was to have spent 57 months in prison. But his time now seems likely to be extended since, despite plea bargaining that should have exempted him from further testimony, he has been called to testify before a secret grand jury in Virginia investigating Islamic organizations in the state. It is the newest twist in a case that has become emblematic of the repression meted out to America’s Muslim minority.

Al-Arian endured a six-month show trial in Florida that saw the government’s case collapse in a mass of contradictions and innuendo. During the trial the government called 80 witnesses and subjected the jury to hundreds of hours of often inane phone transcriptions and recordings, made over a 10-year period, which the jury dismissed as “gossip.” Out of the 94 charges made against the four defendants there were no convictions. Of the 17 charges against Al-Arian—including “conspiracy to murder and maim persons abroad’’ --, the jury acquitted him of eight and was hung on the rest. The jurors disagreed on the remaining charges by a count of 10 to 2 favoring his full acquittal. Two others in the case, Ghassan Ballut and Sameeh Hammoudeh, were acquitted of all charges, dealing another body blow to the government’s case. The May sentencing of Al-Arian contradicted the basis of the jury’s acquittal and the reasoning behind the subsequent plea agreement.

Following the acquittal, a disaster for the government, especially since then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had announced the indictment, prosecutors threatened to retry Al-Arian. The Palestinian professor, under duress, accepted a plea bargain agreement that would spare him a second trial, saying in his agreement that he had helped people associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad with immigration matters. It was a tepid charge given the high profile of the case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida and the Counterterrorism Section of the Justice Department agreed to recommend to the judge the minimum sentence of 46 months. But U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. sentenced Dr. Al-Arian to the maximum 57 months. In referring to Al-Arian’s contention that he had only raised money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s charity for widows and orphans, the judge said acidly to the professor that “your only connection to orphans and widows is that you create them.”

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