[Peace-discuss] similar illegal detention case <fwd>

Wed Jun 19 16:13:10 CDT 2002

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 14:27:02 -0400
From: answer.general at action-mail.org
To: answer.general at action-mail.org
Subject: [ANSWER]: Support Palestinian activist Jaoudat Abouazza -
    illegally detained and brutalized in Boston

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 (see
http://www.ucimc.org/ahmed/ for more info) 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 at 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.)

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