[Peace] Fwd:[ANSWER]: Support Palestinian activist Jaoudat Abouazza

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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 fac