by Richard Hugus
December 21, 2012
The recent finishing off of the Bill of Rights in the National Defense Authorization Act was actually just a formality. The United States has been able to persecute and convict US citizens for a long time now whether they had a trial by jury or not. José Padilla was convicted without a trial. Aafia Siddiqui and Lynne Stewart were convicted with a trial. Convictions with a trial are a sure thing for Uncle Sam because he has carried out so much political indoctrination that just about any jury pool in the United States has had the alleged facts of the war on terror so deeply imprinted in their minds that a prosecutor has only to press the right buttons for the jury to reach a guilty verdict. The buttons are words like "al-Qaeda" and "Osama bin Laden", perhaps a video clip of the World Trade Center attack. They have worked time and time again. Jury trials don't make any difference when it comes to terrorism cases because the American public is deeply ignorant and long trained to be intimidated by authority.
A case in point is the conviction of Tarek Mehanna in a Boston federal court on December 20, 2011. Mehanna is an Egyptian-American Muslim who was arrested by the FBI in 2009, at the age of 27, on charges of material support for terrorism. He spent two years in solitary confinement in a prison in Plymouth, Massachusetts before facing trial -- in a sense, convicted without a trial. When the trial finally took place it went on for eight weeks. It was a circus of prejudicial evidence, government-coerced informers, Patriot Act snooping by the FBI, phony government experts on terrorism, and all-around ignorance about the Muslim religion. Federal Judge O'Toole allowed everything put forward by the prosecution, no matter how irrelevant, and denied almost all defense objections. Tarek's sentence, scheduled for April 12, 2012, could be life in prison.
Among the supporters of the government case against Mehanna was Americans for Peace and Tolerance who demonstrated outside the courthouse on the first day of trial. Americans for Peace and Tolerance is a new front group led by Charles Jacobs, a professional right-wing Zionist from Boston. Jacobs also led the anti-Muslim media watchdog, CAMERA; the anti-Muslim American Anti-Slavery Group, which promoted the attack on Sudan; and the anti-Muslim pro-Israel on campus David Project. Jacobs has been involved for years in an attack on a mosque in the Roxbury area of Boston, and now on the mosque's Imam.
The dark side of the conviction of Tarek Mehanna is the involvement of Zionism in the attack on Muslims in general. This attack is an important part of the foundation of the war on terror. Eager to find an enemy to replace Communism, fascist America took a cue from Zionist Israel and created a new all-purpose enemy out of Arabs and Muslims. Where Arab and Muslim terrorists do not exist, the FBI is now there to create them. Mehanna's original offense was refusing to become an informant at his mosque for the FBI. The assumption here is that mosques are places of criminal activity -- an idea clearly promoted by Charles Jacobs. Elsewhere the FBI has duped young men who could be identified as Arab by their names and planted them in the midst of so-called terrorist plots which were conceived, funded, and all but carried out by that same FBI. Another Massachusetts man recently became the victim of such a plot, when the FBI arrested him for planning to send model airplanes provided by them to attack buildings chosen by them, with explosives, also provided by them. This is the new COINTEL program -- an undercover operation to support a factitious war, based on what we must remember is a central Zionist imperative: demonizing Arabs and Muslims in order to steal their land and resources. What Zionist Israel has done to Palestine, Zionist USA will do to the world, all the while claiming itself the victim, acting in self-defense.
The only thing the United States was able to prove in its case against Tarek Mehanna was that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. There was nothing he said in the hundreds of instant messages and online chats, stolen from his computer and introduced absurdly as evidence, which would not have been said by any opponent of that genocidal attack. Oddly, the US government in this trial became like the infallible Church in the Spanish Inquisition -- the arbiter of thoughts which only it was in a position to declare heresy; the creator of an idea which, by relentless propaganda, it had the power to make into a reality: the deservedness of Arab people, indeed all people of color, to undergo extermination by white supremacy. How fitting that Tarek now awaits his sentence in Plymouth, the place where it all began.