Sponsoring Groups:
Muslim Solidarity Committee (Yassin Aref & Mohammend Hossain)
Free Fahad (Syed Fahad Hasmi)
Dhafir Trial (Dr. Rafil Dhafir)
Lynne Stewart
Go directly to the database of defendants
Would you like to volunteer? Email Lynne Jackson at lynnejackson@mac.com
Click here to sign
Fourth Letter to President Obama and
Attorney General Eric Holder
(Please note: the petition is hosted by iPetitions.
No donation is necessary to sign the petition)
In February, 2009 we sent a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Holder, asking that they investigate the prosecution of Muslims following 9/11 which resulted in numerous innocent Muslims being convicted on false terrorism charges.
Since then, we sent two other letters (April, 2009 and May 2009) to the President and Attorney General, calling for an investigation into various specific cases that clearly raise the concerns that we expressed in our first letter. These cases are tragic miscarriages of justice and speak for themselves.
Now, we are asking you to sign a fourth letter to President Obama and Attorney General Holder raising objections to the US government's use of agents provocateur, to entrap innocent Muslims.
Letter to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder
On February 17, Project SALAM sent a letter to President Obama and Attorney General Holder requesting an investigation into the validity of numerous criminal prosecutions brought after 9/11 against Muslims. Almost 1000 people signed this letter. Read the letter and the attachments here (1.1 MB download)
On April 4, 2009, Projet SALAM sent another letter to President Obama and Attorney General Holder highlighting the injustices in four cases - Syed Fahad Hashmi, Sami Al-Arian, Dr. Rafil Dafir, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossai. Read the letter here.
On May 21, 2009, Project SALAM sent a third letter to President Obama and Attorney General Holder objecting to the US government's use of agents provocateur, torture, mistreatment of Muslim prisoners, the role of the US government in the disappearance of Muslims and the failure of the US government to live up to its obligations under numerous treaties to prosecute war crimes. Read the letter here.
Lynne Jackson visited the families of the Fort Dix 5 on April 23. Click here to read about the Fort Dix 5 and the terrible miscarriage of justice. The five men are to be sentenced on April 27 and April 28, 2009.
Purpose of Project SALAM
This web site is devoted to researching and documenting the likelihood that the United States Justice Department’s post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecutions and convictions have included a significant number of Muslims who were in fact innocent of any crime. Other cases were severely overcharged and/or over sentenced.
Following 9/11 the FBI and Justice Department indicated that they were operating under a new paradigm of preventing terrorist attacks before they occurred. This paradigm suggested that charges could be brought against people who they suspected might commit crimes in order to obtain convictions before any crimes actually occurred. Such prosecutions seem in fact to have occurred and it appears that completely innocent Muslims have been convicted and sent away for long prison sentences based only on suspicion and concocted charges. In this web site we propose to examine the US post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions and determine whether in each case there was substantial evidence of criminality or simply evidence unfairly concocted and/or twisted to convict innocent Muslims.
Tactics Used in Prosecution
We also propose to examine the tactics and strategies of the prosecution in these cases to determine if the government, in their effort to obtain convictions against Muslims, has stretched legal concepts beyond the point where a fair trial is possible, and is unfairly damaging communities. These tactics include:
- The use of secret evidence and secret court opinions
- The use of “agent provocateurs”/ “informants” who agitate in the Muslim community leading to the conspiracy arrest of everyone who did not notify the FBI about the agent’s provocative conduct. These “informants” are either criminals spared long prison sentences and deportation for their help, and/or are paid large sums of money by the government.
- The use of pending immigration applications to coerce Muslims into giving false testimony against members of their community
- The use of staged press conferences and pre-trial publicity that hype unfounded and sensational terrorist allegations in order to scare communities, damage the reputation and credibility of Muslims, and influence the jury pool. Often after the damage is done, the pre-trial terrorist hype of the prosecution is shown to be completely wrong, unwarranted or greatly overdone
- The use of strategies for intimidating juries into believing that the defendants are real terrorists by excessive security, by insisting on anonymous witnesses and/or jurors, and by constantly referring in trials to “9/11” and to known terrorists such as “Osama bin Laden” even where these references are legally irrelevant to the charges.
- The use at trial of bogus experts who are not independent scholars, and who make a living by simply parroting the government’s theory in case after case.
- The practice of opposing, often successfully, attempts by the defense to introduce experts to explain the political and religious realities of the Muslim community, while the government is allowed to present their own extremely distorted views in this regard.
- The use of translators who are not independent and give the most one sided pro-government translation of foreign words out of context.
- The practice of routinely charging defendants with lying to the government based on unrecorded interviews, often conducted under extreme pressure, where it is essentially the agent’s word against the defendant’s.
- The practice of incarcerating Muslims together in prisons designed to restrict their interaction with the outside world (Communication Management Units (CMU)), and to restrict their religious practices while in prison. This includes severe limitations on family visits to non-contact visits which requires family members to see each other only through a plate glass window and to talk to each other only on a telephone.
- The use of extensive surveillance, including illegal warrantless wiretapping, to monitor targets and their associates, including their attorneys.
- The use of extremely complex or vague charges and legal instructions which confuse the jury.
- The use of charges of “material support for terrorism” which the government has said can be used against anyone who donated to or did anything for a particular group, even if the donor had no knowledge that the group was considered terrorist by anyone
- The excessive and inappropriate use of Conspiracy charges and the use of guilt by association to smear those who have innocent contacts with known or suspected terrorists, and to link innocent people with each other in an alleged criminal association, using one against the other.