Victims of Preemptive Prosecution
Remembering the Victims of
Preemptive Prosecution
After 9/11, fear of terrorism caused Americans to deviate from the equal application of the law for all Americans, and launched a wave of US government retaliation against Muslims in America that bore no connection to any individual guilty. This is most easily seen in the US government’s Preemptive Prosecution program, in which innocent Muslims are prosecuted for some contrived crime, based on their character or “ideology” ostensibly to “preempt” them from possibly becoming involved in terrorism at some future time.
Preemptive Prosecution takes inspiration from former Vice-President Cheney’s 1% Doctrine that if there is even a 1% chance of some terrorist act occurring, the government must act to preempt it as thought it was a certainty. The government launched a war in Iraq allegedly to preempt the Iraqi government from sharing weapons of mass destruction with the terrorists. (No such weapons were found – it was later claimed that the intelligence was faulty). The US rounded up suspected terrorists abroad and incarcerated them indefinitely at Guantanamo in order to preempt them from attacking the US. (Military and government officials now say that the Bush Administration knew that most of the detainees were innocent, but did not care. Having a large number of detainees served the Administration’s purpose of creating fear of Islamic extremists). The US government has also preemptively prosecuted hundreds of innocent Muslims in the US for contrived crimes on the pretext of preempting them from committing crimes in the future. It seems clear the US government does not care that most of these Muslim defendants are also innocent. It serves the US government’s purposes to claim that it caught hundreds of “terrorist” in the US even if the defendants in fact never intended harm to the US.
In this article we remember the victims of preemptive prosecution and describe a little about their personal situation. The government has focused on several different areas as a pretext to bringing preemptive prosecutions charges, and so the cases have been grouped by to these categories (although a case may fit several categories).