American Civilian Victim of US Foreign Policy

Shakir Hamoodi, a Columbia [Missouri] business owner imprisoned for sending money to his family in Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions, was released Tuesday from the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kan., to serve the remainder of his sentence in a halfway house and on home arrest.

Hamoodi, a nuclear scientist once employed by the University of Missouri and owner of World Harvest Foods, was sentenced in 2012 to three years in federal prison for sending more than $200,000 to family, friends and charities from 1991 to 2003. Investigators found no evidence he was aiding the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein through his contributions, which he told the court were to provide for basic needs of family members.

[...]

“My uncle was a surgeon [in Iraq] who made $2 a month and could not even buy a box of eggs,” said Owais Abdul-Kafi, Hamoodi’s son, in an interview Friday. “They were suffering and starving.”

  Columbia Tribune

I’m very happy for Mr. Hamoodi and his family, but I am much more disgusted with the US “justice” system and all who participated (indirectly, that being the entire voting-age citizenry of the US) in the outrage of this treatment of a decent and caring man.

I first met Mr. Hamoodi in his import store where I bought wonderful cheeses, and then on an early protest march against the Iraq invasion where he begged us all to try to understand what our bombs would do to innocent people, including his family in Iraq. All who engaged in the wrath of the 9/11ers, and those who participated in his trial and conviction are a disgrace to humanity.

And, to add insult to injury…

Hamoodi, 62, is at Reality House in Columbia and has a final release date of April 7, 2015. Federal release rules require him to seek work until his final release but he is not allowed to work at his business.

[...]

Prior to his sentencing, friends and supporters urged that Hamoodi be put on probation. Since his incarceration, petitions seeking a commutation have been presented to the U.S. Department of Justice and the White House with no results.

“We are very thankful for the community of Columbia,” Abdul-Kafi wrote. “They have stood with our family through this whole process.”

[...]

“He is a classic good man,” [Columbia attorney Craig] Van Matre said. “He is compassionate. He is intelligent. He is caring. He’s a leader of the Muslim community and he is charitable to the extreme. He is an adherent to the best aspects of the Muslim religion and he just didn’t deserve this.”

No, he did not. He does not.

h/t Jean

US vs. Journalism

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. […] Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

[...]

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

[...]

After Shaye was convicted and sentenced, tribal leaders intensified their pressure on President Saleh to issue a pardon. “Some prominent Yemenis and tribal sheikhs visited the president to mediate in the issue and the president agreed to release and pardon him,” recalls Barman. “We were waiting for the release of the pardon—it was printed out and prepared in a file for the president to sign and announce the next day.” Word of the impending pardon leaked in the Yemeni press. “That same day,” Barman says, “the president [Saleh] received a phone call from Obama expressing US concerns over the release of Abdulelah Haider.” Saleh rescinded the pardon.

  Jeremy Scahill

Shaye was kidnapped, beaten and warned not to talk about the story, but he went back to work and talked about the story and his abduction. He was then abducted again, imprisoned and tortured. He was charged with working for al Qaeda, convicted and sentenced.

As the US ratcheted up its efforts to assassinate the radical cleric Anwar Awlaki, among the charges leveled against him was that he praised the actions of the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. A key source for those statements was an interview with Awlaki conducted by Shaye broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2009. Far from coming off as sympathetic, Shaye’s interview was objective and seemed aimed at actually getting answers. Among the questions he asked Awlaki: How can you agree with what Nidal did as he betrayed his American nation? Why did you bless the acts of Nidal Hasan? Do you have any connection with the incident directly? Shaye also confronted Awlaki with inconsistencies from Awlaki’s previous interviews. If anything, Shaye’s interviews with Awlaki provided the US intelligence community and the politicians and pro-assassination punditry with ammunition to support their campaign to kill Awlaki.

And yet...

There is no doubt that Shaye was reporting facts that both the Yemeni and US government wanted to suppress. He was also interviewing people Washington was hunting. While the US and Yemeni governments alleged that he was a facilitator for Al Qaeda propaganda, close observers of Yemen disagree. “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of his work,” says Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Princeton University who had communicated regularly with Shaye since 2008. “Without Shaye’s reports and interviews we would know much less about Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula than we do, and if one believes, as I do, that knowledge of the enemy is important to constructing a strategy to defeat them, then his arrest and continued detention has left a hole in our knowledge that has yet to be filled.” 

[...]

In February, Shaye began a brief hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, ending it after his family expressed serious concerns about his deteriorating health. While international media organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, have called for Shaye’s release, his case has received scant attention in the United States. Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers have said he remains in jail at the request of the White House. Some had hoped that when President Saleh stepped down earlier this year, Shaye might be released.

That seems unlikely if the US government has any say in the matter. “We are standing by [President Obama’s] comments from last February,” State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told The Nation. “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin said, “That is all we have to say about this case.”

[...]

For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicate that simply interviewing Al Qaeda–associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, is a crime in the view of the US government.

At least they get the message.

At the University of Missouri, Glenn Greenwald told of the response of many Americans to a request to aid Bradley Manning or the Hamoodi family of Columbia, Missouri. He said people express a desire to help but are afraid that if they do, they will suffer reprisal from the US government in some way. Indeed.  We get the message, too.

You say we're free? Think again.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

support link: http://www.thenation.com/blog/166899/help-free-imprisoned-journalist-abdulelah-haider-shaye
video: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8541582306724338079#editor/target=post;postID=7394552843975649709
previous blog post: http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8541582306724338079#editor/target=post;postID=8073122329782271115

Injustice Writ Large

Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer [...] just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the "crime" of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives in Iraq - including his blind mother - during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family's suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.

Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi's son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi's son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master's student in MU's School of Journalism. The travesty of this case - and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family - is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.

  Glenn Greenwald

Dr. Hamoodi ran, with his family, a wonderful food import store in Columbia. Numerous encounters with the Hamoodis proved to me that they are a lovely, kind family. The type of people you want and are lucky to have in your community. I still have a hard time believing this has happened to them. Dr. Hamoodi became a US citizen in 2002 (according to Greenwald's article), and all his children were born and raised in Columbia, Missouri. When the U.S. Invaded Iraq, Dr. Hamoodi was asked and spoke to a group of Columbians (myself included) who gathered to stage a peaceful protest march against the invasion... 

But in 2002 and 2003, Hamoodi was not just a nuclear engineer. He was also a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration's plan to attack Iraq. And his position as a nuclear engineer made him a particularly potent threat to the case for that invasion, as he continuously insisted that Saddam did not have an active nuclear weapons program and that the case for the war was grounded in lies. In his antiwar activism, he emphasized how much already-suffering Iraqi civilians would suffer more, and how the invasion would lead to mass instability.

[...]

US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jones about the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime "killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history".

[...]

Because sending money into Iraq from the US was physically impossible, [Dr. Hamoodi] set up a bank account in Jordan and proceeded to make small deposits into it. From that account, small amounts of money - between $20 and $100 - were dispersed each month to his family members.

[...]

From 1993 until 2003, when the sanctions regime was lifted after the US invasion, Hamoodi sent an average of $25,000 each year back to Iraq [including money given to him by other Iraqis living in Columbia for their families], totaling roughly $250,000 over the decade: an amount that fed and sustained the Iraqi relatives of 14 families in Columbia, Missouri, including his wife's five siblings.

[...]

Everyone, including the US government, acknowledges that these funds were sent to and received only by the intended recipients - suffering Iraqi family members - and never got anywhere near Saddam's regime, terrorist groups, or anything illicit.

[...]

The sanctions regime decimated Hamoodi's family. His elderly blind mother was unable to buy basic medication. His sister, one of 11 siblings back in Iraq, suffered a miscarriage because she was unable to buy $10 antibiotics. His brother, a surgeon, was earning the equivalent of $2 per month and literally unable to feed his family.

And we would be calling Dr. Hamoodi a monster if he had turned his back on them while living in the US earning a comfortable living for himself.

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald (who spoke recently at the University of Missouri – video to be posted at Glenn's site shortly - apparently it was packed - very good - and they had to turn people away - not so good) for picking up this story, giving it a thorough analysis, and offering links to a petition to the White House asking for a commuted sentence, and to donations to help the Hamoodi family.

A Terrible Crime

But the criminals aren't the ones doing the time.

A well-known Columbia [Missouri] businessman and cultural leader was sentenced yesterday to three years in federal prison for illegally siphoning more than $200,000 to family, friends and charities in Iraq during sanctions between 1991 and 2003.

[...]

“I made a mistake, and I am deeply sorry,” [Shakir] Hamoodi told Laughrey before he was sentenced yesterday. “All money sent was used by friends and family.”

Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American former nuclear scientist with the University of Missouri and World Harvest store owner, could have faced up to 71 months in prison. Laughrey said Hamoodi’s efforts to diffuse cultural ignorance toward Muslims and educate local residents about the practice of Islam over the past 20 years weighed heavily in her decision. Hamoodi, through attorney J.R. Hobbs of Kansas City, had requested probation.

[...]

Federal agents in September 2006 searched the Woodberry Court home of Hamoodi, who has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. Investigators found no proof that Hamoodi was aiding the Iraqi government through his financial contributions.

[...]

Hamoodi conspired to help other Columbia residents filter money into Iraq for their families, the court found, but he was the lone defendant.

[...]

Since his home was searched, Hamoodi said, other students have called his children terrorists, his neighbors keep a distance from him and his business has suffered. More than 20 supporters gathered after the sentencing to express their support for the Hamoodi family as their children continue their education and expenses pile up during his absence.

  Columbia Tribune

The man has been an upstanding contributing community member for 20 years. When I was living in Columbia, I met him a few times at his wonderful imported foods store and at a protest march when George Bush declared war on Iraq. He told us at that time about his family in Iraq and his fears for their future under the threat of bombs. He is a lovely person. How many tens of thousands of American citizens from other countries are sending money to families in their home countries? Let them pray that their country doesn't get itself on our enemies list.

(h/t Jean)

And then there's this:

A former Michigan congressman and U.S. delegate to the United Nations was sentenced yesterday to a year and one day in prison for lobbying for a Columbia Islamic charity that had been identified as funneling money to a global terrorist.

Mark Deli Siljander, 60, a Republican who served in Congress from 1981-1987, pleaded guilty in July 2010 to obstructing justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent in connection with his work for the Islamic American Relief Agency, based in Columbia.

In his plea agreement, Siljander acknowledged that he lobbied between March and May 2004 on behalf of the IARA for the organization to be removed from a U.S. Senate Finance Committee list of charities suspected of funding international terrorism. The charity closed in October 2004 after being designated a global terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

[...]

After a short recess, Laughrey said she had no choice but to sentence Siljander to time behind bars.

“I came in this morning with the thought that I would sentence you to a longer time in jail,” she said after announcing the sentence.

Although no real harm had been done by Siljander’s actions, she said, there was the potential for harm, and that’s why a prison sentence was necessary.

“For me, the real harm is that you kept lying to the government,” Laughrey said. However, she added, “This is not a case about somebody aiding a terrorist.”

  Columbia Tribune

He should have been lobbying for the MEK instead.