Thu 3 Nov 2005
United States of America v Rafil A.Dhafir: Individual Responsibility and Complicity
Posted by k under Civil Liberties , Katherine's Writing[4] Comments
[This article is also available on Information Clearing House.]
Are we a society that now calls this justice? Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 for sending humanitarian aid to starving Iraqi civilians through his charity Help the Needy. Dr. Dhafir is an esteemed member of the Muslim community here in Syracuse, New York, and he is respected nationally and internationally. His sentencing follows 31 months of detention without bail and a 14-week trial. The government presented its case in minutia — 7 government agencies investigated Rafil Dhafir for 5 years; the defense called one witness for 15 minutes. One of Dr. Dhafir’s lawyers commented in summation that the only government agency not represented was the Fish and Wildlife Service. The 60-count indictment included International Emergency Economic Powers Act, IEEPA, violation, money laundering, wire fraud and Medicare fraud, and the government won conviction on every count except one where they had listed the wrong bank.
I believe it is impossible to overstate the message that has been sent to the Muslim community via this detention, prosecution, and sentencing. It says, in no uncertain terms: “If we can get Rafil Dhafir, we can get anyone”. It also lets them know that a pillar of their society can be felled without so much as a call for equal justice from the non-Muslim community. Even as a person who is not Arab or Muslim, these messages frighten me. I have spent my entire life secure in the knowledge that my civil rights would be respected, as a consequence of attending this trial I no longer believe that to be true.
Attorney General Ashcroft announced on the day of Dr. Dhafir’s arrest, February 26, 2003, that supporters of terrorism had been apprehended. And in August 2004, just before the trial started, New York Governor Pataki reiterated this charge. Local prosecutors successfully lobbied the judge to deny Dr. Dhafir the right to defend himself against this charge at trial, but they then brought the charge back for his sentencing.
I attended virtually all of the 14-week trial and took notes for 5 hours each day. I am extremely troubled by Dr. Dhafir’s detention, the presentation of the government’s case during the trial, and the fact that a jury gave the government a unanimous verdict on what I perceived as an extremely weak case. I believe other people should have grave concern for what is happening, not only in this case but also in similar cases across this country. I am presently going through the 60-Count indictment to show why I do not believe the government proved its case.
I did not know Dr. Dhafir before attending his trial. Everything I know about this man comes directly from the proceedings. I thought my sharply different experience of the proceedings would be cause for discussion in the press, at least, if not concern. The trial struck me as similar to the show trials of the former Soviet Union in the 1930s that I have seen on film. There were days when I literally cringed because the evidence of the government was so weak. One small example of this weakness was a bar chart that the government had made about Dr. Dhafir’s billing practices to Medicare, as compared to some other physicians. The bar graph showed Dr. Dhafir’s bar as being about 7 inches tall and the other 6 or 7 physicians as having bars of between approximately 1 and 3 inches (people should check the transcript for exact details of the bar graph). The woman who presented the bar chart as evidence, did not know the area that the bar graph covered, or what types of physicians the other physicians were. Given that Dr. Dhafir was an oncologist in Rome, New York, an underserved area, it’s unlikely that many of these other physicians were Oncologists using expensive chemotherapy drugs.
My concern for civil liberties and equal justice originates from my upbringing, and from a British documentary series “World at War” that I watched as a 14 years old. I usually watched this with my family, but I was alone on a night the Allies were shown entering the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Footage in the documentary showed bulldozers pushing heaps of skeletal bodies into pits and people who were walking cadavers. This left an indelible impression on me and spurred a lifelong search for understanding of how ordinary people could let something like this happen.
I have read, for 30 years, hundreds of first hand accounts of what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The similarities I see in this country at the present time are alarming. I could not understand how it had happened in Germany until this last year of trying to tell people about Dr. Dhafir’s case. I took a year out from my studies because I believe passionately in the need to preserve civil liberties for all. I also wanted to alert others to the danger I perceived and worked at this like a full time job. I put in many 60-hour weeks, contacting individuals, religious groups, local institutions of higher education and media outlets about Dr. Dhafir’s detention and trial, as well as keeping up my website about the case.  I believed that if I alerted people they would want to find out more, but this belief proved to be totally naïve. Knowledge is a terrible thing: it throws you out of the Garden of Eden, most people did not want to know.
Three of the defendants in the Help the Needy case have graduated from Syracuse University with advanced degrees, and many of the 150 mainly Muslim families interrogated between 6am and 10am on the morning of Dr. Dhafir’s arrest, have ties to Syracuse University. I was present when one man told how the government agents had gone back 20 years in his bank records because he had donated $150 to Help the Needy. And because he pays principal on his mortgage as well as interest each month, one agent asked him if his children had enough to eat. In a year of trying, I found a total lack of willingness to move anyone in the university community to even have forums on what was happening in front of our noses.
Dr. Dhafir’s case is one that sets legal precedents. And it also raises questions about selective prosecution and freedom of speech – Dr. Dhafir was a vociferous critic of the US policy in Iraq, as I witnessed in a fundraising video during the court proceedings. I believe this extreme outspokenness was a major contributing factor to Dr. Dhafir’s present situation. Barrie Gewanter, Director of the ACLU-CNY, has stated that her organization has concerns about selective prosecution because comparable violations have been addressed with civil fines. This case is a remarkable teaching tool to have for law students, students of journalism, or any students. However, the faculty that I contacted at Syracuse University’s Law School, Maxwell School of Citizenship and the Newhouse School of Journalism, had no interest in finding out anything about this case, or in making their students aware of the case.
Dr. Dhafir wrote a 46-page pamphlet that was handed out to the media after he was sentenced. In one paragraph toward the end of the piece Dr. Dhafir says:
“What was the result of Feb 26, 2003 besides imprisoning of innocent people? Scores of innocent elderly American cancer patients died needlessly, innumerable tens of thousands of Iraqi needy (children, women and men) died, and more than that suffered malnutrition and the humiliation of poverty. An entire segment of our society here was treated as criminals, intimidated, interrogated and threatened. Never in the history of the Islamic Society of Central New York had we had so many cases of depression and suicide that the mosque had to engage the services of a psychiatrist to help out. The dream of this Republic being a sanctuary for the oppressed was shattered on that day and a new sad reality was erected in it’s place.” P.36
Last year, in France, two novels from a Jewish writer who was killed in Auschwitz were posthumously published to wide acclaim. Talking about the second book, one reviewer says: “The second, Dolce, is a more studied and literary portrait of a small village, Bussy, at the very beginning of the occupation, and of the first tentative complicities of collaboration.” The words, “first tentative complicities of collaboration” have stayed powerfully with me since I read them. Unfortunately over the last year, I have seen these complicities all around me.
We express concern about journalists being embedded in war zones like Iraq, but we should be every bit as concerned about journalists being embedded in local Federal Buildings. My experience of the newspaper articles was that the prosecutors could not have written the articles better themselves. The media has also been unwilling to address any of the burning questions raised by the government’s duplicitous approach to this case. I now believe I know exactly how the Holocaust likely happened in Germany. A complicit media and a willfully ignorant public are all that is needed and we have both.
If you care about freedom of speech and civil liberties and would like to find out more about this case, please visit: www.dhafirtrial.net
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[This article was modified 7/13/09. When published it said that Katherine had attended the 17-week trial. It was in fact 14 weeks long, it just felt like 17!]
November 4th, 2005 at 5:21 am
I am shocked but not surprised by this case. It is a sad indictment of where the US is heading. As a member of Amnesty International I aim to push strongly for Dr. Rafil A. Dhafir to be recognised as a Prisoner of Conscience.
November 4th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Unfortunately I haven’t been following the developments in this case with anywhere near the scrutiny that it demands. Much of my focus has been on the fallibility and criminal conspiracy in the Jose Padilla case. Dr. Dhafir deserves to present his story to the American public, something which the mainstream media seems to have ignored. If your words are accurate, his vilification and imprisonment are part of a concerted criminal conspiracy by the fascist Bush administration to control reasoned dissent and thwart citizens from questioning the motives and alliances of their government. We must accept the crushing reality that this is no longer the country we once believed it to be, a country of strong laws that guaranteed and protected free speech, honored diversity of opinion and respected the rights of the individual against the predations of a rapacious government bent on satisfying the whims and goals of Corporate America. War is all about profit for the few at the great expense of the many, and the many always lose– their lives, their futures, their hopes and their dreams. A society that sees enemies behind every garment not of Christian cloth, and every belief not born of some fundamentalist scripture, is doomed to die from its own hate and self-consuming fear. I would hope that Dr. Dhafir may successfully appeal his conviction and continue to care for those in desperate need and want. His trial and conviction echo the dark past, not the future– I’m afraid the National Socialist Party is alive and well behind the green expanse of the White House lawn and busy within its marbled halls and offices, formulating evil as doctrine. Fascism breathes its noxious fumes upon the land…..
November 6th, 2005 at 5:09 am
Dear Katherine !
We have written a résumé of your article in french and will put it online on our site http:/:quibla.net quibla.net under the rubrics “Guantanamo Galaxy”.
Incroyable : Rafil Dhafir condamné à 22 ans de prison par un tribunal US pour avoir envoyé de l’aide humanitaire en Iraq !
par Katherine Hughes, 3 novembre 2005
L’auteure est une citoyenne concernée, potière et lectrice vorace
Peut-on appeler cela de la justice ? Le Docteur Rafil A. Dhafir a été condamné le 27 octobre 2005 à 22 ans de prison fédérale pour avoir envoyé de l’aide humanitaire à des civils iraquiens affamés par le biais de son ONG Help the Needy (Aider les nécessiteux). Le Dr. Dhafir est un membre éminent de la communauté musulmane de Syracuse, dans l’État de New York, et il est respecté à l’échelle nationale et internationale. Sa condamnation faisait suite à 31 mois de détention et à un procès de 17 semaines. Le gouvernement a présenté le cas avec minutie : 7 agences gouvernementales ont enquête sur Rafil Dhafir pendant 5 ans. La défense a appelé un témoin pendant 15 minutes. L’un des défenseurs de Dhafir a fait le commentaire que la seule agence gouvernementale non-représentée était le Service du poisson et du gibier. L’acte d’accusation comportait 60 charges, dont une seule n’a pas été retenue, à cause d’une erreur sur une banque.
Le message envoyé par cette condamnation à la communauté musulmane est clair : « Si nous pouvons avoir Rafil Dhafir, nous pouvons avoir n’importe qui. » Bien plus, elle signifie que de telles choses peuvent advenir sans réaction des non-Musulmans. N’étant ni arabe ni muslmane, je suis épouvantée par ces messages. J’ai cru toute ma vie que mes droits civiques seraient respectés mais après avoir suivi ce procès, je ne le crois plus.
Le jour de l’arrestation du Dr. Dhafir, le 26 février 2003, le procureur général Ashcroft annonçait que des supporters du terrorisme avaient été appréhendés. En août 2004, juste avant le démarrage du procès, le Gouverneur de New York Pataki a réitéré cette accusation. Les procureurs locaux ont réussi par un lobbying intense à convaincre le juge de refuser le droit au Dr. Dhafir de se défendre lui-même contre cette charge, puis ils l’ont présentée à nouveau au procès pour qu’il soit condamné.
J’ai suivi tout le procès pendant 17 semaines, prenant des notes 5 heures par jour. Je suis extrêmement troublée par la détention du Dr. Dhafir, par la présentation du cas par le gouvernement pendant le procès et par le fait que le jury a émis un verdict unanime, sur la base de ce que j’ai perçu comme étant un dossier très faible. Je pense que d’autres gens devraient se sentir concernés non seulement par cette affaire, mais par d’autres afffaires similaires à travers le pays. Je suis en train de revoir l’acte d’accusation afin de démontrer pourquoi je ne crois pas que le gouvernement a fourni des preuves pour ses accusations.
Je ne connaissais par le Dr. Dhafir avant le procès. Tout ce que je sais de lui provient directement de la procédure. Ce procès évoque pour moi les procès ubuesques de Moscou dans les années Trente.
Trois des co-ccusés dans l’affaire Help the Needy sont des diplômés de l’Université de Syracuse et beaucoup des 150 familles, principalement musulmanes, interrogées entre 6 h et 10 h le matin de l’arrestation du Dr. Dhafir, ont des liens avec l’Université de Syracuse J’ai entendu l’un de ces hommes rconter comment les agents du gouvernment étaient remontés 20 ans en arrière dans ses relevés bancaires, car il avait fait une donation de 150 000 dollars à Help the Needy. Et comme il rembourse un emprunt-logement chaque mois, un agent lui a demandé si ses enfants avaient assez à manger. Pendant une année, j’ai tenté en vain de faire bouger la communauté universitaire pour au moins discuter ce qui se passait sous nos yeux. Rien, aucune réaction.
Le cas du Dr. Dhafir crée un précédent juridique. Il pose la question de la persécution sélective et de la liberté d’expresion. Il était un critique virulent de la politque US en Iraq. Je pense que c’est la raison principale des poursuites contre lui.
Nos nous inquiétons des journalistes “embarqués” (embedded) dans les zones de guerre comme l’Iraq, mais nous devrions aussi nous préoccuper des journalistes “embarqués” dans les bâtiments fédéraux. Les articles de journaux publiés par la presse sur l’affaire n’auraient pas pu être mieux écrits par les procureurs eux-mêmes.
Je crois maintennant savoir exactement comment l’Holocauste a pu se réaliser en Allemagne : des médias complices et un public délibérément ignorant suffisent, et nous avons, ici aussi, les deux.
Pour en savoir plus et contacter l’auteur : http://www.dhafirtrial.net
September 28th, 2011 at 8:18 pm
I just read the 46 page pamphlet that Rafil made for his sentencing. I am crying.
This is a travesty. A waste of a good man who was doing so much good. All I can say is history will exonerate him!