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Atlantic Free Press - June 5, 2008
Yassin Aref's Struggle for Justice in America
by Stephen Lendman
Yassin Aref is a 37 year old Albany, New York resident and one of many Muslim victims of police state justice in post-9/11 America. They've been hunted down, rounded up, held in detention, kept in isolation, denied bail, restricted in their right to counsel, tried on secret evidence and trumped-up charges, then incarcerated as political prisoners or deported to where they face possible arrest and torture.
Because of his faith and ethnicity, Aref was victimized by US "justice" in a post-9/11 climate of fear. He's an Iraqi Kurd who emigrated to the US as a UN refugee in 1999 with his wife and three young children. He's now in federal prison but committed no crime. He's also the author of a poignant memoir/autobiography titled "Son of Mountains: My Life as a Kurd and a Terror Suspect." He wrote it in custody at Troy, New York's Rensselaer County Jail after his wrongful conviction in October 2006.
It's his story in prose and poetry covering much more than his arrest, conviction and imprisonment. It's an account of an early life in poverty, his struggle to survive, his time in exile, of a two-time immigrant, and a UN refugee who sought peace and freedom in America but instead was persecuted. It's his story of wrongful conviction, of grave injustice, of a militarized state, of his constitutional rights denied, of despotism run amuck, of a nation where no one is safe, where many hundreds like him are imprisoned, and where we're all Yassins in police state America.
The story concludes with a powerful essay by pro bono lawyer, Stephen Downs, that details how Yassin was framed and wrongfully convicted. It explains how he "never before in (his) professional life (of over 35 years) encountered a deliberate frame-up. (He) was familiar with prosecutorial abuses" wrongful convictions, "sloppy police work, concealment of errors, hubris and arrogance, but what happened to Yassin was (much) different."
The government deliberately fabricated bogus charges and plotted to convict a man they knew was innocent. It was a "cold, calculating plan carried out over a long period of time, costing millions of dollars and involving dozens of agents, prosecutors, and the acquiescence of high-level officials, to convict two men of terrorism who had no involvement or interest in (it)....I could not adapt....to this new reality. For me, Yassin's case (won't end) until (his) injustice (is) corrected. Besides, (he's) now my brother." Today, we're all Yassin's brothers and sisters and must stand with him for justice.
The FBI Sting Operation
In August 2004, FBI agents arrested Aref and Mohammed Hossain as part of a counterterrorism sting operation based on an unsubstantiated claim: that his name, address and phone number were in a notebook in a "bombed out Iraqi encampment." The information was classified and unavailable to his defense counsel even though he's cleared for security. The government first claimed Aref was called "commander." It then admitted there was a "mistranslation" and the Kurdish word "kak" means brother and is a common term of respect.
Aref originates from Iraqi Kurdistan where his grandfather was a famous imam, and Aref was known and respected in the area. No information is available on the target was bombed, whether a notebook really exists, or what's in it if it does. Its "contents" are classified and kept under wraps, so that automatically raises suspicions about their authenticity or existence.
Nonetheless, the FBI claims Aref was tied to Mullar Krekar, Ansar al-Islam's founder. It's a Kurdish Sunni group that supposedly promotes radical Islamic and Jihad views. Since 1991, Krekar lived in Norway as a political refugee. While there, police investigated him for seven months, found incriminating evidence, and in April 2003 the country's Supreme Court acquitted him of terrorism charges. In spite of it, US authorities recharged him with consorting with Ansar to carry out 2003 suicide bombings in northern Iraq.
Norwegian police then reopened their investigation, went to Iraq, and what they learned was disquieting. The key witness (Didar Khalan) was in Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) custody, and his statement was obtained through torture. He subsequently retracted it, said he never met Krekar, and Norwegian authorities dropped all charges they believed had no basis in fact.
The real issue is this. In mid-2002, US officials sought Ansar's support for its planned Iraq invasion. When Krekar refused, Washington targeted him and his group. It got Jordan to demand his extradition on drugs-smuggling charges with no substantiating evidence. It also called Ansar the "missing link" between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and the New York Times mysteriously uncovered evidence of the group's tie to bin Laden. The PUK was the rest of the "link" on a trumped up Ansar- Baathist connection. It was all untrue, but in February 2003, the State Department designated Ansar a "foreign terrorist organization (FTO)," claimed it was "one of the leading groups (against) Coalition (forces) in Iraq," and accused Krekar as the group's founder.
It also got Aref in trouble with trumped-up charges of his ties to Krekar and secret "evidence" supposedly proving it. After marrying, Aref left Iraq in 1994 and lived for five years in Syria. While there, the UN approved his refugee status and right to emigrate that allowed him to come to America. While still in Syria, he worked as a gardener, lost his job in 1998, and was hired by the Damascus office of an Islamic Kurdish US ally opposed to Saddam Hussein - the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan (IMK). Krekar was an IMK official. In 2001, two years after Aref left Syria, he formed Ansar al-Islam. Aref briefly met him in Damascus but neither knew him or espoused his views.
In 1999, Aref and his family came to America and worked as a hospital janitor and ambulance driver. A year later he became the Masjid As Salam Mosque's imam. Aref's troubles began when FBI agents targeted him in a 2003 sting operation that his lawyers call a frame-up. They convinced a Pakistani informant (facing a long prison sentence and deportation on fraud charges) to approach Aref's friend, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain (a Bangladesh immigrant and US citizen), as a way to target him.
Shahed Hussein was the informant, he was known as Malik, and here's the essence of the scheme:
— Malik was wired to secretly record all conversations with his targets;
-- he offered Hossain a $50,000 loan, pretending an interest in his pizza shop; as a show of good faith, he asked for $45,000 in checks so Hossain could keep the rest;
— Hossain was told the money came from a surface-to-air (SAM) Chinese missile purchase that was intended for a group called JEM (Jaish-e-Mohammed - a Pakistani-based Islamic group that's also a designated FTO); and
— the missile supposedly would be used against the Pakistani ambassador in New York.
It was all untrue, Malik was a willing FBI accomplice, Hossain thought JEM was a musical group, and he knew nothing about terrorism. He went along with the arrangement, and according to Muslim custom, brought in Aref to witness it. Later, the government arrested both men and claimed Aref was part of a money laundering and terrorist scheme. Aref's defense argued that he spoke poor English at the time, believed the loan was legitimate, was unaware of any laws broken, and the affair was a plot to entrap him.
Moreover, in January 2006, the defense learned that "evidence" was illegally obtained through NSA warrantless wiretapping and filed a motion to suppress it. It was denied. The defense appealed and was joined by the New York ACLU. Their appeal was denied on procedural grounds that no action could be taken while the case was still pending. It was unclear how this and other classified evidence (99% withheld from the defense) affected the trial. However, the Court instructed the jury that "the FBI had good and valid suspicions for investigating Yassin Aref."
He and Hossain were arrested in August 2004 and convicted in October 2006 - Hossain on 27 counts and Aref on 10 of 30 charges of money laundering, conspiracy to provide material support for a terrorist plot, terrorism, and making false statements in February 2002 and August 2004.
In March 2007, both men were sentenced to 15 years in prison and have filed appeals. In addition, Aref's counsel filed a lengthy sentencing memorandum to the US District Court for the Northern District of New York. It detailed his client's history and character and concluded as follows:
...."this case....raises a lot of troubling issues (including) the nature of the sting operation, targeting two individuals who had never been in any trouble before, and who clearly were not involved in any illegal activity at the time the informant entered their lives.... Moreover, the case occurred in a post-9/11 climate of great fear when ordinary Americans had become suspicious of Muslims.....history will recognize that this case never should have happened, and that the two defendants were the victims of an unfortunate over-reaction....Yassin Aref asks that the Court seriously consider his entire history and character (and) all (his) letters (of support,) the troubling nature of the case, and impose a truly just sentence."
Before sentencing, Aref professed his innocence and addressed the Court in imperfect English: ...."I know you, (your) Honor, and every single person and everybody, FBI, they check all my record, all my life, they interview thousands of the people....they knew never I did any violence, never I participate in any fighting, never I support any terrorist group....everybody knew I did nothing to be one day in the jail for. And I did not come to this country to be in the jail. I came to be free. I did not come to this country to destroy (it). I came to be my life. I (didn't) threaten any human being....I came for my children to be safe from terrorist....I believe what's done for me it is unfair and I believe, (your) Honor, it is your duty to make sure that justice has been served."
The prosecution asked for 30 years. The Court imposed 15. After the convictions, the Muslim Solidarity Committee (MSC) was formed to support Aref, Hossain and their families. It collected letters and around 1000 petition signatures asking the Court for leniency. It also held vigils twice weekly between conviction and sentencing and raised funds to support the two families. IMC members were traumatized by the verdict and knew it could happen to them. Others in the community were also outraged because Aref was innocent and was targeted for political reasons. They united with a committed goal - to exonerate Aref and Hossain, get all charges against them dropped, and protect their families from further harm…….
http://atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/4016/32/
TBM Books
Son of Mountains:
My Life as a Kurd and a Terror Suspect
by Yassin Aref
“One day I was talking with one of the peshmerga commanders…who…quoted Napoleon Bonaparte, saying that ‘I am not afraid of 100 men with guns, but I am afraid of one man armed with a pen.’ Since then, I have always looked at my pen as my weapon. I consider myself a peshmerga, but I fight my battles with a pen.”
––from Chapter 4, A Student in the City
Sometimes they put innocent men in prison. Yassin Aref is one of those men.
Son of Mountains tells a story in prose and poetry that is much more than just Yassin’s side of his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment. It’s the story of a UN refugee who sought peace and freedom for himself and his family in America, and found just the opposite. It’s the story of a two-time immigrant who has struggled all his life just to survive. And it’s the autobiography of an Iraqi Kurd––a “son of mountains”––who grew up in poverty under the rule of Saddam Hussein, and who writes that “I have the whole of Kurdistan and all of my people with me in my tiny cell at the jail.”
Yassin was the imam (prayer leader) at the Masjid As-Salam in Albany, New York from 2000 until the FBI executed a “sting” in 2004, raided and ransacked the mosque, and arrested both Aref and Mohammed Hossain, a pizza store owner and mosque member, on charges of aiding terrorism and money laundering. The fictional sting operation was designed to entrap the two Muslims by means of a paid informant/convicted felon and an imaginary plot to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador in New York City. At the end of the controversial 2006 trial in Albany, in which illegal and still-secret NSA wiretapping cast a penumbra of doubt on the evidence, the verdicts, and the constitutionality of the entire trial, both men were sentenced to fifteen years each in federal prison. Their sentences were reduced from the recommended thirty years by the trial judge because of the outpouring of community support for both men.
Yassin wrote Son of Mountains in five months at the Rensselaer County Jail in Troy, New York between his conviction in October 2006 and his sentencing one year ago, on March 8, 2007. Because English is his third language, two members of his legal team, Stephen Downs and Kathy Manley, and a professional editor, Jeanne Finley, worked with Yassin over the past year to edit and assemble the book.
In 1995, Yassin married and made the wrenching decision to leave his beloved Kurdistan for Syria. Although he worked full-time to support his growing family, he managed to graduate from Abu Noor University in Damascus with a degree in Islamic studies. But Kurds had no freedom or rights in Syria, and in 1999 the stateless family was given refugee status by the UN and sent to Albany, New York to begin a new life in America. An immigrant once more, Yassin worked at several low-paying, often temporary jobs until he was appointed imam of Masjid as-Salam (House of Peace), a small Albany mosque. The 2004 FBI raid on the mosque and Yassin’s arrest, which was nationally reported as a victory in the “war on terror,” and his trial and conviction in 2006, tore his family, the mosque, the community, and the city apart.
The story then moves to Syria, where Yassin and his family spent four years in exile; to America and Albany, where, after 9/11, “the walls could see and hear”; to the Rensselaer County Jail, where Yassin lived for eighteen months from 2004 to 2006 and wrote stories about his experiences and his fellow inmates; to “Beyond the Walls,” a short compilation on such topics as the teachings of Islam, human rights, Martin Luther King, social justice, the tragedy of Iraq, the dream of Kurdish independence, and the rule of law in America.
The book concludes with an outspoken essay by volunteer lawyer Stephen Downs that details how the government’s case against Yassin was not a sting but a frame-up, with lives, families, and Constitutional rights sacrificed to America’s post-9/11 climate of fear.
By the end of this extraordinary memoir, filled with the peaceful, practical morality of Islam as well as Yassin’s lively humor, the reader will understand why he is no terrorist, and how grave an injustice has been done.
http://tbmbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3&products_id=9
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