[Marxism] NYT editorial on L.A. 8 case: " End to a Shabby Prosecution"

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear friends,
 
This an Editorial in today's NY Times.  
They recognize the end of the LA-8 case 
stating that the bush administration are not sincere 
but that they did it for opportunistic reasons, and 
that they keep targeting people for political reasons.
 
Best,
Michel Shehadeh 
 
*********************************
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/opinion/03sat2.html
 
The New York Times


November 3, 2007
Editorial
End to a Shabby Prosecution


The federal government agreed this week to terminate 20-year-old
deportation proceedings against two Palestinian men who were wrongly
targeted for their political beliefs and activities. Better late than
never, but we fear that there is little hope that the Bush
administration will learn any lesson from this shockingly mishandled
prosecution.

The two legal United States residents at the center of the storm â
Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh â were the remaining defendants in
a travesty dating back to the Ronald Reagan administration known as
the L.A. Eight case. They were arrested and marked for deportation
along with six others in 1987 for supporting the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine, which the government lists as a
terrorist group.

The key allegation was that they had distributed a magazine published
by the Popular Front and raised funds for lawful charitable
organizations somehow linked to the group. Yet, fairly early on, the
government conceded that it had no evidence that the two defendants
had ever been involved in any criminal or terrorist activity â and
that had they been citizens, there would have been no grounds for
their arrest.

Unfortunately, that did not stop the government from obsessively
pursuing the case under four presidents.

The defendants were originally charged under provisions of the
notorious 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which helped raise guilt by
association to a broadly practiced dark art. In 1989, a federal court
declared those provisions unconstitutional, and Congress subsequently
repealed them. Still, the government pressed on, eventually moving to
retroactively apply provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act that punish
people who provide âmaterial supportâ for terrorism.

In January, Bruce Einhorn, an immigration judge, issued a ruling
denouncing the long and winding prosecution as âan embarrassment to
the rule of law.â He also castigated the governmentâs âgross failureâ
to produce potentially exculpatory and other relevant information.

We would like to believe that the governmentâs decision to withdraw
its appeal means that Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security
secretary, and his colleagues were embarrassed by the case and
concerned about how it has fueled distrust and anger among Arabs and
Muslims. We suspect, however, that they were more concerned about
getting the judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct vacated as
moot.

Itâs easy to see this case as a tragic anachronism, a relic from 
the bad old days of the Red Scare and cold war. But the Bush
administration continues to risk injuring innocent people and
deflecting resources from real terrorist threats with cases built on
weak allegations of guilt by association.


====================================
Walter Lippmann
Havana, Cuba
"Un paraÃso bajo el bloqueo"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
====================================

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