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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, the Scott Horton Show, and our first guest today is Catherine Hughes.
See, she's an activist and a writer for Truthout.org, and she's written these two very important articles I'd like you to look at.
The first one here is from January 2012, Anatomy of a quote, yes, dare quotes, Terrorism Prosecution, Dr. Rafil Dafir and the Help the Needy Muslim Charity Case.
And then this one is Fairness and Justice, Post 9-11 Muslim Charity Prosecution.
This is at again at Truthout from September the 20th of this year, 2014, and this will be a follow-up.
I first talked with Catherine back in 2012 when this first article came out.
Very interesting story.
Welcome back to the show, Catherine.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
I'm very happy that you reminded me of this story.
I spent the morning rereading the first article and going over the second.
It's a very important story here.
An individual has been locked up, it seems unfairly, so it might be the most important thing in the world right now.
Tell us, first of all, broad strokes, the background.
Who is Dr. Rafil Dafir?
He's an Iraqi-born oncologist who worked here in upstate New York.
He's been in prison for about 12 years now, and the reason he's in prison is because he sent food and medicine to Iraq during the brutal sanctions against that country.
For 13 years, he fundraised, really knocked himself out, had a website, kept asking the government if it was okay to send humanitarian aid, was given the go-ahead, and then on the morning of the 26th of February 2003, he was arrested and charged with breaking the sanctions, and he has never been home since then.
Initially, the indictment was 14 counts of things related to the sanctions and sending money to Iraq, but when Dafir wouldn't accept a plea bargain, when his case came to trial 19 months later, he faced an indictment of 60 counts, including 25 Medicare counts.
The trial was 17 weeks long, and I don't remember how many weeks it was before we got to the Medicare part of the case, but when we got to that part of the case, it was so ludicrous.
I just thought the government had shot themselves in the foot.
They had bar charts where Dr. Dafir's bar was huge and the other doctors were small, but the witness didn't know if they were other oncologists using expensive chemotherapy.
It was an education for me.
I attended almost every day of the trial.
In fact, I just passed my 10th anniversary of my first day at the trial, and because of the size of the injustice that I witnessed, it won't let me go.
My blood still boils when I talk about this case, and that's 10 years later.
I wrote to you because we've had this fantastic new development in the case where the Muslim Legal Fund of America, which is a charity in Texas, has hired retired Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift.
When he was in the Navy, he was assigned the Hamdan case.
He was the driver of Bin Laden and the government.
He was being charged as a terrorist, and Charles Swift took that case to the Supreme Court and won.
That meant that Salim Hamdan was able to go home.
I think Swift brings a lot of things to this case.
Even during the trial, I noticed straight away that it wasn't just a fear.
The Muslim charity in the post-9-11 period was under siege.
In December 2001, the three biggest Muslim charities were shuttered.
That was Holy Land Foundation, Benevolent Center, National Foundation, and Global Relief.
The Holy Land Foundation case didn't come to trial until six years after that.
I hope that Swift will be able to bring justice to Dafir's case.
Dr. Dafir, who's now in his mid-60s and has spent the last 12 years in prison under horrible conditions, will get home to spend some time with his family.
My other hope for Charles Swift being on the case is that he'll help bring attention not only to Dafir's case, but to what's happened to other Muslim charities.
The two Holy Land Foundation main people, after a second trial, were sentenced to 65 years each.
The other thing about Charles Swift is that a lot of these people, like Dr. Dafir and the Holy Land Foundation, were put into a special communication management unit, which many people consider a Guantanamo North.
Not a lot of people know about this.
I'm so grateful that the Muslim Legal Fund of America have taken on this case and that they have such a brilliant lawyer.
If nothing else, I hope it will bring a spotlight to what's happening, because certainly for me in the last 10 years, it's been very difficult to get any coverage, basically because the government never tried him as a terrorist.
He was charged as a white-collar criminal, but he was sent to the CMU.
He's now in another prison, but he's not eligible for a camp because of the US designation.
He just had his November 4th deadline for a 2255 habeas corpus petition, and Dafir has been without a lawyer for the last year, and he had to submit that petition by himself.
You can imagine that that was no easy task, particularly because on June 18th this year, he was put in the special housing unit for absolutely no reason, which really impeded his ability to prepare his motion.
It took call-in days, letter-writing, two senators, Gillibrand and Senator Warren, contacting the prison, and finally after 73 days, they put him out, and we still don't know why he was there in the first place.
I'm sorry, Catherine, I've got to stop you here.
We've got to take this break.
Okay.
But if you'll hold the line, we'll be right back in just a few minutes.
Everybody, it's Catherine Hughes, writing for Truthout.org on the case of Dr. Rafil Dafir, railroaded by the state as a publicity stunt before the Iraq war.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Catherine Hughes.
She's written this thing at Truthout.org, Fairness and Justice Post-9-11 Muslim Charity Prosecution.
And it's about this doctor.
He's an oncologist, Dr. Rafil Dafir, and he was persecuted by the Department of Justice just right before the Iraq war in 2003.
A huge investigation, headlines all over the place about how this guy was money laundering for terrorists and Saddam Hussein and Iraq and terrorism and Iraq and terrorism.
Just trying to confuse your mom in the run-up to that war there.
Just another fake orange alert.
And at the end of the day, they didn't even bring terrorism charges against him.
They ended up just charging him with some white-collar stuff that apparently was all just trumped up and bogus.
And the judge apparently was perfectly happy to let the jury be inundated with innuendo about the reasons to believe that terrorism charges are pending as soon as you're done convicting him of this stuff, but without ever really saying so.
And John Ashcroft and Governor Pataki made big press conferences, made a giant orange alert terrorism case out of this.
And then what it turned out was, as she said, some bogus Medicare fraud case where there wasn't even any Medicare fraud.
As she said in their chart, they're comparing this very expensive chemotherapy he's doing to the costs of different kinds of doctors doing entirely different kinds of medical care for different people.
In other words, their evidence was just slapped together, scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to come up with a way to put this guy in prison, which of course the jury was perfectly happy to go along with.
And it's just another one of these.
And as you were saying, I think it's very important, as you mentioned there, Catherine, about how it's so important that we get coverage for this case.
It's so beneficial, it's so positive for this case that we have such a prominent lawyer coming on now to try to get attention to it.
And as you said, not just for Dr. Dafir, but to bring attention to all the other trumped up terrorism cases since September 11th.
I mean, you're focusing on the charities who've been wrongly prosecuted.
There's an entire reckoning with the last decade's Department of Justice and their bogus war on terrorism here in the United States.
They've gotten all of maybe three or four actual terrorists, including al-Mahri and Zacharias Moussaoui from the very beginning of this thing.
Maybe one small handful of actual terrorists in this country, Zazie from Denver, that kind of thing, Faisal Shahzad who attacked Times Square.
Otherwise, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trumped up, bogus terrorism prosecutions.
Almost 100 or so of them, more than 50 of them, certainly outright entrapment, sting operations.
But so many more cases just like this, where it's just a giant trumped up PR stunt operation showtime kind of a thing for the agencies doing the prosecuting and doing the arresting and PR for the war and all that kind of thing.
While innocent men are rotting in cages and the government is getting away with it.
So I'm sorry for having so much of my own say right there, but I just want to try to snap people's attention to.
This is really important.
There's a doctor who, what was he guilty of?
He was guilty of trying to provide food and medicine to the sanctioned, the blockaded, starving, dying people of Iraq under the Bush-Clinton-Bush sanctions regime before the invasion of 2003.
And as you said, Catherine, he had checked with the State Department all along and got permission, had been working with them.
Of course, what is he, an idiot?
He's working with the State Department, making sure that what he's doing is within the letter of the law.
Because he's not trying to get in trouble.
He's not trying to help Saddam Hussein.
He's a doctor.
He's trying to help women and children over there that Bill Clinton was killing.
And then they stabbed him in the back after giving him a license to do so.
Actually, he didn't have a license.
He used the license of another charity, and that is not illegal.
And after 9-11, I think a lot of Muslim charities were wanting to put their houses more in order.
So he had applied for a license that, if granted, would have been retroactive.
And it should have been dealt, you know, he should have got a response within six months.
But the government had put a block on that.
And actually, that was one of the really sad things at trial as well.
Because, I mean, if the government had left it another few weeks before it arrested him, all that part of the case would have been sorted out.
Because Dr. Dafeer had hired accountants and lawyers to get it sorted out.
I just want to go back to the bar chart, because we don't know what the other doctors were.
I mean, I can assume that they might have been primary care physicians or something.
But that was what was so blatant about it, was that the person who was supposed to be explaining the bar chart had no idea.
Which effectively made the bar chart meaningless.
And there were times, you know, there were other times like that in the trial where Mrs. Dafeer was Dr. Dafeer's office manager.
And Medicare rules are extremely complicated.
And the whole 25 counts was on one rule.
And it's called the Incident 2 Rule.
And that's treatment incident 2, the doctor's treatment.
And when Mrs. Dafeer left the house at 6.30 in the morning, and just shortly after, the FBI came to the house and knocked on the door and then battered it down.
Found Mrs. Dafeer in her nightgown on the other side and had five guns to her head.
And then 85 agents in and out the house all day.
So there she is on the stand describing this.
And her guilty plea is to one count of lying to a government agent because she had said, I think, that her husband was in the office on a day that he wasn't.
And so, you know, up on the board office, the defense had put a piece out of Medicare that if people were overpaid, a refund would be requested.
So you've got all this bizarre stuff going on.
And I mean, it made the whole trial surreal.
And that was true, even like I've been to all the appeals.
And it's because he was never charged with anything except white collar crime.
Michael Powell of the Washington Post called that shadow boxing.
And I think that's the best description I've heard because Dr. Dafeer can only go on the court record and the government successfully kicked that out.
But the great thing about this 2255 is that we can go outside the court record.
And, you know, in the last few years, we've got freedom of information that we've only managed to get six of about 38.
But it's clear what and even though they're like 95 percent redacted or I mean, we've only got like five percent of the pages and those are 90 percent redacted.
It's still very clear, you know, what the government was actually after.
And I mean, they're still looking and it's like, how much has that cost?
I mean, there were people on Dafeer's case, you know, 24 hours seven doing overtime.
Is this a good use of taxpayer money?
And after like 13 years or 15, you know, if you can't find something in 15 years, don't you think that maybe there isn't anything to find?
Yeah.
Well, when it comes to spending taxpayer money, it's no object from the point of view of government employees, no doubt about that.
In the last minute here, I want to ask you real quick to go over some of the things you talk about, about the innuendo, about the terrorism case that was never brought here.
Now, obviously, there is a bunch of nonsense all over TV and in the media being parroted, that kind of stuff.
But as far as at the trial, you talk about the judge allowing the government to allude to a gun cleaning kit as though this must be part of some terrorist plot and allude to, oh, this man shares a religion with Osama Bin Laden.
Oh, we're already out of time.
Well, we're already out of time.
Just tell people to check out the website and also to support the Muslim Legal Fund of America, who are, you know, doing a fantastic job, but not able to help everybody that should be helped.
And we're very lucky that they took the fear case.
That's Catherine Hughes, y'all, dotfeartrial.net.
Thanks, Catherine.
Thanks, Scott.
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