03/13/15 – Charlotte Silver – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Charlotte Silver.
She writes for Electronic Intifada and Al Jazeera and quite a few other publications here.
She's at Alternet, at Truthout, all over the place.
And the subject is the sentencing of Rasmia Odeh.
Welcome back to the show, Charlotte.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for bringing me back on.
Very happy to have you here.
Tell us again, please, who is Rasmia Odeh?
Rasmia Odeh is a 67-year-old woman from Palestine.
And she immigrated to America in 1995 and became a citizen around 10 years ago.
And in 2013, the U.S. government indicted her for immigration fraud, for relying on her immigration and naturalization forms after they had unearthed a 45-year-old criminal record from an Israeli military court.
And this indictment was the product of what many of her supporters and her defense called a phishing expedition into the Palestinian-American and solidarity movement in the Midwest, wherein in 2010, they raided several activists' homes, looking for evidence that would link them to terrorists.
And they found nothing.
But Rasmia Odeh was the one person.
She worked with the Arab American Action Network, which was targeted.
And she and they, by subpoenaing records from Israel, they found this very old record with an Israeli military court.
Right.
And now, so what was it exactly, her criminal record from Palestine?
Right.
So she was charged, she was accused and charged of helping to detonate a series of bombings in Jerusalem on behalf of the PFLP.
And she was arrested from her home and almost immediately subjected to brutal, what she has described in writing and elsewhere, very brutal torture and ultimately raped.
And she signed a confession as a result of this torture, which was presented in front of the military court and was convicted of terrorism, sentenced to life in prison, and was released 10 years later as a result of a prisoner exchange.
And the Israeli military court has a nearly 100% conviction rate and is known by most human rights organizations, by the UN, and even by the U.S. State Department as not providing the kind of standards of justice that any U.S. court should consider as valid.
And so the fact that this criminal background in Israel was used against her in U.S. criminal proceedings was problematic from the start.
Yeah, well, you'd think so.
But I guess their argument is that it doesn't, or do they even make the argument that it doesn't matter whether the conviction was legitimate or not, it doesn't matter whether her confession was tortured out of her or not, it only matters that she didn't say on the form that, yeah, I was convicted of something and that's a crime.
That's all we need to know.
Right.
And the government sort of spoke out of two sides of its mouth in this.
They did focus on the fact that the veracity of the conviction wasn't really at stake as much as the fact that she failed to disclose this.
And at the same time, they really hammered home on the severity of the crime.
And during the trial in November, they focused on the fact that two people were killed during these attacks.
They didn't use the word terrorism, they were barred from using the word terrorism, but the kind of terror it wreaked on this community was used to emphasize that the lie was a serious lie and that that is why she is now being prosecuted even, you know, 10 years after her naturalization, 45 years after the crime.
And the judge, the judge tried to also say that he didn't want to retry.
He didn't want to try to decide whether or not she was guilty or not of the bombings.
And that was one of his justifications for significantly curtailing what the defense was allowed to.
He doesn't want to retry it, meaning she can't defend herself from these accusations that the prosecution is is perfectly allowed to make against her over and over again throughout the whole thing.
Right.
And what was interesting, interesting during the sentencing trial, the sentencing phase of this was that whole pretense that it wasn't the crime that that was at stake.
It was the it was the lie on the immigration forms that the prosecution completely drew back its veil.
And the sentencing was they made the sentencing entirely about what she was convicted of in 1969.
But she was not allowed.
Correct me if I'm wrong here.
She was not allowed.
Her defense was not allowed to introduce into evidence the fact that she was brutalized in any way.
Is that correct?
Right.
She was not allowed to mention torture.
She was not allowed to mention the occupation.
She was not allowed to mention anything about sort of the wider political circumstances of the time.
So the jury just heard two bombs went off.
She was convicted.
She said she spent 10 years in prison and on her immigration forms.
There is no mention of this.
And so it was a very from the jury's perspective, it was a very clear cut case.
And from the jury's perspective, there are a bunch of idiots who let the government do with their mind whatever they want.
Well, geez, I guess if they want me to convict this lady, I mean, I don't know.
I've never been on a on a jury, especially not a federal one.
But it seems like it'd be pretty impossible for them to not know, even if they don't know exactly what's excluded, to not be able to tell that they're not getting the whole story here.
You know what I mean?
Right.
And, you know, I've also never served on a jury.
And and it's it's hard to know.
I think that the judge, it's very ceremonious being sort of inducted into a jury.
And and it's also kind of a deputy prosecutor for a week in that.
And also, you're you're entering a world that you don't know anything about.
And so you are sort of you put yourself into the hands of the judge's instructions and the judge's instructions were very clearly.
We are trying to decide if she lied on immigration forms.
You're not trying to decide if you feel sympathy for her.
You're not trying to decide if she actually committed the crimes she was convicted of.
And so that sort of narrowness of the confines of the trial, what the jury was supposed to decide, I think made it somewhat of an inevitable conclusion.
And now.
So how long did he sentence her for?
So yesterday he sentenced her to 18 months in prison.
He revoked her citizenship and she would spend those 18 months in prison before being deported to Jordan.
And you know, this sentence, as as difficult as it is to imagine someone who's 67 years old who has health problems, I mean, she spent a month in jail right out following right following her conviction in November.
If you recall, she was it was very shocking to her and all of her supporters that the United States argued to revoke her bond and her and the judge agreed.
So she spent she went immediately to jail following the conviction in November and she spent a month and it was a very, very hard on her physically, in addition to emotionally, of course.
And so 18 months in jail is not going to be easy, but it was a relief considering that the prosecution had argued that she should be she should spend five to seven years in prison.
And this is an extraordinary departure from what the sentencing guidelines, which were which are about 12 to 18 months for the offense she was convicted of.
And remember, everybody, this started just as a fishing expedition.
Let's see what we can get her on, which is the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work in the United States of America.
But anyway, thank you so much, Charlotte, for covering this case.
Very important.
That's Charlotte Silverberg.
She's Al Jazeera and electronic into FADA dot net.
They have a great new one on this story here.
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