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All right.
Introducing Jess Sundin.
She is one of the leaders of the Justice for Rasmia campaign about Rasmia Oda, the Palestinian.
Okay.
Welcome to the show, Jess.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
So this is a story I covered back, I guess, a couple of years ago about this lady, Rasmia Oda.
I'm probably mispronouncing it.
Sorry.
You're pretty close.
That's good.
And so she's Palestinian living in the United States.
And then what?
Take it away.
Go ahead.
Well, Rasmia has been in the U.S. for over 20 years now.
And after following an investigation into a number of anti-war activists, including myself, the government began investigating some of our associates.
And with that, they moved to bring immigration charges against Rasmia.
So Rasmia has been here 20 years.
She's been a citizen for 10 years.
And all of a sudden, the government comes back and claims that she falsely answered some of the questions in her immigration applications.
And based on that, indicted her, brought her to trial in Detroit, which was just a district where she entered the country, though she now lives in Chicago.
And that all began in fall of 2013.
At the trial, Rasmia's defense was really gutted by a decision by the judge not to allow her to speak about the torture that she experienced at the hands of the Israeli military and the impact that that had on her in terms of leaving her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
And based on that judge's decision, we appealed the case, and we won the appeal.
Rasmia was prepared for a new trial.
And just a month before the new trial, the prosecution unsealed a new superseding indictment.
And in that second indictment, they added several allegations relating to terrorism and really made the case—we, all along, believed that the case against Rasmia wasn't being prosecuted like an immigration case.
It was really being prosecuted like a political case.
And the new superseding indictment exposed that absolutely.
But it also created a much more difficult situation, given the understandable, I suppose, bias that you would expect in any jury confronted with allegations of terrorism.
And so where we stand today is that after some back and forth, Indian Rasmia signed a plea agreement, which has her losing her citizenship, but not spending any time in prison or jail in this country.
And so sometime after the plea is reviewed by the judge at a hearing at the end of April, she'll have to leave the United States for good.
And does she have anywhere else to go?
I don't think she's said anything about her final plans.
As a Palestinian, of course, she's very limited.
She was living in Jordan at least some of the time before she came here, so that's a possibility.
But I don't know that all her plans are settled yet.
It's a big uprooting, and she has to figure out where she can make a life for herself.
She's spent her entire life as an organizer and activist, and so I know she wants to find a home where she can continue her important work, which has mostly been working with refugee women like herself.
Yeah.
Well, that's an important part of it, right?
It usually is understated because, I mean, there's so many different facets to this story, but she's really been a huge part of the community for people coming in and helping them settle, that kind of thing, for refugees coming to the United States.
Yeah.
In Chicago, she actually founded the Arab Women's Committee, which works with something like 800 new immigrants from all over the Arab world, not only Palestinians, and has been able to provide them with a social network so they're not isolated, support in terms of social services and legal support, and things as simple as learning English.
The Arab Women's Committee has really been a life-changing experience for most of the women that have passed through it.
It's going to be a big loss to the Chicago community not to have her there.
Yeah.
All right.
Anyway, to try to unpack this story, if I understand it basically right, she was tortured into confessing to some bogus terrorism charges back in Palestine, back when.
Then she comes to the United States, and on her forms they ask, hey, have you ever been convicted of terrorism?
And she says, no.
And so that's what they're nailing her on now.
It's not that she's a terrorist because, I guess, as you're saying, they don't really want to litigate how it is that she came to confess to being a terrorist or anything like that.
They just want to say the fact of whatever happened in Israel, as far as the conviction, is a fact.
It doesn't matter any other thing about it.
And she just didn't stipulate to that fact, because there is no place on the form to say, yes, I was convicted, but I was innocent and tortured into confessing by America's greatest democratic ally in the whole wide world, which they don't have a space for that on the citizenship form.
You're close.
I mean, basically that's right.
In some of the hearings during the last trial, Ms. Mia talked about her understanding of the forms.
The question was asking about her criminal history in the United States, where she has none.
She has parking tickets maybe, but she hasn't had any criminal experiences here in the U.S. at all.
And as the torture expert that we wanted to have testify on her behalf would describe, PTSD very automatically makes a person's mind exclude traumatic experiences unless they're specifically recalled.
And so it was a very natural, automatic thing for her mind to do when she's checking off these forms.
When she was able to speak in the courtroom during the first trial or during the hearings, she talked about, it was her understanding the American government was well aware of the conviction in Israel.
In fact, her father, who I believe was a U.S. citizen, had discussed it with the embassy at the time.
She was released from prison, the Israeli prison, in a prisoner exchange that was highly public.
She testified at the U.N. about her experience with torture.
So for her, it wasn't something that she thought was hideable.
It really just was an automatic, you know, her mind protecting her from those traumatic memories in those forms.
So, you know, what she described is she believed that the U.S. knew about and did understand the circumstances of her conviction in Israel.
Well, it seems like, yeah, they were taking as a given she was actually, or I guess she wasn't seeking asylum in any way, though.
She was just coming in as an immigrant, not a refugee.
She came here to care for her sick father at the time, actually.
I see.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I don't care at all.
Either way, don't get me wrong.
But I could see why the court, you know, wasn't having that.
Or you're saying they wouldn't even let her argue that.
The judge refused to let her argue.
This was protecting her from trauma or whatever.
Because on one hand, if she's saying, hey, everybody already knew about it, then it's not like she's that bad in denial anyway, right?
Right.
Well, I mean, the explanation that the torture expert and the defense wanted to present was simply that when you read a question that says, have you ever been convicted of a crime, and it's following a bunch of questions about the United States, if your traumatic experience was in another place, your brain would automatically kind of like not open that door to those memories, and that that's what the trauma, the torture expert described would have happened for us in this case.
I'd buy that.
She, you know, when asked directly about what happened to her at the hands of the Israeli military and with the imprisonment, has never denied it.
That's not something she's tried to hide.
It's not something she likes to talk about.
Because it is so traumatic, but it's, it's never something that she's hidden or attempted to hide.
And then, so is there some kind of political agenda behind this?
Or this is just a case of a US attorney who some files landed in his or her lap, and they said, let's go ahead and do this one?
Or is there, she crossed somebody powerful and they're getting revenge?
Or what's going on here?
I mean, I think there's kind of two aspects to it.
You know, from my perspective, you know, my home was raided by the FBI in 2010.
And they tried to, you know, build some sort of case, arguing that I as an anti-war activist and international solidarity activists had given material support to terrorism.
That case has never come to fruition.
But they had conducted raids in a dozen homes at the same time, coordinated across states, something like 70 FBI agents.
We had undercover agents working in our anti-war group for two years.
They invested an incredible amount of resources and haven't been able to bring charges against any of the folks they directly investigated.
So I think one thing that happened is that looking at, you know, everyone around us in some attempt to justify that, it meant tremendous outpouring of resources.
But the second is certainly related to the US's relationship with Israel.
And it's been very clear to us in the courtroom that US attorney, Assistant US Attorney Tuckall is absolutely a staunch supporter of Israel.
And that he has an agenda that's anti-Palestinian.
And that I think certainly the DOJ in general has a long history of criminalizing at any chance they get, those who've been directly involved in the Palestinian liberation struggle.
And Rasmia, when she came to the US, though her activism principally has been supporting refugee women from around the Arab world, has always identified with and continued to be outspoken for the cause of liberation of her own people and the Palestinian people.
So I think there's sort of two things at work in my, you know, estimation, the criminalization of the Palestinian struggle, hand in hand or hand in glove with Israel, as well as some attempt to sort of justify this ever growing surveillance state that, you know, tried to catch up a few anti-war activists and hadn't managed to do so.
Yeah, I mean, this is just amazing.
A 67 year old woman, this torture and false conviction was 48 years ago, back when the occupation was new, 1969.
And then so, and she's being unceremoniously deported.
And this is her plea deal because otherwise she was facing how many years in prison?
She was facing 18 months in prison, followed by an undetermined amount of detention with immigration until the deportation was final.
So the original ask from the prosecutor was for five to seven years.
And it's entirely possible that if convicted in the retrial, that they could, in fact, get a higher sentence than they got out of the first trial.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, is there any other, you know, part of the news?
I guess we're just waiting to hear where she's going to go, huh?
Well, you know, I think, first of all, a lot of us are going to go to Detroit on April 25th to join her at the hearing.
We have seen this prosecution be incredibly vindictive.
So, you know, I think there is certainly concern there could be some kind of switch and bait.
And so we want to continue to accompany her through this process.
But I do think that it's actually very important to look at her case as an example, because it's very hard to stand up to the U.S. government.
It's scary and intimidating and your chances are very narrow.
But her strength and bravery in doing so has been, I think, an example that I hope others will follow.
It didn't end in victory, but it's gotten her out of prison time.
And that's important.
And I think that we need to have that kind of spirit of resisting this repression when we're faced with it, rather than just quietly accepting it.
And Rasmia, for one, is a perfect example of how we all need to respond if we're confronted with this kind of repression, or those in our community are.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Jess, for coming on the show.
I sure appreciate it.
Thank you, Scott.
Take care.
All right, y'all.
That is Jess Sundin.
And she is part of this group, Justice for Rasmia, at Justice for the number four, justiceforrasmia.org.
And you can go there to find out all the latest.
That's it for Scott Horton Show for this time.
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