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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Okay, so our first guest today is Lynn Jackson.
She's from Project Salam.
That's Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims.
Welcome to the show, Lynn.
How are you doing?
I'm doing very well.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
And I appreciate this.
It looks like a really great project you've got going on here.
Tell us what sort of support and legal advocacy do you do for Muslims?
What is this project?
Project Salam actually works on the issue of preemptive prosecution of Muslims or the prosecution of Muslims before they have ever committed a crime.
We started in 2008 from Albany, New York, because we had a case like this in Albany where two Muslim men were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted, and we believe that they had no idea that there was a crime going on, and we began to look into these kinds of issues.
Okay, so you're not talking just – and we've covered a lot on the show.
The audience is very familiar with the theme of the entrapment cases, right, like Lodi, California, for example, or the Miami 7, where a well-paid informant tricks some dunderhead into saying something stupid that they can play back in court about declaring loyalty to Osama bin Laden or something like that, or maybe even they trick him into trying to set off a dummy bomb.
That's happened in a couple of cases, but you're going broader than that, correct?
Oh, yes.
There are many more issues.
I think the entrapment, these, quote, sting operations are easier to understand, but we began to look at a broader range of cases.
For example, we call them charity cases.
So, for example, the case of Dr. DeFeer in Syracuse, New York, or the case of the Holy Land Five.
In these kinds of cases, for example, in the Dr. DeFeer case, Dr. DeFeer was an oncologist in Syracuse, New York, and he raised a great deal of money to give to children and for hospitals and schools in Iraq during the sanctions.
And because there was no terrorist organization in Iraq, so the government couldn't get him on supporting terrorism, they went after him for making bookkeeping errors in his Medicare form.
And for that, he's doing 22 years in prison.
There's also the Holy Land Foundation case, where the Holy Land Foundation was the largest Islamic charity in the United States.
They raised a great deal of money for schools and hospitals in Palestine.
They had two trials, the second, and even though the government acknowledged that not one penny of the money they raised ever went to any kind of violence or terrorism in the Middle East, it was still considered material support for terrorism because the money went through the Zagat Committees in Palestine, which were controlled by Hamas.
And so it was considered material support for terrorism because they built these schools and hospitals that raised the prestige of Hamas, therefore material support for terrorism.
We also look at other cases, such as training camp cases where young men go overseas for some reason, and either they're arrested overseas or here, and the government makes a case that they were actually going to a training camp with terrorists.
Whether or not that actually happened, one of the specifics of that case would be the Ziad Yagi case, where three years before he was arrested, he went back to Jordan where he had family looking for a wife.
He did not find a wife.
He came back to the U.S.
Three years later, he was arrested because the government said he went to a training camp, that he wasn't looking for a wife, and he was given 31 1⁄2 years.
And we began to look at all these cases and say, well, what is the overriding theme?
Like, why is the government doing this, and what connects them?
Because we could see the sentences in these cases were enormous.
There was no violence.
Nobody was hurt.
Nothing was stolen.
Nothing was broken.
Nothing happened.
And yet these men got these huge sentences, and we began to realize it's this whole idea that the government is trying to prevent something from happening, when, in fact, you know, you can't, you know, in our Constitution, it's very clear that you can't just go arrest somebody for what you think they might do.
You know, that's simply a complete violation of our Constitution.
But that is indeed what is going on, and the target group are, of course, Muslims, because we believe it has to do with the wars overseas, that, you know, we have to create this element of fear so that people will fear the other, and we have to be at war with Muslims overseas.
We have to be at war with Muslims here in the U.S.
Yeah.
Well, okay, let's start, you know, there with the follow-ups, because I think that's really a huge part of this, is it's not just, you know, all these anti-terrorism cops desperate for something to do to justify, you know, not having to go get a real job and that kind of thing, but the foreign policy is based on the idea that something bad is going to happen to you, in your jammies, in the middle of the night, if you don't let us do this.
And so they sort of need this endless parade, especially back when they're, you know, on their way working up to getting us into the Iraq War.
But even since then, too, they have to have this parade of terrorist suspects and terrorist convicts on television all the time, Orange Alert after Orange Alert, just to kind of keep everybody off balance or keep everybody reminded of what the threat is.
And it's like theater.
In fact, you describe on your website how, you know, somebody could be in there on, you know, the furthest stretch of some sort of terrorism charge, but they'll have the prosecution will arrange with the court to have an insane amount of security, as though Al-Qaeda is going to come and spring this guy, like the courtroom will be his chance to escape or for them to come and get him out.
And so we need all these guards or maybe to protect the judge from the terrible terrorist.
And so what's a juror supposed to think when they're under such heavy guard or whatever?
Boy, the government sure is convinced of how dangerous this guy is.
I'm glad they have all these guards here to protect me from him and this kind of thing.
He's guilty before they even hear the first witness.
The whole thing is basically just a big propaganda exercise, public relations for the individual jurors and for the society at large, it seems like to me.
Well, I think you actually bring up a really important point, because if I had not seen it for myself, I would not have believed that the government engages in this security theater.
For example, the Newburgh 4 case, which is quite a famous case of entrapment of four men from a poverty-stricken city of Newburgh, was very illustrative to me.
The day that jury selection was to begin at the Westchester Federal Courthouse, my friend and I went down to Newburgh, and we were very worried because we knew the government would have snipers on the roof and they'd have guards everywhere and police and the whole thing.
So we come down to the courthouse.
We parked far away, and yes, indeed, they had all the unbelievable amounts of security.
However, some new evidence was shown up from the prosecution that was mildly exculpatory for the defense, and so the whole jury selection was postponed, and a couple days later the judge called for another hearing on this new evidence.
So a bunch of us from Albany wanted to drive down.
We drove down to the courthouse again, and I said to my friend who was driving, oh, you better park way far away because they're going to have all the security.
You can't get close to the courthouse.
And she said to me, she was a lawyer, she says, oh, no, we'll be able to park right in front of the courthouse.
I said, how could that be?
Last time they had snipers on the roof, they had the security.
And she says, oh, no, there's not going to be a jury present at the courthouse today.
There will be no security.
And indeed, when we got to the courthouse, we parked right in front of the courthouse, not a sniper, no security at all whatsoever because there was no jury there.
We still had the four defendants in the courtroom, but the jury wasn't there.
And to me, this was so telling of what the government is doing.
I mean, what is the difference?
We still have the four defendants in the room, in the courtroom.
Oh, well, no, apparently they care that much more about the lives of jurors than they do about the lives of judges, right?
That's the only explanation.
I think that's unlikely.
But it is this kind of thing.
Trevor Aronson just wrote a book called The Terror Factory.
And in this book, he describes that these days the FBI is given something like $3 billion a year from Congress, a little more than half of their budget to do counterterrorism.
And so what's the FBI going to do, go back to Congress and say, oh, we can't find any?
So I believe that they're inventing them.
And that's what all this security theater is all about.
What I find really striking is sometimes you listen to the press conferences of when these men are arrested, such as what happened in Albany, New York, and the FBI representative will say, don't worry, the public was never in any danger.
What does this mean, the public was never in any danger?
Because the FBI was controlling everything, controlling absolutely the entire, if it was a sting operation, their complete control.
So of course the public was never in any danger.
Yeah, they don't even know they're supposed to be embarrassed about admitting what a frame-up it all is.
Yeah, that's true.
They just come right out and they go, yeah, we completely entrapped this guy and it worked.
We're going to put him in prison.
And then the reporters congratulate them on a job well done, and everybody just moves on, I guess.
Yeah, I think the most telling in all this, we have a video of the post-sentencing press conference the FBI held after the two men in Albany were sentenced to 15 years each in prison.
And a reporter asked the prosecutor, said to the prosecutor, do you believe that Yassine Arif was a terrorist?
And the prosecutor said, no, we have no evidence of that, but we believe he had the ideology.
So what does that mean?
The government had no evidence that Yassine Arif was a terrorist, and yet they prosecuted him because they thought he might do something?
And what has happened to our government?
It's terrible.
Hang on one second here, because I want to try and see if I can play devil's advocate a little bit, because so much of this is such obvious nonsense.
I hate to let them get away with it all, but then maybe we found a kind of gray area, an iffy zone here.
When you brought up people going overseas and getting terrorism training, that's not quite the same thing as just outright politically prosecuting someone they don't like on a Medicare charge or something like that.
It actually goes to I don't know where.
You'd have to, I guess, give me examples.
Afghanistan or somewhere else to get some training and go through the same camps where, I don't know, some Egyptians were one time or something, I don't know, and then come back to the United States.
I don't know if it's really the job for the criminal division.
Maybe it would be more the counterintelligence or counterterrorism side or whatever.
If they think that they have, I don't know, an objective, reasonable belief or something like that, that, hey, this person has these foreign connections, I think we can consider him an agent of a foreign power, and I think that we can anticipate that he's actually here on a mission going to do something.
Say somebody like Faisal Shahzad, something like that.
We have intelligence.
Say, pretend that they had, maybe they did, but pretend they had some intelligence that says Faisal Shahzad went to Pakistan and he's been palling around with the Taliban there, and now he's come back, and they want to do something about him before he tries to blow up Times Square, something like that.
What does the law say?
What do you do about a guy like that to stop him from blowing something up, but without just, you know, making up stuff and prosecuting people for things that, you know, they've only done in the imaginations of their prosecutors?
Well, there are a couple of issues with the training camp cases.
I mean, in the U.S. we have a long history of people being involved overseas in other, you know, freedom fights in other governments, like, you know, with Spain and all those kinds of things.
So it's not, you know, that U.S. citizens of the U.S. have often felt strongly about certain issues in other parts of the world and actually gone and fought, you know, in those conflicts.
Here, you know, when you talk about Faisal Shahzad, he was the Times Square bomber, the guy who actually did something.
And what, just as a side aside, what bothers me is that because the government has created so many of these terror cases with the sting operations and everything, that people really believe that there are people doing this stuff.
And I think somebody like Faisal Shahzad could be, you know, like a copycat kind of thing.
He really believed that, yeah, there were all these, quote, terrorists in the U.S., and he should go do something, too.
I mean, that's just a speculation on my part.
I have no evidence.
But I think that's one reason the government should not be involved in this, is because people may really believe that these plots really exist.
You know, the other issue with the training camps, one of the early cases, the Lackawanna Six, actually did go to some, quote, training camp out there.
I believe it was Afghanistan.
I'm not quite 100% sure.
But they didn't like it, and then they came back.
And it was sort of like they just went back to their lives, and they didn't do anything.
They didn't do anything.
You know, and then you have to ask, you know, how do you know that they're training camps?
You know, one of these cases involved a man and his son, and they finally, you know, the FBI kept interviewing the father, saying, well, what about these training camps?
And he finally, just to answer their questions, came up with all kinds of fantastical, unbelievable kinds of things.
But the FBI still accepted it and prosecuted him.
In the case of Ziad Yaghi, he didn't go to a training camp.
I mean, the FBI said things like, because Ziad went overseas to visit family and look for a wife, and they said, well, you know, the wedding was a code word for, you know, blowing stuff up, and the beach was where the event was going to happen.
Of course, they had a picture of Ziad on the beach, you know, tried crazy stuff.
And I think the biggest problem is, you know, what we're doing is targeting this particular minority in this country and saying these are the people who are really going to do bad things.
We have to stop them.
Yet when you look at, you know, who in this country is out there, you know, actually killing people or doing horrific things, like, you know, we read about Newtown and the absolute tragedy of Newtown where 20 little children were killed by this guy.
Well, the government hasn't done anything to prevent him.
You know, they didn't do anything to prevent him from doing stuff.
We don't even know what religion this guy was.
You know, what is the, I mean, does the FBI send informants into Episcopal churches or, you know, Baptist churches or Catholic churches?
No.
They've decided to target the Muslims when I believe that people are people and Muslims have no particular inclination to terrorism or crime than any other particular group of people.
Well, the thing is, too, is that we're tolerating this.
I mean, it's just so obvious that innocent people are being, you know, I don't know, rounded up, but they're at least being, you know, targeted, isolated, targeted.
And, you know, the government's going on fishing expeditions and they're putting people who are, you know, guilty of falling for it at worst in a lot of cases and people who didn't even really mean to do anything wrong at all.
Like you're saying, gave to a charity that gave to a charity that made Hamas look good one day or whatever kind of nonsense, these sorts of things, and they're going to jail for decades over this stuff.
And it hasn't become controversy enough, I guess is the point.
I mean, we do have Trevor Aronson, thank God, and a couple other people shining a spotlight on this.
But, you know, for the most part, as far as I know anyway, the major news channels don't care about it.
They don't cover it.
It's just, you know, and as Trevor Aronson pointed out, there's only been one handful.
Maybe, you know, you could count if you wanted to be really generous to the government's position on this, you could count on two hands the number of actual terrorists in this country since September 11th that they prosecuted.
It's more like five or six of them.
And that's, you know, the shoe bomber and the underpants bomber and Zacharias Moussaoui, who if they'd only done their damn job in the first place on him, they could have stopped the attack on 9-11.
And then Zazie from Colorado, that was one.
And I'm almost out, right?
There's one or two more, I think.
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with you that there have been a handful of Muslims who have done really bad, you know, done terrorist, what you might call terrorist kind of acts.
But the vast majority of the men who have been prosecuted are, you know, given very long-term sentences when there was nothing, you know, no one was ever hurt or no property was ever damaged in these plots.
We are trying very much to bring to light this tremendous violation of the Constitution and this injustice done to minorities.
Project SALAM in Albany, we work a lot.
We actually have a database of cases which we are in the process of analyzing.
And we work with other groups such as the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms to bring to light these injustices.
Also in Chicago, I recently visited Chicago, and we're working on SALAM Illinois.
And the project that we're working on in SALAM Illinois is the actual prisons themselves.
There are two special Muslim prisons in this country, can you believe it, they're called Communication Management Units.
And they both happen to be located very near Chicago, about four hours from Chicago.
One is in Terre Haute, Indiana, one is in Marion, Illinois.
And the majority of men in these two small prisons are Muslims, and the treatment is quite harsh.
They're called Communication Management Units, but it's kind of like double speak because people aren't allowed to have contact visits with their families.
They only can see them through glass and talk through a telephone.
Everything they write is looked at.
It's a very severely restricted prison, and they're very harsh to the people there.
So what SALAM Illinois is working on is to write to the prisoners because we really need to realize these men are human beings just like us in this horrible situation and to learn about their cases and to write to them and to bring to light this terrible injustice.
Because we do want to, you know, besides the horrible prosecution of these men, which I think is absolutely wrong, what's happened to them is they have many decades often sentenced to huge sentences in prison.
And some of them are still kept in isolation.
There's also the ADX Colorado, Florence, Colorado, which is a very high security prison with a lot of solitary confinement there.
Now the U.N. Rapporteur on Torture says that more than two weeks in solitary confinement is torture, and yet men are being kept in the ADX Colorado in solitary confinement for years.
I personally know a man who has been in solitary confinement for six years at this point.
How can we expect people to survive this kind of unbelievable torture?
And also that particular man, Dry Tintuca, is part of the 465 case, and I believe that he was convicted of a conspiracy he didn't know about and given life in prison for that.
So these are the kinds of things that we're bringing to light.
I have to say it's not a particularly, it's a difficult issue and it's not particularly popular.
However, I think it's really important because we need to look at, you know, how is our government targeting these, you know, minority populations?
And we need to stand up for their rights also.
Yeah, well, and these, the CMUs, Communication Management Units, could you give us like a comparison and a contrast between, say, you know, Ramzi Youssef and Ted Kaczynski at the Supermax?
They're in a, that's a different kind of prison, but could you, I think, right?
Well, yes, they are in the ADX Florence, Colorado, which is, you know, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement.
The ADX Colorado is the epitome of brutality of the U.S. prison system.
So wait, I mean, is there a difference then between the CMU and the Supermax?
Yes, there is.
The CMU is not quite as restrictive.
Now, the CMUs are very small populations of men.
They usually have less than 50 men in the CMU, so it's a small, small.
However, it isn't, they are allowed out of their cells during the day.
They can walk, they maybe can visit somebody else in their cell, so it's not like the ADX where they cannot leave their cell.
However, there is no yard, you can't, there's no grass.
When Yasin Araf was released from the Marion CMU into the general population of Marion, Illinois, which is a high security prison, he said he felt he was half free.
We don't know as much as we would like to know about the conditions of the CMU because the government is very secretive about this.
The government created these CMUs without any kind of public comment, and there is a current case with the Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a case on behalf of Yasin Araf and other plaintiffs against the CMU.
I think the biggest concern is that people have such a restricted ability to speak to their families.
The CMUs are often a thousand miles from where their family are since a lot of the cases happen on the coast and the CMU is in the middle of the country, you know, it's a thousand miles to visit your family.
Plus, they're only allowed one or two 15-minute phone calls per week to speak to their family member, and you have to make an appointment to make that phone call a week ahead of time.
Also, the entire idea that you cannot sit next to your wife, you cannot hold your baby when they are able to come and visit you, plus the fact that all of the communications are monitored, so everything is, all the letters that go out are read, and it may take quite a while, you know, because it takes a while for the, you know, by the time you send your letter, it may take weeks before it's reviewed and then sent on to the recipient.
So communication is very difficult.
Okay, now, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time, but I want to ask you real quick, can you tell us about this database that you guys maintain at the website ProjectSalam.org?
Yes, we have a database where we have put the people who are considered terrorists into the database, and then we are analyzing them to see if we believe that they are preemptively prosecuted or not.
So preemptive prosecution would be, you know, if they were targeted for their beliefs and if there was an informant involved, if there were material support charges, these kinds of things where it looks like they were prosecuted before they committed a crime.
And people can go to the website and look at this.
We hope in a couple months to have some really definitive reports to come out of our analysis and our research.
We have about over 800 cases in our database at this time.
Awesome.
Well, I'm so glad to know that you're doing this project.
I actually had a project at one point and a co-author.
We were going to write a book, a lot like Trevor Aronson's book, and at least before we gave up we'd been told by the different publishers that, eh, that's more of just kind of an academic thing and nobody's going to want that and whatever.
So the project fell apart, but it is something that is very important to me, and I'm always very pleased when I find anyone else who's noticed that, you know, this is all a bunch of B.S. what they keep selling us with these, you know, scary Muslim men on our televisions all the time and pointing out that, as you do such a good job of doing on your site and in this interview, pointing out that these are human beings and they're having their lives stolen away, locked in a dungeon, locked in cages like animals over nothing, just so that the American people can be lied to, and it ain't right, and if it's not stopped it'll keep going, and we can't have that.
So I just thank you so much for putting your effort, for choosing this issue to focus on and working so hard at it.
Well, thank you so much.
I think you put it very well.
It's, you know, this whole targeting of the Muslims and putting them away, but they're just humans just like you and me.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
I sure appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you so much.
All right, everybody.
That is Lynn Jackson from Project Salaam.
That's ProjectSalaam.org.
ProjectSalaam.org.
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