11/06/14 – Charlotte Silver – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, introducing Charlotte Silver.
She is an independent journalist based in Oakland, California.
She formerly spent a couple years reporting from Palestine, from the West Bank, and is now writing regularly for the Electronic Intifada.
She's got this piece for The Nation at thenation.com.
Will Rasmia Odeh go to prison because of a confession obtained through torture?
It's the spotlight today on antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Charlotte.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show.
What an important story here.
I guess, first of all, please just start with the story of Rasmia Odeh.
Oh, and I'll say here, no kids for this interview.
Everybody hit pause, get your kids out of the room before you hear this one.
Please go ahead.
Okay, so the story of Rasmia Odeh is long and complicated in some ways.
She was born in 1947 in Lifte, Palestine, and very soon after she was born, her family fled to Ramallah.
And Lifte was destroyed soon after by Zionist militia forces on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel.
And so Rasmia and her family grew up as refugees in the West Bank until 1967, when Israel again occupied the rest of historic Palestine, occupied the West Bank.
And at that point, she traveled abroad, she studied abroad in Lebanon, and she came back to the West Bank in 1969 and was arrested by the Israeli military at that point.
But what's happening right now to Rasmia Odeh is since 1995, she's lived in the United States, first in Detroit and then in Chicago, where she lives now, and she has worked very dedicatedly with the Arab American women community in Chicago, and she has worked with the Arab American Action Network that's based in Chicago.
And in October 2013, she was indicted on immigration fraud, nine years after she became a citizen.
Right.
Okay.
And now, so there's a lot of detail in between there to unpack, of course.
So, first of all, I guess if we could rewind a little bit to her original arrest back then in 1979, because, of course, the charges against her are a big part of why she's being charged again now in the United States of America.
So what were the charges against her originally back in Palestine?
So the charges that were brought against her in 1969 were the Israeli military charged her with taking part in a series of bombings that were detonated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, which was one of several Palestinian nationalist organizations organizing at the time.
And one of these bombs that went off ended up killing two people.
So Rasmia Odeh, along with hundreds of other Palestinians in the West Bank, was one who was swept up in the wake of these bombings.
And she was immediately taken to the police headquarters in Jerusalem.
And where 25 days of brutal torture began and the torture that she endured has been documented by her on several occasions.
And most recently, it was documented by a psychologist with the Kovler Institute and a woman with 30 years of experience working with victims of torture.
So Rasmia Odeh was tortured for 25 days, at which point she finally broke down and agreed to sign the confession that Israel and Israeli military had been asking her to sign.
So she signed a confession.
And the threat that finally made her agree to sign the confession was after she had been electrocuted, watched men die in front of her, raped with foreign objects, raped by men, she still didn't sign it.
What finally made her sign it was the threat that they would force her father to rape her.
And she actually speaks about this in a documentary called Women in Struggle that was made in 2004.
And you can find it on the Internet if you wish to.
Well, and not just after all of that, but the threat was so credible as you write here in The Nation because they brought him in.
It wasn't like they just, you know, made that up somehow.
They brought him in front of her when they threatened her with that is how credible they made the threat at the time.
Absolutely unbelievable.
This would be denounced from the highest levels, from the highest tops of all the marble monuments in Washington, D.C., if any enemy state of America had ever done this to anyone, the way that the Israelis treated this woman.
It's absolutely insane.
It's barbarism from lost ages.
It is horrifying and it's horrifying to read.
And it does make the fact that the U.S. has picked this woman out to scrutinize her application and find four questions that she answered allegedly falsely to focus in on and prosecute.
And it's important to note that the U.S. Attorney's Office here in Detroit has spent four years building this case against Rasmia Odeh.
This is where their energies have been focused.
And they have very strategically argued in front of the judge to narrow down what the jury is allowed to see in court.
And this is really important because Rasmia Odeh is not being able to tell the jury what happened to her in 1969, the torture that she endured in 1969 that led to her confession, which then, of course, led to her conviction.
And they're not being able to know, hear much of anything about the realities of the military court system in Israel, which is a notoriously sort of kangaroo process.
They have a nearly 100 percent conviction rate.
Most of their convictions are based on a confession and the overwhelming majority of those confessions are extracted through torture.
So this is sort of the background to the conviction that Rasmia Odeh got in 1969 that the jury is unfortunately not hearing any of.
And so in court this week, they've been getting a lot of documentation.
They've heard repeatedly she's convicted of two bombings that killed two civilians.
And we're hearing from immigration officials that are saying, without a doubt, this woman would not have been allowed into the U.S. had they known this.
And they're not getting any of the sort of essential context around this woman who was a political prisoner in 1969.
And the fact that she was a political prisoner is really confirmed by the fact that she was released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange.
Well, I'm sorry, she must have some great lawyers for a case of this high profile.
Is it really?
That's just the system now.
There are enough precedents set that they can rig a trial as rigged as you describe it.
And that's just how it is.
They get to hear all the evidence that makes her seem guilty.
And it's the judge that excludes all the Brady material.
It is very unfortunate that the judge has made the decision to keep the keep the evidence in her defense excluded from the trial.
But I have to say that the her attorneys in court this week have done a really fantastic job of pushing the boundaries and including as sort of touching on what is unknown.
So they don't really get to talk about it.
But they can sort of they are planting sort of an impression of that.
This is more complicated than what's being presented in court.
And today, Rasmus O'Day took the stand.
The prosecution rested their case and Rasmus O'Day took the stand and gave a very powerful began her very powerful testimony in her defense.
But she's not allowed to address these questions at all, right?
Her testimony must be very narrowly circumscribed.
She's not.
Before she took the stand, the judge spent several minutes going over with her that she could not allude to any of the torture that she experienced.
And she pushed back a little bit to him and she said, but this is my experience.
This is this is this is everything.
This is my life.
And but he said, I understand that.
But you cannot say that and say it and I will hold you in contempt if you do.
And so she didn't.
She did talk about being arrested in 1969.
She talked about the death of her sister at that time.
She and she she did begin to cry.
And it was very it was very moving.
It was very it was a completely unrehearsed testimony.
Michael Deutsch, her lead attorney, asked her questions.
And and so that that will continue tomorrow.
And they expect that closing arguments.
She will finish her testimony tomorrow.
The prosecution will cross-examine her and then both will provide closing arguments and the trial will and then the jury will deliberate.
Well, it's such an incredible case.
You know, I can't help but wonder about what if she was Cuban?
And so, yeah, she'd been convicted by one of Castro's courts after his men had tortured her.
Are there court precedents?
There must be court cases where it's just like that.
Only it's Iran or Cuba or some country that's out of favor with the U.S. government where they couldn't possibly use the same standards.
Right.
Right.
Well, the difference is is that those cases are never brought to court.
So those precedents don't that the U.S. government isn't prosecuting those cases.
And I think that but your point is very valid, which is the fact that they found this flaw, this mistake in her application from nine years ago, is the result of a very political investigation.
In 2010, the FBI in Chicago and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago began this very broad investigation to Palestinian-American, Palestine Solidarity activists there, sort of on suspicion that they were involved in some sort of, quote, material support of terrorism.
And it was through this very selected, targeted investigation into people who were organizing with their community, doing First Amendment, protected First Amendment activities.
Through this investigation that they found Rasmia Odeh, they requested documents, hundreds of documents from Israel, to sift through and find information about Rasmia Odeh.
And then they were able to finally link up her application and this record from Israel.
Before that, before that investigation that was very specifically targeting Palestinian-Americans in Chicago, they knew nothing about Rasmia Odeh.
And so, you know, it definitely is the result of a politically charged investigation.
Yeah, and a phishing expedition, at least in English, if not to the exact letter and period of the law.
Definitely.
You know, they may be able to get away with arguing it's not in court, but it obviously is in real life, whatever they call it.
Definitely.
Unreal.
And now, yeah, the torture confession being allowed and the fact that it came from torture being excluded.
There's one other case I know of that which was Abu Ali, who was tortured by the Saudis into admitting a plot against George W.
Bush, which was completely ridiculous.
And they did him the same way.
It's amazing to me that there's no way for a lawyer to defeat that in a federal court in the United States of America.
I mean, I know it's the homeland now and everything, but boy, is that out of control that the jury can be made to sit there.
And like you're referring to there, it sounds like the closest thing they have is kind of inferring to the jury that, hey, the judge and the prosecutor are conspiring to keep you in the dark about what's really going on here.
And you ought to resent it enough to acquit this lady.
That's really the only defense that they have.
Well, their new strategy in their defense has come out this week, and they are putting forth what I think is a strong defense, which is that the questions that she answered were somewhat ambiguous.
And they've shown how the questions are asked somewhat inconsistently on the applications.
It asks, were you ever convicted, charged, sentenced, imprisoned?
But that doesn't specify in the United States, in and outside of the United States.
And so they're arguing that she was under the impression that they were just asking, have you been arrested, convicted, charged, imprisoned in the United States?
And they've collected evidence that supports this as a reasonable inference from Rasmia.
That sure does sound like one.
I wonder how often they run into that, too.
Yeah, they haven't presented that kind of evidence in court.
Well, it's a really frustrating thing.
It's amazing that such a blatant and obvious miscarriage of justice could happen like this.
And especially, as you point out, to someone who's incredibly prominent in her community, an active participant in her community, that kind of thing.
There are a lot of people with a lot less influence that we probably never even hear of and don't make the news at all, who just get shut right away.
They don't ever make it to trial, that kind of thing.
So very important to shine this spotlight here.
It is important.
And the court gallery and even a spillover room has been full of supporters of Rasmia that have come from Chicago and also Detroit.
And they've stayed throughout the trial to sort of be a presence in the courtroom.
Well, that's good.
So and then you said, I guess they'll be wrapping up next week, right?
Yeah, the trial, all the arguments will be finished by Friday as they project.
And then the jury will begin deliberation on Monday.
OK, well, thank you very much for your time on the show and for this great journalism, Charlotte.
I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Charlotte Silver.
She writes at The Nation, reported from the West Bank there for a couple of years and now is reporting from Detroit for the Electronic Intifada.
Find this one at The Nation.
Will Rasmia Odeh go to prison because of a confession obtained through torture?
And against the spotlight today, you can find it at Antiwar.com.
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