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

Hey all, Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
Next up is Charlotte Silver.
She's a journalist who for a few years there was reporting from Palestine.
She's now writing for electronicintifada.net.
And she had that recent piece in The Nation, we talked about it last week, about Rasmia Odeh.
And now Rasmia has in fact been convicted in, was it federal court, Charlotte?
Welcome back to the show, how are you?
Hi, Scott.
Hi, welcome back to the show.
She was convicted of what all, and it was in state court, right?
Not federal court.
It was in federal district court.
Oh, it was in federal district court, I'm sorry.
And she was convicted of what all now, I guess, lying on federal forms?
Yeah, the charge was unlawful procurement of naturalization.
I see.
And then, so, what are the likely or possible sentences for that?
Well, so, no one really expected Rasmia Odeh to be taken into custody immediately following the verdict.
She knew going, challenging the charges, at last, when she decided to challenge the charge and not accept a plea bargain, that she faced potential jail time, but no one expected for the government to ask for her bond to be revoked immediately.
So, yesterday, she was actually taken away in handcuffs to await the sentencing hearing, which will take place in March.
And so, she faces, at most, the crime carries a potential 10-year prison sentence, but it's expected that, I think, the maximum for something similar to her was 21 months, and the government did say that they would seek no less than 21 months.
And now, when the prosecution asked the judge, hey, let us hold her between now and the sentencing hearing, did they have to make any argument why, other than because they want to?
They did make an argument why, and it came as a surprise that they were going to ask for that to everyone.
So, the defense was really not adequately prepared to motion against it.
But the argument the government made was, it was disturbing, because this hearing happened after the verdict was called, and so there had been a short recess, and Oday had gone outside of the courthouse and spoken to media and her supporters, and she had said, you know, I think this was an unjust verdict, and this is fair, considering the fact that every avenue of defense that she had tried to pursue in this trial had been cut off to her, as we talked about last time.
You know, she wasn't allowed to bring in the evidence that she was tortured in order to confess to the bombings that she was convicted of in an Israeli military court.
The jury wasn't able to see any of the record of the Israeli military court.
So, all of those defenses were cut off to her.
So, she said outside the courtroom she thought the verdict was unfair, and the government actually used this an hour later, saying this is a woman that tried to escape from prison in 1975 when she thought a ruling was unfair, when she didn't respect the authority of the court.
Oh, for crying out loud.
I'm sorry.
And so, therefore, she poses a flight risk, because she said that she doesn't respect this ruling.
And the judge agreed with everything they said.
That's just absolutely crazy.
And again, now, I'm sorry, because I screwed this up at the beginning, Charlotte, in the introduction.
I should have said for the people who missed the show last week, who aren't familiar, could you please tell the story very briefly of who this lady is and how she ended up on trial in the first place?
Sure.
Rasmia Odeh, she's lived in the United States for the last 20 years.
She is from the now-destroyed Palestinian village of Lifta, which is right outside Jerusalem.
It was destroyed in 1948.
And she was convicted by a military court in 1969.
She was arrested, tortured for 25 days.
And her testimony to the torture she experienced is online, and you can read about it.
And it's very harrowing to read.
So she was convicted by an Israeli military court that convicts nearly 100% of the people who cycle through it.
And she spent 10 years in an Israeli prison and was ultimately released in a prisoner exchange, which gives you an idea of the nature of her incarceration.
It was a political incarceration.
And so she was released in 1979, and she tried to pursue her life in Lebanon and then in Jordan.
And part of her family was living in the United States.
And in the 90s, she came over to first Detroit and then Chicago.
And since 2004, she's been working in Chicago with the Arab American Action Network, doing extensive outreach into the Arab immigrant community here, of women particularly, and sort of helping them find a community among themselves, in addition to other work with their American Action Network.
And her indictment was the result of this massive investigation into Palestinian and Palestine Solidarity activists in Chicago and the Midwest in 2010.
The FBI and the Chicago U.S. Attorney's Office just cast this wide net investigation trying to dig up information on members of the Arab American Action Network.
And they ended up finding this Rasmia Odeh, and they requested thousands of documents from the Israeli military court.
And they found this criminal record that she had from 1969, and that when she was asked on her application for naturalization, have you ever been convicted, have you ever been arrested, have you ever been convicted, have you ever been imprisoned, she said no.
And so this discrepancy was used against her to say that she unlawfully procured immigration, naturalization.
It's an important point, it sounds there.
Not that it makes it better or anything, but it's just different.
They didn't have some political vendetta against this lady, that they were just going to nail her to the wall.
They were investigating some organization.
They couldn't come up with anything.
And so when they're scraping the bottom of the barrel, they got this tortured, fake confession immigration charge to throw at this lady who, as you say, is a leader in the community and helps new members of the Palestinian community when they move to Chicago and make them feel at home and this kind of thing.
It's just a disgrace.
And the trial was, you know, the prosecution alluded to her convictions, which are, you know, two bombings, two people were killed.
If someone doesn't know anything about the situation, that sounds very threatening.
And so the prosecution was able to have all of this information in the court, in the trial, presented to the jury, and none of the other information about Rasmia's torture.
And the judge said he repeated his justification for why he didn't allow this torture evidence in on Monday.
He said he thought it would be unfair to the government and to one-sided if any of the evidence of her torture had been allowed in.
Wow.
Because what, they wouldn't be allowed to cross-examine her?
What's unfair about it?
Well, they're also, they are, by not allowing the torture evidence in, he was keeping it one-sided because all of the evidence from the Israeli military court of her conviction was let in.
Of course.
Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to even understand what he means from his own point of view there.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
It really is.
Unfair to the state that you, well, I mean, hey, this happens in American courts all the time that confessions are thrown out because the local deputy sheriff tortured somebody.
So what, it's supposed to be, well, right, just unfair.
Not that it's unlikely that her story is true and she'll be unable to prove it or something like that, but it'll make her seem like her confession maybe wasn't legit to the jury and we can't have that basis, what he's saying.
How's the prosecution supposed to win in that circumstance is what he's asking.
Right.
Amazing.
Well, great journalism.
Thank you so much for caring about this and writing about this.
I sure appreciate it, Charlotte.
Yeah, thanks for having me again.
That's Charlotte Silver, y'all.
She's writing again at electronicintifada.net.
They're appealing.
Phone records, financial and location data, prism, tempora, X-key score, boundless informant.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now, here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to see some real rollback of the National Surveillance State.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
And the courts, they betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place.
In state after state, I've lost count.
More than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something.
Something important.
Something that can work if we do the work.
Get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to offnow.org.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scotthorton.org.
Thank you.