Some
good news, for a change: The excruciating ordeal
of the Los Angeles Eight is finally over. On
October 30, federal prosecutors gave up on their
efforts to deport Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh,
the last of the seven Palestinians and one Kenyan
arrested in 1987 on patently silly anti-terrorism
charges whose cases remained before the courts.
The
tale of the LA Eight is an odiferous stew of
anti-Arab and immigrant-bashing racism, FBI machismo,
Justice Department malevolence and laws aimed
at criminalizing political thought. On January
26, 1987, squads of agents from the FBI and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
descended at dawn upon the Palestinians’ homes,
leading them away in shackles to the maximum-security
Terminal Island prison. (The eighth person was
picked up a week later.) The Eight—Bashar Amer,
Iyad Barakat, Hamide and his Kenyan wife Julie
Mungai, Amjad Obeid, Ayman Obeid, Naim Sharif
and Shehadeh—were accused of membership in the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
a Marxist-leaning group within the PLO. Prosecutors
told an immigration court that the Eight had
passed out copies of Democratic Palestine and al-Hadaf,
two PFLP publications that, though available
in the Library of Congress, were “subversive.”
Since none of the Eight were then US citizens,
the government invoked Section 241 of the 1952
McCarran-Walter Act, which made it a deportable
offense to distribute literature promoting “doctrines
of world communism.” Six of the eight, without
green cards, were also slapped with a variety
of visa violations. “We don’t care how we score
our touchdown, by pass or run,” said INS lawyer
William Odencrantz at the time. “We just want
to get them out of the country.”
Judge
Roy Daniels refused to hear Odencrantz’s case,
based as it was on “secret evidence,” including
testimony from an FBI agent under orders from
Attorney General Ed Meese to speak “to the judge
only.” Nor was Daniels impressed by the 45-page
dossier compiled by Frank Knight, a self-styled
“Lone Ranger” in the Bureau, and consisting of
such items as photographs of the Eight arranging
fundraisers for Palestinian causes and dancing
the dabka. Indeed, although Hamide and
Mungai had been under surveillance for three
years prior to their arrest, the FBI admitted
it had no evidence of illegal activity. On February
18, 1987, Daniels ordered the Eight released
from detention.
Yet
the Eight’s lack of citizenship—and lack of protection
from double jeopardy—allowed the government to
persist in its campaign, which was to last through
the Reagan, Bush, Clinton and younger Bush administrations.
When Congress repealed the McCarthy-era statute,
the INS sought deportation orders on the grounds
that the PFLP had called for assassination of
government officials. A district court judge
ruled these tactics unconstitutional. Then, in
1991, the government tried again to deport Hamide
and Shehadeh, under the terms of a 1990 law targeting
those who “engage in terrorist activity,” defined
here as the destruction of property. Prosecutors
never claimed that the Eight were involved in
acts of political violence. Rather, they argued
that money they raised for charitable endeavors—clinics
and child care centers in refugee camps—found
its way into PFLP coffers and that, even if the
PFLP itself provided social services, it was
still a terrorist organization. As one Justice
Department official put it, “The Nazis built
the autobahn.”
From
the beginning, the LA Eight attracted broad-based
support, from the Japanese-American Citizens’
League and a host of Latino organizations to
the Center for Constitutional Rights and the
American Civil Liberties Unions. In the 1990s,
the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee,
which was helping the National Lawyers’ Guild
defend the Eight from deportation, also counter-sued
to have the entire case dismissed on the grounds
that it was a politically motivated selective
prosecution. The government clearly had singled
out for dogged enforcement of immigration rules
peaceful people who happened to be vocal in their
advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and
their criticism of US Middle East policy. From
this point forward, as prominent immigration
lawyer Jeanne Butterfield wrote in these pages
in 1999, the case became a referendum on the
question: “Do immigrants have First Amendment
rights?”
In
1997, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed
that they do, and that the INS was engaging in
unwarranted selective prosecution. Unwilling
to admit defeat, the INS appealed all the way
to the Supreme Court. Shockingly, eight of the
nine justices voted with the government, sending
the remaining defendants back to immigration
court in 1999. Judge Bruce Einhorn, who had previously
heard the case there, remained unswayed by the
government’s baroque legalese and reliance on
“secret evidence” that successive courts have
hinted amounts to exactly nothing. He granted
the Eight’s motion for dismissal, but the government
again appealed.
The
appeal was pending when the September 11, 2001
attacks ushered in the PATRIOT Act, which lowered
the bar for proving alleged ties to terrorism
in order to deport immigrants. Federal prosecutors—now
working for the Department of Homeland Security—seized
upon the expansive new language to amend their
charges against Hamide and Shehadeh for the fifth
time. In January 2007, Judge Einhorn again ordered
the government to desist, labeling its case “an
embarrassment to the rule of law.” Finally, almost
21 years after launching their disgraceful political
witch hunt, the government relented.
All
is not well that ends well, of course. Years
of legal limbo did incalculable damage to the
lives of the LA Eight and their families. The
case “felt like a sword hanging over our head,”
Shehadeh recently told the listeners of Amy Goodman’s Democracy
Now! “It was like torture.” The government
lawyers who obdurately kept the threat of deportation
alive will pay no penalty for what they have
done to the LA Eight, and neither will FBI agent
Knight, who took an obsessive interest in seeing
the Palestinians punished for their activism.
Shehadeh, for his part, sticks to the high road,
telling Goodman: “You know, we wanted this day
to be vindicated and to prove that this case
has always been a political case, that we have
done nothing wrong, that all we did is to speak
our minds…and relay our thoughts to the public
in regards to the Palestinian struggle.”
Justice
for the Los Angeles Eight was very, very long
overdue. We extend our warm congratulations to
all who persevered in this vital civil liberties
fight.
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Many
thanks to all of our friends and supporters who
responded so promptly and generously to the appeal
printed in this space in the fall issue. As has
always been the case, our readers are our lifeline.
