Note by Hunterbear: Easy has just posted [attached] on the summary pre-dawn arrest a few days ago at University of Idaho -- at Moscow, 'way up on the northwestern border of the state -- of an Islamic student [and family man] by a huge number of Federals. Not surprisingly, the arrest has been praised by Idaho Gov Dirk Kempthorne, a Bushie. Moscow -- which adjoins Pullman, Washington [Washington State University] is a relatively sophisticated area and it appears that the student is getting some assistance from appropriate persons in that setting.
Civil liberties in Idaho have been in sorry shape long before George Bush -- or even the very civil liberties-mangling Bill Clinton -- came along. The Idaho ACLU affiliate, based at Boise from which its director appears to travel little, seems to be interested in some drug arrest cases and the free choice issue with an occasional church/state thing. When it comes to tangling with so-called "lawmen" on "political" civil liberties issues, the Idaho ACLU officialdom certainly appears to dodge those controversies. We here in southeastern Idaho have made several direct and formal requests for assistance to Idaho ACLU without getting so much as an acknowledgement. [Prior to coming here, I was a member for years of the coordinating committee of the North Dakota ACLU. Once here, I immediately offered to lend my volunteer assistance to this Idaho counterpart -- and never heard from its director again! The ACLU in my native state of Arizona, founded in an atmosphere of screaming Red-baiting in 1959 and 1960, and the New Mexico ACLU affiliate, do genuinely solid jobs.] As I noted over a year ago, the breakup of the ACLU's Rocky Mountain Office a decade or so ago -- when its always exemplary director, Dorothy Davidson, retired -- and its diffusion of ACLU resources into the "small" states [e.g., the Dakotas, Idaho, Wyoming etc] has not generally worked out very well at all It would be far better from "our" standpoint -- the sparsely populated and very geographically large Mountain-and-immediate-environs states -- to have the old more centralized system. We could always get help then when we needed it. Hunter [Hunterbear] JEDDAH, 11 March 2003 - Over 100 FBI agents raided the graduate student housing unit of the University of Idaho early Friday morning and arrested Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a 34-year-old Saudi graduate student. Al-Hussayen, a computer science student at the university since 1999, is facing an 11-count federal indictment for alleged visa fraud and making false statements to the government. Al-Hussayen has pleaded not guilty. While Al-Hussayen faces no direct terror-related counts, federal prosecutors allege that he failed to disclose his role in the Islamic Assembly of North America, a Muslim charity based in Michigan whose offices were raided at the time of his arrest. Charging papers contend that Al-Hussayen maintained websites for the organization that featured "radical Islamic ideology" in order to bring about terrorist acts. Without elaborating, they further allege that Al-Hussayen kept six US bank accounts through which hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed to the Islamic Assembly of North America and to individuals from Cairo to Islamabad. "The raid happened in a SWAT-team kind of setup," said Cynthia Miller, an Idaho lawyer who represented Al-Hussayen in initial court appearances. "We're talking about a family man with three small children who gets up and prays at dawn every morning." Professor Elizabeth Brandt of the University of Idaho College of Law said in a letter sent to Arab News: "The FBI flew in 120 agents, fully armed in riot gear, on two C-17 military aircraft to Moscow, Idaho to arrest one Saudi graduate student for visa fraud. The raid went down at 4.30 a.m., terrorizing not only the student's wife and three elementary school-aged children but also the families of neighboring students who were awakened by the shouting and lights and were required to remain in their homes until after 8:30 a.m." Brandt said the indictment of Al-Hussayen itself "does not comport with the university's understanding of him." She and others recall Al-Hussayen as a vocal critic of the Sept. 11 attacks, a man who coordinated a blood drive for victims and walked in a town vigil dedicated to their memory. "I don't know what evidence they have," said Michael Whiteman, who directs the University of Idaho 's international programs. "An indictment," he said, "is an accusation." Al-Hussayen's arrest has jarred Moscow, a college town of about 25,000 that is a close neighbor of Washington State University across the state line in Pullman. And the manner and implications of the episode have proved very worrisome among the university's 830 foreign students, many of whom are Middle Eastern. Brandt said students told her that agents confiscated some of their hard drives and told them, erroneously, that they had no right to legal counsel. Officials have defended the timing and nature of their actions as necessary to coincide with related moves in Michigan and New York. "The INS and FBI are working together using Gestapo tactics to question the students, threatening their immigration status and hence their education if they don't answer questions which are really aimed at the criminal investigation. They have also threatened their partners and spouses with perjury charges if they don't talk," Brandt said. "Students are terrified," he added. "Many of them are thinking about leaving." A member of the town's Muslim community, who asked not to be named, said that in the wake of the arrest, "families were taking (their) kids, wrapping them in blankets and sticking them in cars" to avoid their detection should their own homes be raided. As the day unfolded, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne credited Al-Hussayen's arrest in part to post-Sept. 11 security measures, while agents "questioned all the Saudi students ... and a number of other Muslim students, some of whom had possible immigration irregularities," said Brandt. =========================================================== Hunter Gray [Hunterbear] www.hunterbear.org Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ and Ohkwari' In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings. Then it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and remembering way. 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