UNITED STATES: Muslims’ Guilty Verdicts Bring Sedition Concerns

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 2 1995 (IPS) - The conviction of 10 Muslim radicals on charges of seditious conspiracy could spark a resurgence of the use of decades-old laws, lawyers here warn.

Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine followers were Sunday convicted on charges of plotting a “war of urban terrorism” in the United States.

They were convicted of involvement in crimes ranging from the 1990 assassination of right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane, the attempted assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and a 1993 plot to blow up the United Nations and key New York landmarks.

All 10 men were found guilty of “seditious conspiracy” or of violating the 1918 Sedition Act, designed to counter socialist or anarchist threats to the United States. That law, in turn, amended post-Civil War sedition laws that gave wide authority to crack down on challenges to the Union.

According to many legal experts here, the conviction of Abdel- Rahman and his nine followers is the first successful use of sedition laws since the era immediately following World War II.

“This is the first case in the modern era to succeed on seditious conspiracy grounds,” noted Ron Kuby, a former lawyer for the Egyptian cleric.

The convictions may thus spark a new interest in convicting groups on charges of sedition, now that it has proved so useful in snaring a group of Muslims, Kuby said.

“The touchstone’is that people have to be sufficiently unpopular that everything they do is touched with deviltry,” he argued, noting the stigma against Muslim fundamentalists here.

After the guilty verdict was handed down, Abdel-Rahman told his lawyer, Lynne Stewart, “I am not the first person to go to jail for my religious beliefs, and I won’t be the last,” the lawyer told IPS.

The only other major sedition trial to win convictions, a 1987 case against Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago, succeeded only when the nationalists admitted their guilt, arguing they were prisoners of war against U.S. imperialism, Kuby noted. Two other sedition cases in the late 1980s both failed to win any convictions.

But U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who praised the guilty verdicts, insisted last year that Abdel-Rahman would be tried on sedition charges when U.S. officials conceded they had no direct link between the cleric and the bomb plots.

To convict someone of seditious conspiracy, a prosecutor need only prove that two members of a group of people knowingly planned acts of violence against the United States.

The conspiracy charges grew to implicate Abdel-Rahman with several men who followed his preachings, as well as some only loosely connected with him.

Connected in the plot, according to the U.S. authorities, were the four men convicted last year of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, as well as El-Sayyed Nosair, a Palestinian acquitted in 1990 of killing Rabbi Kahane.

Nosair, who has been in prison on weapons charges, has now been convicted of killing Kahane as part of the conspiracy charges. He faces life in prison without chance of parole, as does Abdel- Rahman. The other eight men face 20 years in prison on bombing charges, while two other Muslims, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges, may serve shorter terms.

The convictions were all the more impressive given the credibility of the government’s star witness, Egyptian informer Emad Salem. Salem confessed in his own testimony to lying under oath in a previous trial, of suffering memory lapses, and of serving both U.S. and Egyptian intelligence officials.

Defence lawyers contended that Salem hatched the plot in which many of the defendants were caught buying and mixing explosives intended to blow up the United Nations. Several of the defendants claim that they had only been told the weapons would be used for fighting in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Kuby blasted “the cynicism on the part of law enforcement officials to create a false conspiracy, and then smash it.”

Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of Egypt’s Gamaat al- Islamiya, was convicted even though taped conversations between Salem and the cleric show that the informant suggested the bombing attacks, with Abdel-Rahman saying the plots would be “bad for Muslims.”

Stewart argued that Salem entrapped the Sheikh and his followers and was “a classic liar.”

One Muslim leader in New York, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the guilty verdicts proved that Muslims could be convicted of any crimes in the United States regardless of evidence.

Kuby agreed the verdicts were “a completely predictable miscarriage of justice. There was never any doubt that a group of Arab fundamentalist Muslims could not get a fair trial in New York in 1995.”

But Attorney White stressed that several suspects were captured as they mixed an explosive “witches’ brew” in a New York apartment.

Also, besides Salem, two other members of the group — Abdo Mohammed Haggag and Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali — confessed their guilt and informed on their colleagues.

Many Muslim leaders avoided comment on the Sunday decision, but warned against harassment of members of their communities.

“This is a specific case involving specific individuals, and shouldn’t be generalised to apply to Islam as a whole,” cautioned Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American- Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Security increased at New York airports following the verdicts.