DECEMBER 1999, pages 35, 98-99

In Case You Thought It Can’t Happen Here

Mohammad Salah, an American Citizen, Is Facing Trial on Charges Neither He Nor His Lawyer Can See

By Richard H. Curtiss

I first encountered Mohammad Salah last April when he met me at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. He introduced himself as “Mohammad” and as we drove along a freeway to where I would be speaking that evening I asked him the usual get-acquainted questions about himself.

He was born in Jerusalem in 1953 and, after the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank in 1967, he became a refugee in Jordan. He had the equivalent of a B.A. in electronic engineering when he arrived as an immigrant in the U.S. in 1971. Five years later, he became a U.S. citizen.

He has a wife, Mariam, three sons and a daughter. He spoke enthusiastically about how an immigrant who has some technical skills and works hard can purchase a home and a car and start saving enough money to give his children good educations. It’s because no matter who you are you can get a job in America, he said, and you can keep what you earn since no one has the right to take it away from you.

It was only as he dropped me off at the office of the Islamic Association for Palestine, sponsor of the program at which I was to speak, that I thought to ask his last name. He hesitated for a moment before he said “Salah,” and then assured me that if I needed anything between then and the program, I could call him on his cellular telephone.

At dinner someone from the mosque which was hosting the program asked me who had met me at the airport. “Mohammad Salah,” I said, pointing him out at another table.

“What can we do about his problem?” my interlocutor asked.

“He seems like a man who has no problems,” I replied.

“You don’t know who he is?” the man asked incredulously. “Then I’d better tell you.”

As it turned out, I’d read an Israeli version of Mr. Salah’s story when he was arrested in 1993 in the occupied territories. I just didn’t recognize his name. But when I heard his side of the story, it was so hard to believe that I asked him to start from the very beginning as he drove me back to the airport that night. He agreed, but I couldn’t take notes in the dark as his car sped back along the freeway. And I kept thinking that what is happening to him in the United States is impossible under our Constitution.

There was no time to follow up when I got back to Washington. I had a magazine to edit, and a trip scheduled two weeks later to speak in Salt Lake City at the annual convention of the Unitarian Universalist Association and then on to Sunnyvale, California, for programs arranged by the American Muslim Alliance. It was at one of those programs, in which local Muslim activists introduced themselves to federal, state, county and city officials, that my conversation with Mohammad Salah came back with a rush.

One of the activists raised the subject of Mazen al-Najjar, a Florida teacher and father of three children born in the United States who has been in a Bradentown jail for more than three years awaiting a deportation hearing on charges neither he nor his lawyer has been allowed to see. An FBI official sitting on the dias next to me leaned over and asked skeptically if I knew anything about the case.

“I know it’s true,” I answered. “I’ve met Mazen al-Najjar’s wife and children.”

In the discussion that followed it was explained that the Florida case involved a Palestine-born resident alien and that a provision in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act passed by Congress in 1996 does permit the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to hold and actually deport non-citizens on the basis of secret evidence, even though they have no means of mounting an effective defense to charges they are not allowed to see or hear. In the discussion an official added reassuringly that, unlike resident aliens, American citizens cannot be charged and tried on the basis of secret evidence.

“But that’s not true,” I found myself saying. “I just met an American citizen named Mohammad Salah in Chicago who has been charged in an American court and, on the basis of secret evidence, has been denied permission to withdraw money from his bank account or to continue working. And he has had a lien and a seizure order put on his house by the FBI,” I concluded, looking at my neighbor on the dias.

But the government officials, even an Arab American from the federal attorney’s Los Angeles office, looked skeptical. After a long silence the FBI man, with the caution an official might use in dealing with a possibly confused older man 20 years his senior, asked politely: “Do you know the legal basis for this action against Mr. Salah?”

“Yes,” I said, recalling the conversation in the darkened car speeding back to O’Hare airport. “The action was taken on the basis of an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton.”

The discussion ended there. The federal, state, county and city officials obviously didn’t believe me. The frightened Muslim-American audience members obviously did.

Needless to say, as soon as I got back to Washington I telephoned Mr. Salah. He confirmed my memory of the conversation.

“I’ll be back in Chicago to speak at the Islamic Society of North America convention in July,” I told him. “And this time when I talk to you I want to take notes. Obviously even most federal officials don’t believe that what the federal government is doing to you is possible.”

The interview was easy to arrange. Forbidden to work, Mohammad Salah was serving as a volunteer at the booth of the American Muslims for Civil Rights and Legal Defense Committee in the convention, no more than 100 feet from the booth of my own publishing organization. We bought tall paper cups of coffee and took them to a table outside Chicago’s magnificent new convention center. There, as we sat in late afternoon summer sunshine, with strolling tourists in shorts, rollerblading teenagers in helmets, and Muslim convention attendees from every conceivable ethnic background flowing peacefully around us, Mohammad Salah told me his incredible story.

Mohammad Salah’s Story

In 1993 he had returned for a visit to the occupied territories. His primary purpose was to visit members of his immediate family in Ramallah. But he also had been entrusted with $200,000 by members of his Chicago Muslim community to distribute at his discretion to needy families of Palestinians deported or jailed by Israeli occupation authorities.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this. All Muslims who can afford it are enjoined to tithe on behalf of worthy causes, with the percentage of their income to be donated varying with their financial means. Even as we spoke, jars at the booths of charitable organizations represented at the convention inside, including my own, were rapidly filling up with $1, $5 and $10 bills from the families of thousands of physicians, engineers, accountants and entrepreneurs attending. Sometimes someone who had been entrusted with large sums from friends and relatives who could not attend in person would rush from booth to booth, donating to each from a wad of $20 bills until all were gone.

Mohammad Salah didn’t carry the money with him. It was transferred by a bank draft. He distributed more than $60,000 in Ramallah, mostly through Palestinian physicians who told him of needy people. Then he traveled through Israel to Gaza, where he left another $30,000 with doctors at a hospital he visited there. He had planned to return to Ramallah the next morning, but that night Israeli security agents stormed the Gaza room in which he was staying, and also the room in the YMCA Hotel in Jerusalem to which he was scheduled to return.

They seized the $100,000 he had not yet distributed, his clothes, passport, everything. Then they handcuffed him and threw him on the floor of a jeep for the three- or four-hour drive to Ramallah. En route, as he lay bound at their feet, they accused him of being a drug dealer.

In Ramallah they took him to the headquarters of Shabak, the Israeli internal security police. There, for the first time, he was accused of being a member of Hamas. He was told that Shabak had the names of the doctors he had contacted, and his interrogators tried to make him believe it was one of the doctors instead of an Israeli collaborator who had alerted the police to his presence.

He was stripped naked and told that if he did not provide the names of all of the “Hamas” contacts to whom he had been giving money, he would be sexually assaulted. After he was left naked and alone for a time to think about this, his interrogators returned. When he told them he would rather die than implicate innocent people just to avoid torture, the by now well-documented Israeli physical and psychological procedures began. They continued for nearly five years.

The first 48 hours of what Israeli law calls “moderate physical pressure” began when a vile-smelling hood was put over his head. Then, with his arms handcuffed behind him, he was forced into a child-sized chair, the shabah, with shorter legs in front than in back. To add to his discomfort, the handcuffs were passed through the rungs on the chair, leaving one arm pinioned behind his back and the other tied over the back of the chair. As he sat there for hour after hour, blindfolded, barely able to breathe, and unable to shift from his painful position, interrogators came and went, sometimes hitting him as they asked him questions, other times casually striking or kicking him whenever they passed his chair.

After the first two days spent in the tiny, sloping chair, the excruciatingly painful hours in the shabah began to alternate with periods in a cell which remained brightly lighted, his every move recorded on a video camera, and with loud music playing to keep him from sleeping. When he did fall asleep, he would be awakened and taken back to an interrogation cell for more time hooded in the shabah and subjected to endless interrogation, punctuated by blows when he didn’t answer.

His interrogators told him they had arrested everyone with whom he had come in contact in Ramallah and Gaza and let him know that they were preparing, in Hebrew, what they first called a “routine report” based upon his answers to his interrogators, plus the testimony of those whom he had contacted. Later they described the document, which had grown to 15 pages, as a “confession” which he would have to sign to end the torture.

He refused. Eventually, because he had no idea what they were writing down, he stopped saying anything at all, no matter how hard or how often they struck him.

It was winter and bitterly cold in the prison, but his jailers took away the blankets in his cell, sometimes allowing him to sleep, uncovered, on a thin mattress, and sometimes forcing him to lie on the cold floor. He was not able to wash for the first two months he was imprisoned.

On his 16th day in custody he was allowed to meet with a woman lawyer his brother had hired after reading about Salah’s arrest in the Israeli press. He asked her to tell the American Embassy he wanted to see an English-language translation of the “confession” the Israelis were preparing.

He was not allowed visits by members of his family for the first four months of his imprisonment. But he received weekly visits from his lawyer and occasional visits from U.S. officials. The first U.S. consular official “interrogated me more than he seemed to want to help,” Salah said. “When I said I would go on a hunger strike if my conditions did not improve, he said ‘don’t do it.’” But, otherwise, official Americans said only that “all we can do is protest” the life-threatening torture to which he was being continuously subjected.

They seemed so detached and unsympathetic that, gradually, Salah came to believe “the Embassy was sympathizing with the Israelis, so I became even more afraid. I felt I was being set up.”

Nor did conditions improve. He was not allowed to use a bathroom during the lengthy interrogations. He was kept tied up, and more and more the blows that accompanied the interrogations were directed at his face, leading him to believe that if he continued to remain silent, his interrogators eventually would kill him.

The cruelest of his interrogators was an American-born Israeli whose family still lives in the United States. Salah explained, “They play good cop, bad cop.” The good cop was Haim, a French Jew, who warned Salah that if he didn’t cooperate “they plan to keep you in here for life.”

Salah looked forward to the weekly visits by his lawyer, but after she left the guards would challenge him, saying “what can she do for you?” They laughed at his protests that he was an American citizen.

“Who cares?” they said. “We’re not afraid of the FBI. We’re not afraid of the CIA. And if they ever get you out of here, we’ll kill you after you get home.” One of his jailers even pretended to be from Chicago and “confided” that “the ones who told us about you are your friends in Chicago.”

Salah’s first court appearance came after 18 days, during which his lawyer asked for a continuance of his case. It was then he learned he had been formally accused of working with Hamas. A U.S. Embassy representative was present at Salah’s insistence, but they were not allowed to speak to each other. Salah asked for a personal appointment with the Israeli judge, who agreed, but didn’t keep the appointment.

Ironically, after Israeli authorities told Salah they had “three or four secret files on me,” presumably based on fabricated reports by Palestinian collaborators, a U.S. Embasssy representative assured him he could not be convicted on secret evidence. This hope was dashed at his next court hearing, when the judge warned the Shabak officials that, in the absence of any open evidence, he “would let the prisoner off with a sentence of only 12 years in prison.”

In desperation, Salah hired a new Israeli lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, who was highly recommended by Palestinians and Americans. This infuriated his Shabak interrogators.

“You have the No. 1 lawyer, but we’ll see that you get life in prison,” they told him. And indeed the interrogators then produced a whole new list of allegations. They also suggested that his only way to ever get out of jail would be to agree to collaborate with them after he returned to the United States. They offered him 1.5 million Israeli shekels ($1 million U.S.) if he would do so.

Finally attorney Feldman advised him, “Don’t dream of justice; the right decision is to plea bargain.” In this way, Feldman said, instead of a minimum sentence of 12 years, his sentence would be reduced to 51.

Salah recalls vividly now that at one point as he served out his sentence an Israeli police captain warned him that he was “from the FBI” and that if Salah didn’t cooperate after his return to the U.S., “we will seize your house.” Salah laughed at him at the time, saying “this couldn’t happen.” But he is laughing no longer, because that is exactly what has happened.

Upon his release after 58 months in Israeli jails, Salah was taken twice to Ben-Gurion airport under Israeli custody. But he was not accepted by the pilots of the airlines upon which he had booked passage. Finally a TWA captain, after asking to meet Salah first, agreed to accept him. He passed through immigration in New York on Nov. 9, 1997 without incident and thought his troubles were behind him.

But on Dec. 5 he was served a subpoena in Chicago saying that the FBI had placed a lien on his house. It was then he remembered the explicit threat he had received while in Israeli custody of what would happen to him if he didn’t collaborate after he arrived in the United States. His bank account was seized as well, and he has been forbidden from working.

Since his assets have been seized, Salah has no further personal funds to defend himself in court. However, Chicago Muslims, who have raised funds and mounted protest demonstrations on his behalf, found a lawyer to represent him on the assumption that the fees will be paid by the U.S. government if it loses the case.

In Congress, Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) has proposed, as a direct outgrowth of the case, that the civil forfeiture laws, which originally were passed as a measure against racketeers and drug dealers, be abolished. Meanwhile, since a motion by Salah’s lawyer for dismissal of the case has been rejected, the lawyer is petitioning for examination of the “evidence,” which Salah believes is based on fabricated and uncorroborated allegations received by the U.S. government from Israeli authorities.

While he waits, Salah reports, he is followed when he leaves home, his telephone calls and visitors presumably are monitored, and “I must get permission for everything I do, including travel and attending the classes I’m taking while I wait for permission to work again.”

After his almost five years in Israeli prisons, Salah looks at least 10 years older than his chronological age. But he remains astonishingly philosophical about his ordeal. In answer to my questions, he said he has none of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He believes his memory is as good as before his imprisonment, he has no flashbacks to his torture, nor does he suffer from nightmares. He says he read literally hundreds of books during his incarceration, sometimes even passing up opportunities to exercise or fraternize with other prisoners to do so, and this reinforced the personal inner resources required to cope with his misfortune.

While he waits for justice in Chicago, he continues his studies and helps friends and neighbors whenever and wherever he can.

“I’m strong and I’m patient,” he says simply. “What concerns me now is what will happen to my kids.

“My lawyer wants to bring the Israeli interrogators who tortured me into court. He tells me, ‘I want to put Israel on trial.’ When I say I don’t want this to go on forever, he replies, ‘If we win your case, we will win it for everyone.’

“He’s right, but I’m not counting on it. I think sooner or later the government will take my home and keep the money I had in the bank. Meanwhile my kids, the oldest of whom is already 12, are growing up. These are important, formative years for them. Whatever happens, I don’t want them to turn against our government.”

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.