BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Muslim cleric, was convicted on October 1 of masterminding a plot to blow up the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels leading into New York City, the George Washington Bridge, and the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). No physical evidence linking him to any crime was presented by the U.S. government prosecutors.
Nine others along with Rahman were railroaded to jail on Civil War-era seditious conspiracy charges, which carry a 20- year sentence. In all, the 10 defendants were found guilty on 48 of 50 counts brought against them.
"The message here is put a Muslim on trial and they'll convict him," Rahman's lawyer Lynne Stewart told the Washington Post. The verdict was a victory for fear and prejudice, she said.
"I don't feel this case was decided on the facts, on the evidence," added Valerie Amsterdam, an attorney for another of the defendants.
Rahman, who is 57 years old and an outspoken critic of the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt, was arrested in 1993 and has been held in a New York jail since then. He now faces the possibility of life in prison without parole.
In a case of double jeopardy, the jury also convicted El Sayyid Nosair, one of the 10 defendants, of the 1990 murder of Meir Kahane, a right-wing politician from Israel. Nosair was acquitted of these murder charges in a state trial in 1991.
The sedition trial was linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which six people were killed and scores wounded, although the defendants were not accused of that crime. The key witness in the case was a self-admitted liar, Emad Salem, who received more than $1 million for his services as an FBI informer.
Salem admitted in early March at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that he had lied to almost everybody he ever met. Salem told the court how he built his life around a tangled web of deceit, which included lying to his wife, his mistress, and intelligence agents in the United States and in Egypt, where he was born.
Salem also worked part-time for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, snitching on undocumented workers in exchange for the government's assistance in obtaining work permits for his family and citizenship for himself. Salem, who testified for a month, is now in the federal witness relocation program, where he receives a $2,700-a-month living allowance.
Salem rented a garage in Queens that was wired for surveillance by the FBI to entrap the defendants. In one videotape showing several defendants supposedly concocting a "witches brew" of explosives, Salem is boasting about his skills as an explosives expert, advising the alleged conspirators on technical matters.
Three of the four defendants who testified explained they thought they were preparing to go to Bosnia to help Muslims fight the Serbs. The fourth defendant stated that he was duped into believing that he was aiding plans to attack a Serb warehouse in New York where arms were stored. "They baited these guys with Bosnia and halfway through they switched to talking about American targets," said Amsterdam.
The evidence against Rahman was "scant," as the New York Times put it. "It still remains unclear who was calling the shots," admits the Times in a news analysis of the trial, "nor did the public learn much." At the same time the big-business editors of the paper were quick to hail the verdict as "justified."
The only evidence linking Rahman and still-to-be prosecuted Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the so-called mastermind of the World Trade Center explosion, were a few telephone calls. Yousef is scheduled to stand trial for the blast early next year.
The last time the U.S. government attempted to silence critics of its policies through a seditious conspiracy trial was a case against a group of Puerto Rican nationalists in Chicago in 1987. Under these undemocratic charges a person can be railroaded to prison without having committed any criminal act. The conviction is based solely on conspiring "to overthrow, or put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States." The law was enacted after the Civil War against supporters of the old slavocracy and "amended in 1918, with Socialists and anarchists in mind," says the Times.