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Mazen al-Najjar's sister (r) and wife (l), Fedaa, cannot accompany Al Najjar, who is to be deported from the U.S.
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WASHINGTON,
Aug. 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A Palestinian man and
former university professor in Florida, who had been imprisoned twice
under secret evidence charges that brought no criminal charges, is to
be deported from the U.S., his attorneys said Monday.
Mazen
al-Najjar, 45, formerly an adjunct professor at the University of
South Florida (USF), has faced a litany of charges including
immigration violations and suspected ties to “terrorist”
organizations, but has never been charged with any crime.
Held
since November on a deportation order for overstaying his visa issued
20 years ago, al-Najjar, a stateless Palestinian, will be released
this week from a federal prison, where he was held in solitary
confinement, after which he will be deported to an undisclosed Middle
Eastern country.
Martin
Schwartz, one of the attorneys involved in Al-Najjar's case, said,
"There's no justification for the fact he's been detained all
this time and there's no justification for sending him to a country
and splitting him up from his family."
Hussein
Ibish, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee, a Washington-based civil rights group, condemned the
"frankly brutal treatment" of al-Najjar, calling it an
injustice that he was detained essentially without charge, reports
news agencies.
"His
due process rights have been completely disregarded ... in total
violation of constitutional rights," he said.
Noting
that he was not questioning the government's right to deport people
lacking proper immigration papers Ibish commented, "There is no
basis for locking people up without charge indefinitely."
Al-Najjar,
who has lived in the U.S. since 1981 and has three American-born
daughters, was first arrested in 1997 and spent three years in jail
due to his association with the Florida-based Islamic Committee for
Palestine (ICP) and the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE)
think tank, both of which were accused – but never charged – of
being fronts for terrorist support networks after one of their members
turned up as the new head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in
1995.
He
was never charged with any crime, and was denied bail on the basis of
evidence neither he nor his lawyers ever saw. In 1999, a habeas
federal court lawsuit was filed; in May 2000, it was found that
al-Najjar had been denied due process during his bail hearing.
In
October, another judge ruled that al-Najjar was not a threat to
national security as his detractors had claimed in trying to keep him
behind bars, because there were no "facially legitimate and bona
fide reasons to conclude that [Respondent] is a threat to national
security."
After
then-Attorney General Janet Reno blocked the government’s appeal to
continue his detention, al-Najjar was freed in December 2000, only to
be re-arrested last November on a visa violation after the Sept. 11
attacks, in what some supporters said was part of a backlash against
people of Arab or Muslim origin.
Ibish
said that authorities have not suggested any link between al-Najjar
and Sept. 11, his re-arrest was likely part of a backlash. "Since
Sept. 11 the Justice Department now considers that Arabs and Muslims
from
South Asia
in this country with some sort of visa problem ... may be detained
indefinitely," he said.
U.S.
District Judge Joan Lenard concluded in February that the government
had legitimate reasons for keeping al-Najjar imprisoned for at least
six months while trying to deport him.
For
nearly a year, al-Najjar has been kept in 23-hour solitary lockdown,
shackled hand and foot whenever he leaves his cell, strip-searched
twice a day even after non-contact visits, and allowed only one
15-minute phone call per week to his family.
An
Amnesty International report last year found that he was not allowed
visits from his family for the first 30 days of his detention.
Al-Najjar
founded the ICP charity and WISE think tank with his brother-in-law,
Sami Al-Arian. Both men have consistently denied any connection to
terrorists.
Even
though Al-Najjar’s case sparked a bill in Congress to ban the use of
secret evidence in immigration cases, he will be deported sometime
this week said Rodney Germain, an Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) spokesman, but declined to say when he would leave or
where he would be going.
Officials
at the
U.S.
Justice Department and INS in
Washington
,
DC
, did not return phone calls Sunday from news agencies.
Another
attorney for Al-Najjar, Joe Hohenstein, said Al-Najjar has acquired
travel documents from the Palestinian Authority and will be deported
to an Arab country "with friendly relations with the United
States," such as Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar or
Bahrain.
"One
of the Arabic countries has accepted him," Schwartz told news
agencies, but would not identify the country.
Al-Najjar's
wife, Fedaa, also a Palestinian, is also under a deportation order and
is trying to find a country that will accept her, so that at some
point she and her three U.S.-born daughters, aged 13, 11 and 7, can be
reunited with Mazen Al-Najjar, Hohenstein said, reports news agencies.
She
cannot travel with her husband due to lack of travel documents and
will remain in the
United States
, but hopes to be reunited with al-Najjar later, said Schwartz.
"I'm
very happy that the miserable condition of my husband will soon end,
but my daughters have been very sad that they will soon leave the only
country they know and love," she said in a statement.
For
his part, al-Najjar sees the deportation order as a mixed blessing,
said Hohenstein.
"He
wants to be able to stay and raise his family [in the
United States
]," he said. "But at the same time, he wants to be able to
live in freedom."
Al-Najjar’s
brother-in-law, al-Arian, a tenured computer science professor at USF,
has been suspended with pay since September after he and the
university received threats following his appearance on a Fox News
television show to discuss the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and
Washington.
USF
President Judy Genshaft is expected to decide whether to fire him
sometime before fall semester classes begin August 26, reports news
agencies.
Al-Arian,
a Palestinian and a legal
U.S.
resident and former head of WISE and ICP, contends he is being fired
because of his pro-Palestinian views.
USF
officials say his firing would have nothing to do with academic
freedom, saying he is a safety risk on campus and did not clearly say
he was not speaking for the school when he expressed his opinions
publicly on Fox News.
