FM: John Whitbeck
Transmitted below is a news article in today's ARAB NEWS (Jeddah) on one of the draconian sentences for thought crimes now being handed down, with depressing frequency, by American courts.
As both a lawyer and a human being, the following aspects of this case appear to me worthy of note:
1. The prosecution never asserted that Mr. Abu Ali ever actually DID anything.
2. "Prosecutors offered no evidence to indicate he ever took steps" to actually DO anything.
3. The re-sentencing judge explicitly explained his decision to increase Mr. Abu Ali's sentence from 30 years to life imprisonment on the basis that "There is no way to know what his mental state would be after 30 years of solitary confinement" -- i.e., if Mr. Abu Ali still had a mind left after 30 years of solitary confinement, he might be REALLY bitter and might finally actually DO something, so it is better to keep him in solitary confinement until the day he dies.
It is difficult to imagine that, even in America, someone named Cohen, O'Reilly or (one hopes) Whitbeck would be sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement for harboring bad thoughts and dreaming bad dreams. However, any Muslim, anywhere in the world, would be well advised to keep his private fantasies strictly private. Today's America does not only practice "preventive" war. It also practices preventive "law enforcement".
... The US-born Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted here in 2005 of conspiring with the terrorist group, but prosecutors offered no evidence to indicate he ever took steps to follow through...
Background info on David H. Laufman
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