By the Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee
June 17, 2002 - Boston

On Sunday June 16, two members of the Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee were able to visit Abouazza in INS custody in the Bristol County Correctional Facility in North Dartmouth, Mass. They learned that at 10:00 AM that morning, prison guards forcibly took Abouazza from his cell and restrained him in a chair while a man with a surgical mask on forced open his mouth and pulled 4 teeth. A broken piece of a tooth was left in his mouth, leaving Abouazza in much physical pain, swollen, bleeding and unable to eat.

This brutality followed a week in which prison guards engaged in other forms of brutality against Abouazza, including punching, solitary confinement, threats and continuous epithets of "Taliban" toward him. On Sunday, June 9, FBI agents attempted to interrogate Abouazza regarding a defense committee leaflet. When Abouazza refused their interrogation, they threw him into an isolation cell, telling him they could keep him there as long as they wanted.

On the morning of Monday, June 17 -- the day after his teeth were extracted -- Bristol prison officials demanded Abouazza sign a form in English that he could not understand. Guards once again threw Abouazza into solitary confinement for requesting review of the document by his lawyer before signing.

BACKGROUND OF THE CASE

On the evening of May 30, Abouazza was stopped by the Cambridge, Massachusetts police on the pretext of a minor traffic violation. Without being charged with a crime or read his rights by the arresting officers, he was handcuffed and brought to the Cambridge police station. Within hours, Abouazza would find himself in jail being interrogated by the FBI for suspicion of "terrorism." The evidence? He is Palestinian and was in possession of leaflets calling for the legal, permitted protest of the Israeli Independence Day Festival on June 9th in Boston.

"The government's shameful policy of racial profiling is now rapidly expanding to include political profiling," said Carl Messineo, a lawyer with the Partnership for Civil Justice and a member of the International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism) Steering Committee. "This was always the true goal of the attack on civil rights engineered by John Ashcroft: to stifle dissent by trying to intimidate people from speaking out against injustice.

"On June 29, people from around the country will demonstrate at the FBI's Washington headquarters to show they won't be intimidated by these tactics," Messineo continued. "For every one person they place into administrative detention, as they have done to Abouazza, there will be hundreds who will take to the streets. It is the mass mobilization of the people that will turn back this extremist and repressive government program."

The government circumvented initial motions by Abouazza's public defender for a bail hearing on the charges of his arrest, keeping him in jail over the weekend. This follows a pattern now familiar in the detention of thousands of Arabs and Muslims across the nation after September 11. During that weekend in jail the FBI interrogated Abouazza seven times, sometimes awakening him at 1:00 a.m. for questioning. Although Abouazza had been appointed counsel, she was present at none of these proceedings. By the time of his appearance in court on the following Monday, the INS had already filed a detainer, requiring he be held in jail until the INS came to get him. Abouazza was moved to an INS detention facility in the early hours of the morning on Tuesday, June 4.

In an Ashcroftian Catch 22, at Abouazza's pre-trial hearing on June 12, the Cambridge district judge found him in default for failure to appear at the hearing, after a court ordered writ of habeus corpus to secure his transfer to the courtroom was rejected by the INS. Abouazza was of course unable to appear, because he remains in INS detention. The judge then found Jaoudat in default, meaning he failed to show up for court, and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Expanded powers of FBI domestic surveillance put into place by Ashcroft's Justice Department in the last week of May have made it easier to target political dissidents. The Justice Department and the FBI have begun a new wave of arrests, specifically targeting Palestinian political activists. The case of a Palestinian student organizer, Ahmed Bensouda, in Chicago (see http://www.ucimc.org/ahmed/ for more info) and the case of Jaoudat Abouazza in Boston are two prominent examples. Both occur in the context of increasingly vocal criticism of Israel, and U.S. support for Israeli policies, in which Arab and Muslim immigrants have played a significant role. On April 20, 100,000 people marched on Washington to protest Bush's "war on terrorism." The large presence of Palestinian activists made itself felt across the country.

In Boston, Abouazza has been a leading activist in the Palestinian struggle. His photograph appeared in the "Boston Globe" as one of the leaders in a local march against the Israeli occupation on April 6th that drew 2,000 activists--the largest to date in Boston. He has participated in weekly protest vigils in front of the Israeli Consulate. Several of those protests have come under heavy surveillance by the Boston police & plainclothes agents, who have repeatedly photographed demonstrators and their license plates.

His arrest on May 30 occurred a little more than a week before a major legally permitted protest against the Israel Day Festival planned for June 9th in which Abouazza had been a key organizer. Flyers for the protest which the FBI found in his car were cited by the prosecutor in court on May 31 as a reason to continue holding him.

The increasing criminalization of dissent in the United States in the aftermath of September 11th endangers the rights of all of us, citizens and immigrants alike. Everyone who is concerned for fundamental human rights and civil liberties can act now in defense of Jaoudat Abouazza.

SEND LETTERS OF PROTEST to:

USINS District Director Steven J. Farquharson
Room 1700, JFK Federal Building
Boston, MA 02203

with copies to:

Commissioner James W. Ziglar
Immigration and Naturalization Service
425 I Street, NW
Washington, DC 20536

and

Jaoudat Abouazza Defense Committee
c/o International A.N.S.W.E.R.
(Act Now to Stop War and End Racism)
31 Germania Street
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
617/522-6626.
http://www.iacboston.org/ANSWER
abouazzadefense@yahoo.com

Please also send copies of your letters to Jaoudat himself, and write to Jaoudat, at the address below:

Jaoudat Abouazza
Bristol County Jail and House of Correction
(North Dartmouth)
400 Faunce Corner Road
North Dartmouth, MA 02747
1 West
ID#120541
(Unit and ID number should be written on the lower left of the envelope.)