Posted on 11/27/2001 6:28:03 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON -- The federal government is working to secure Mazen Al-Najjar's deportation to the United Arab Emirates following his arrest Saturday on a final deportation order issued two weeks ago.
"The government is presently making arrangements for Al-Najjar's deportation," Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson said.
Nelson would not elaborate, but Al-Najjar's attorney, Joe Hohenstein, said the former University of South Florida teacher may have to resign himself to departing the United States after two decades of residency and a five-year fight against deportation.
"That's the legal reality, short of a Supreme Court review on this matter," said Hohenstein, a lawyer with the nonprofit Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia.
Hohenstein said he still plans to file a petition for Supreme Court review of the case.
Never charged with a crime, Al-Najjar was jailed for 3 1/2 years on classified information the United States said linked him to a Middle Eastern terrorist group. He was released in December 2000 after a federal court ruling that he had been deprived of the evidence necessary for his defense.
Through it all, Al-Najjar and his attorneys have argued that the Gaza native could not be deported from the United States because no country would accept him.
As a stateless Palestinian stigmatized by U.S. assertions that he is a security threat, they said, he could find no other home.
Hohenstein said Al-Najjar has now entered into serious discussion with the federal government over whether, and how, he can comply with the deportation order.
Since January 1999 the Immigration and Naturalization Service has sought a travel document issued to Al-Najjar by the Egyptian government that the INS says it must have to get Al-Najjar accepted into the United Arab Emirates, the country to which an immigration judge ordered Al-Najjar deported in 1997.
Al-Najjar refused to hand over the document, Hohenstein said, because the INS had lost a previous important travel document.
In addition, "we said no (to the INS) because there was no final deportation order" at the time, Hohenstein said. "We indicated we'd open up discussion if there were a final order."
That final deportation order came Nov. 13 from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, triggering a 90-day mandatory detention period for Al-Najjar. INS agents arrested him on Saturday outside his Tampa apartment.
Al-Najjar could have protected himself from arrest, at least temporarily, by asking the Supreme Court to consider a stay of his deportation. But his attorneys did not think the government was serious about jailing him again and failed to do so.
"In retrospect, (asking for a) stay would have possibly been a better idea," Hohenstein said. "I also don't know that it would have been granted."
In public discussion of the case, the deportation issue has taken a back seat to the debate over whether classified intelligence information can be used to indefinitely detain an immigration violator. The Justice Department said the information, never revealed, showed Al-Najjar to be involved with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group.
Attorney General Janet Reno ordered his release in December 2000 after a federal judge in Miami ruled Al-Najjar's due process rights were violated when the government failed to reveal enough of the classified information for him to mount a defense. The government has appealed that ruling.
But while civil rights activists used Al-Najjar to rally public opinion against the use of secret evidence to keep immigration violators in jail indefinitely, the separate deportation case against Al-Najjar and his wife, Fedaa, continued to make its way through the courts.
On Nov. 13 the federal appeals court affirmed the earlier deportation order against the Al-Najjars. Mazen Al-Najjar is ordered to go to the UAE and Fedaa Al-Najjar to Saudi Arabia, the respective countries where they last resided before entering the United States.
Al-Najjar entered the United States in 1981 on a student visa that expired long ago. He used a travel document issued by the Egyptian government to enter the United States.
In the 1970s Egypt frequently issued such international travel documents to Palestinians, who do not have their own country to issue them proper passports. The original document that Al-Najjar used to enter the United States expired long ago and has since been lost by the INS, Hohenstein said.
Hohenstein is negotiating with federal authorities about finding a way to send Fedaa and Mazen Al-Najjar to the same country, presumably the UAE, and keep them together with their three American-born daughters.
"We're essentially treating the family as one package," he said.
But he said he still doubts the UAE will accept Al-Najjar.
"There were overtures made to the UAE in 1997 when he was originally detained," Hohenstein said. "The UAE indicated they weren't willing to take him."
However, a May 28, 1997, letter from Ali Mohammaed Ali, an official of the UAE embassy in Washington, to a previous attorney for Al-Najjar, states that the UAE would accept Al-Najjar, but under two conditions: that he have a "valid passport" and a "valid entry visa" issued by the UAE.
The letter does not state that the UAE refuses to accept Al-Najjar as a resident. "No, they never provided that in writing," Hohenstein said. He said UAE officials communicated their intentions through back channels.
Officials of the UAE embassy did not return phone calls Monday.
In 1998, Egypt issued Al-Najjar a new travel document in anticipation that Guyana, in South America, would take him. Although Guyana backed out of the deal for reasons that Hohenstein says were never clear, Al-Najjar was left with a valid travel document.
It is this second document that the government says Al-Najjar refused to hand over: the equivalent of the "valid passport" sought by the UAE as a condition of his entry.
"His representation to this court that he "cannot leave, because no country will accept him' is open to serious question," the government said in a brief submitted to U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard in Miami in March 2000. "Najjar has failed to cooperate with the INS's efforts to find countries that may accept him."
An INS agent submitted an affidavit saying that Al-Najjar had failed to respond to two requests since January 1999 for his Egyptian-issued travel document.
That second document expired last year. Now, in order to deport Al-Najjar, the U.S. government will have to persuade Egypt to issue him a third travel document and persuade the UAE to issue him an entry visa. Those negotiations are taking place quietly through diplomatic channels.
Hohenstein says he doubts the negotiations will succeed, because a representative of Al-Najjar's approached the emir of one of the UAE's seven emirates and received a negative answer about the possibility of relocation there.
In a June 20, 2000, letter submitted to the court, Agieb Bilal, the former principal of the Islamic Academy of Florida, said the ruler of the emirate of Sharjah told him in a December 1999 meeting that Al-Najjar would not be welcome unless the United States disclosed the classified information concerning his alleged terrorist ties.
The Islamic Academy, a private school in Tampa, is now run by Al-Najjar's brother-in-law, Sami Al-Arian. Al-Arian and Al-Najjar worked together in the 1990s at a University of South Florida think tank that was investigated for alleged ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. No charges were filed.
But the seven emirates often act autonomously, according to a State Department description of the UAE. That means one emir does not necessarily speak for them all, said Patrick Clawson, research director of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, a think tank.
Nonetheless, Hohenstein said Al-Najjar "is not comfortable with the UAE because the UAE government has a history of mistreatment of Palestinians." He said it is "extremely likely" that the UAE government would detain him, "and it's well-recorded in detention that they torture people."
But Clawson, who has traveled frequently to the UAE over two decades, said, "Palestinians don't fare on average worse than people from South Asia or East Asia, who if anything tend to get worse jobs and be subject to more social discrimination" in a country where 80 percent of the residents are foreigners recruited to fill jobs.
And when asked if the UAE is known for torturing prisoners, Clawson said: "Oh, good lord, no. I wouldn't say their respect for human rights is spectacular, but among Arab nations, it's not bad."
I bet they'd love to know what we know and how we know it!
The Islamic Academy, a private school in Tampa, is now run by Al-Najjar's brother-in-law, Sami Al-Arian. Al-Arian and Al-Najjar worked together in the 1990s at a University of South Florida think tank that was investigated for alleged ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. No charges were filed.
Gee, I feel so sorry for him. NOT!
Him, and a whole lot of others.
Source--News host Bill O'Reilly warned his audience last week that USF "may be a hotbed of support for Arab militants." O'Reilly's contentious interview with Sami Al-Arian, a USF engineering professor who founded WISE in the early 1990s, brought predictable reactions from some Tallahassee politicians and university donors. For USF president Judy Genshaft, the controversy over WISE, in the emotional environment created by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, represents one more inherited problem that will require a deft response. [End Excerpt]
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