DEMOCRATIC TYRANNY
Column Written 5/2/98
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved

A "freedom fighter" is one of your own people who fights for your independence. A "terrorist" is a foreigner who fights for independence for his people.

--Amos Kenan (Israeli Journalist) The Nation

Imagine, if you will, a nation of secret trials, or one where evidence is a secret whisper that the defendant may never hear nor read, nor ever even hope to challenge. Imagine.

What nation comes to mind? Peru, with her infamous hooded judges? War-wracked Bosnia-Herzegovina, with her concentration camps and death squads? Imagine that this nation of secret proceedings sits neither in Latin America, nor in Eastern Europe; neither in Africa, nor in Asia.

It is the United States of America, where a man named Nassir Ahmed tries to fight a phantasm, a monstrous legal machinery that is the offspring of the so-called Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). This law, signed into the law books by President Clinton, a former professor of Constitutional Law, denies immigrants like Ahmed the very fundament of a hearing: denial of the opportunity to hear and challenge evidence against a person.

Ahmed, who dared pray at the community mosque of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, may be forced to leave his American home of the last eight years where his three daughters have lived all of their young lives. He faces deportation.

It should be deeply shocking to us all that secret, untranscripted trials are taking place in this country; it should be a source of great shame that a court rules on a person based upon such secret evidence; and it should stir us to outrage that courts deny these secrets to one's lawyers, urging them to file appeals to challenge evidence that they have never seen. In such context, what can a "trial" mean? What of "evidence?"

For Mr. Ahmed, they must seem empty, English words, that actually mean nothing at all. How can any Constitutional scholar (not to mention, Rhodes Scholar) dare put his signature on any law that legalizes secret proceedings, secret evidence whispered to a judge, and untranscripted, unrecorded hearings? How can any judge dare to sit in such a proceeding?

How can we dare not raise our voices in protest at this outrage, if not for Nassir Ahmed, then for our very selves?

Such a "law" commits terrorism against the letter and spirit of the Constitution.
©MAJ