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THE MIDNIGHT KNOCK ON THE DOOR AND FBI WHISKS AWAY A PROFESSOR IN PREPARATION FOR A USA SHOW TRIAL national |
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news report
 Thursday February 20, 2003 15:14 by Rachel La Corte
 USA PROFESSOR ARRESTED FOR SAYING 'DEATH TO ISRAEL' IN SPEECH TEN YEARS AGO Television reports showed Sami Al-Arian being led in handcuffs to FBI headquarters in Tampa after the arrest. His indictment is sealed until a court hearing scheduled for Thursday afternoon, a federal source said on condition on anonymity. http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAXLVIQECD.html University of South Florida Professor Accused of Terrorist Sympathies Arrested by FBI in Tampa TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - A college professor previously accused of having terrorist ties was arrested early Thursday by federal agents. Television reports showed Sami Al-Arian being led in handcuffs to FBI headquarters in Tampa after the arrest. His indictment is sealed until a court hearing scheduled for Thursday afternoon, a federal source said on condition on anonymity. "It's all about politics," Al-Arian told reporters as agents led him inside. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa had said last year that Al-Arian was under federal investigation, but refused to elaborate. The tenured Palestinian computer engineering professor was placed on forced leave and banned from campus shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and his subsequent appearance on Fox News Channel. He was quizzed about links to known terrorists, and asked about tapes from the late 1980s and early 1990s in which he said "Death to Israel" in Arabic. Al-Arian has said that he has never advocated violence against others and that his words were a statement against Israeli occupation. He also has consistently denied any connection to terrorists. The university says that hurt the school's fund-raising efforts and resulted in threats being made against the school. The university also claimed the professor raised money for terrorist groups, brought terrorists into the United States, and founded organizations that support terrorism. Al-Arian and his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, founded the World and Islam Studies Enterprises, a now-defunct Islamic think tank at USF that was raided by the FBI in 1995. Al-Arian also founded the Islamic Concern Project Inc. in 1988. Al-Arian has lived in the United States since 1975 and had taught at the university since 1986. Last month, the faculty union at the University of South Florida filed a grievance on Al-Arian's behalf, saying that banning him from campus violated the union's contract, Al-Arian's right to academic freedom and its own policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religious affiliation. His brother-in-law, who also had taught at the university, spent more than 3 1/2 years in jail on secret evidence linking him to terrorists. He was released in 2000 but arrested again in November 2001 and deported last August. |
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Comments (10 of 10)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Write a summary and provide a link, or find a related story on the newswire and post the link as a comment.
There's no point having an independent media site where half the stories are just copied from mainstream sources. Do something original instead.
Read again: you have your summary and the direct link to the story is part of it.
There is no other news to link to as this is a breaking story.
Why do you want to suppress news about the arrest of Prof. Al-Arian? What the fuck do you care as long as it is legitimate? Who the hell are you to tell anybody what they can and cannot post?
Go back to troll land, moron.
There wasn't any summary. The poster (you?) posted the first paragraph of the story, a link to the story, the entire story, and then the link to the story again. The only original writing in that story is the headline.
The newswire contains plenty of stories about the US drive to war, as well as at least one recent story about the department of Homeland Security. If the poster is only going to copy a story that's been published already elsewhere, they could do us the courtesy of adding a link as a comment to an existing article. If the poster didn't think this story was important enough to deserve some original writing, then why should I think its important enough to deserve an article all to itself?
(as for who I am - I'm one of the editors, as you'd know if you'd been here more than a couple of hours. My comments to this article are expressing my personal opinions - I'm not speaking on behalf of the collective)
Didn't know you were so famous, Ray, that I would automatically know who you are after a couple of hours here. Actually I've been here awhile and have only noticed your numerous "fuckwit" trollings at a variety of posts.
Here are your editorial guidelines. So now tell me, "fuckwit", which one does the above article violate?
---
In general, posts may be removed for any of the following reasons:
being comments, not news - comments belong with the story being discussed - to have your say in response to a story on the site, use the "add your comments" link at the bottom of each story.
duplicate posts - make sure you've read the newswire
infactual or obviously false posts - the onus is on the author to check and confirm facts - if a factual error is brought to our attention it will be removed
libelous or slanderous posts - choose your language carefully
discriminatory or abusive posts
http://ireland.indymedia.org/about/editorial.html
Here we go again - this sounds just like the guy who said we were fascists because we were trying to suppress Adrian More's global spamming.
We may as well just come out and say it; Yes, we are deliberately and systematically trying to destroy this story, because of our secret C.I.A. funding agreement. In fact we've a deal where, if we let this story through, Ray's body is handed over for gruesome scientific experiments in New Mexico. So do you understand why this is important to us?
Happy now?
But seriously - as you can see, the article has not been deleted, because it is not in breach of a guideline. Editorial volunteers try and encourage the creation of original content - analysis, new reports, photo, video and audio, unknown stories (your story is, according to Google News, running in 158 news outlets, including the Wash Post within the last 10 minutes), interviews, digests, etc. The fact that Ray's comment is appended to your article shows that it is not going to be deleted. So you're right to say that it doesn't breach a guideline. If it did, we would have hidden it .
No need to hand Ray's body over for gruesome scientific experiments in New Mexico; I'll be happy to do them myself.
Yes, the story NOW is all over Google News, but it wasn't when I posted it. And if you look at all those articles, you will see Dr. Al-Arian being branded a "terrorist". This early article does so too, and that's why I added a different title to change their "spin" from arrested "terrorist" to professor persecuted for his statements.
It's important to refute corporate spin early, and especially so here because IMC-Ireland is one of the few IMCs that Google News searches and posts. I don't know if this article made it yet, but I'll check Google News and let you know.
Yup, it's another one of these bizarre
stories. The world must be a very small
place for the President of the USA
to have gotten himself photographed in
July 2000, standing right next to this
Al-Arian terrorist guy. Both of them
are grinning from ear to ear.
The plot thickens...
"Al-Arian campaigned for Bush "when Bush decried the use of secret evidence during the campaign" secret evidence that should've been used [in 2000] to deport Al-Arian. And it details the anger of Muslim-Americans, who walked out of the Bush White House in protest when Abdullah Al-Arian was ejected from a Bush meeting, based on the evidence.
Instead of being embarrassed, Muslim- and Arab-American leaders decried it as profiling, and the Al-Arian family is a cause célèbre for Arab - and Muslim-American leaders. Dr. Al-Arian has become a "civil rights leader" among them. Incredible. Even more incredible, Bush apologized to Sami's son, Abdullah Al-Arian [for ejecting him from the White House], inviting him back. He dispatched the deputy director of the U.S. Secret Service to Congressman Bonior's office to personally apologize to the 20-year-old intern. And, in June, the New York Times reported that Dr. Al-Arian, himself, "was among a group of Muslim leaders admitted to the White House for a political briefing."
If your article had been in breach of the editorial guidelines I would have deleted it immediately, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
As I said (and I explained that this was a personal opinion, not an expresion of policy), the story was completely unoriginal, and added nothing to indymedia. Your comments haven't convinced me that you'll have anything to add in the future either.
Who? Ray?