December 24, 2001

The Nation since 1865

PRINTED DECEMBER 5

IN THIS ISSUE

2 LETTERS
EDITORIALS & COMMENT
3 REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
5 ENRONS RISE AND FALL
William Greider
6 WARS WITHOUT END
Michael T. Klare
7 CABLE SNOOZE
Michael Massing
7 DEPORTED DISAPPEARED?
Amy Bach
9 A CHAIN REACTION
Jonathan Schell
COLUMNS

12 STOP THE PRESSES

Objectivity RIP
Eric Alterman

3
VOLUME 273, NUMBER 21

31 LESSONS IN ISLAM FROM INDIA

Disdained by the majority culture, Muslims turn for self-respect to absolutism.
Akeel Bilgrami

ARTICLES
13 AND DARKNESS COVERED THE LAND
A report from Israel and Palestine.
Robert I. Friedman
20 LETTER FROM LONDON
Europe and the United States have begun
to follow diverging scripts on the war.
D.D. Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis
23 IN DEFENSE OF JUST WAR
THINKING
The only acceptable purpose of war is to
restore peace on a more durable basis.
Richard Falk

10 BEAT THE DEVIL

Sharon or Arafat: Which Is the
Sponsor of Terror?
Alexander Cockburn

27 BUSHS GLOBALIZED NATO

As envisioned by the Administration, its
unilateralism with a multilateral face.
Sherle R. Schwenninger

11 DIARY OF A MAD
LAW PROFESSOR
More Juice?
Patricia J. Williams

29 RELIGION AND THE WAR

AGAINST EVIL
Modernity isnt the archfiend. But as
often preached, it appears so to many.
Harvey Cox

BOOKS & THE ARTS

33 SERENY: The Healing Wound:
Experiences and Reflections on
Germany, 19382001
Eric Weinberger
36 DEK: Essays on Hitlers Europe
Paul Reitter
38 HYMN TO NECESSITY (poem)
Sherod Santos
40 JANZEN: The Rise and Fall of Synanon:
A California Utopia
DOWNING: Shoes Outside the Door:
Desire, Devotion and Excess at San
Francisco Zen Center
Allison Xantha Miller
44 FILMS: In the Bedroom The Man Who
Wasnt There
Stuart Klawans
Cover design by Open, photo by
AP/Wide World; illustrations by
Christoph Niemann, Peter O. Zierlein

EDITORIALS

Reaping the Whirlwind

n mid-November Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered the

Bush Administrations long-delayed statement on its plans for
re-engaging in efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. We
have a vision of a region where two states, Israel and Palestine,
live side by side within secure and recognized borders, he said.
Other than the purely symbolic use of the term Palestine, a
breakthrough in the semantic wars that punctuate the decades-old
conflict, nothing in Powells speech showed any indication that the
Administration has a clue about how to get the parties back to the
negotiating table. Powell ritually admonished both sides, seemingly with objective balance. Terror and violence against Israelis must
stop, he told the Palestinians. Settlement activity and killing of
innocent Palestinians must stop, he told the Israelis.
But if Powell had been really serious about reversing the cycle
of violence, he would have admitted Washingtons role in the
conflictcontinuing to arm and fund Israel despite its steady expansion of settlements and its systematic violation of Palestinians human rights in the occupied territories. Ten years ago, the
first Bush Administration refused to meet officially with then
Housing Minister Ariel Sharon because of his aggressive role
in building settlements. And it took a modest step in the right
direction by telling Israel that it would delay $10 billion in loan
guarantees if Israel kept expanding settlements. The threat helped
bring right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the table with

the Palestinians, paving the way for recognition of the PLO and the
beginning of the Oslo process.
Powell showed no such resolve, with the result that his speech
had no effect. Instead, the blind rush of events has propelled the
White House to a far more dangerous course. After a horrendous
series of violent actswhich began with the killing in Gaza of
five Palestinian children who tripped a booby-trapped bomb
planted by the Israeli army, and the provocative assassination
of a Hamas leader who, Israelis said, was behind recent suicide
bombingsthree more Palestinians blew themselves up in crowded streets and on a bus, killing at least twenty-five Israelis and
wounding hundreds more. And this time, there were no calls from
the Bush Administration for Israeli restraint.
The Palestinians desperate and appalling turn to terrorism has
backfired. For there seems to be little willingness in Washington
to see equivalence between their tactics and Israeli military operations even when those parallels may exist. Were not about to tell
Mr. Sharon what he should do, said Powell, in the least belligerent of several statements to come from the White House. Given
that green light, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took the unprecedented step of bombing Yasir Arafats offices and attacking
several police headquarters, even though the Palestinian Authority
had arrested about 100 Palestinian militants. The last time Washington gave Sharon a green light was in 1982, when as commander of Israeli forces in Lebanon he occupied Beirut and was
responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. That war,
which Sharon supposedly devised to destroy the PLO, instead

The Nation.

December 24, 2001

EDITORIALS

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solidified its international status. As we go to press, it looks as

though Sharon is intent on tearing apart the PA in the dubious belief that he can find quislings to deal with instead of Arafat.
Of greater concern is the new analogy taking hold in Washington. The PLO is the same as the Taliban, which aids, abets and
provides safe haven for terrorists, said Senator Chuck Schumer.
And Israel is like America, simply trying to protect its home front.
To ask Israel to negotiate with Arafat is like asking America to
negotiate with Mullah Muhammad Omar. This, almost verbatim,
is the line that Sharon has been pushing since September 11. But
that analogy is false, not only because the Palestinian Authority
is recognized by the 189 members of the United Nations as the
legitimate representative of the Palestinian people but because in
no way can the West Bank and Gaza be considered part of Israels
home front. 200,000 Israeli settlers are occupying lands that
belong to and are inhabited by more than 3 million Palestinians,
and there can be no peace until that central fact is undone.
The last time a US President referred to the settlements as
obstacles to peace was under Bush I. Israels settlement policy
and Sharon, the bulldozer of a man who has been its mastermind
almost from the beginning, have won, with the result that the
Palestinians have lost all hope in any kind of peaceful resolution
to their grievances. The hell described so painfully and eloquently
in this issue by Robert I. Friedman is here. The biggest factory for
suicide bombers is your policy, Mohammed Dahlan, the former
head of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza, told an Israeli
reporter recently. I can put out a table to sign people up at the
Rafah roadblock and in two minutes Ill have 200 suicide bombers.
Once it was difficult to persuade people to commit suicide. Today
everyone wants to. Dont you people understand that?
The grim future now facing Israel/Palestine can be changed
only by active international intervention, led by the United States.
To begin, the United Nations could send in peacekeepers to separate the warring sides, as it has done in other parts of the world.
The United States could set up a fund to help repatriate Jewish settlers, using that portion of US aid that now goes into expanding the
settlements. Or, thinking more ambitiously, the Security Council
could impose a solution, by claiming international jurisdiction
over the occupied territories. Under such a scenario, the Council
could offer to recognize a Palestinian state in the West Bank and
Gaza, contingent on Palestines recognition of Israel as a Jewish
state within the pre-1967 borders and with full security guarantees.
The details of a final compromise on Jerusalem, refugees and

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB

arc Cooper reports from the AFL-CIO convention

in Las Vegas, where the labor federation called for
a renewal of vigorous, partisan politics on behalf of
working families threatened by deepening economic
recession and by an empowered and emboldened conservative White House. Also, read Daniel Swifts look at
Chelsea Clintons problems with antiwar demonstrators
at Oxford (www.thenation.com).

December 24, 2001

The Nation.

COMMENT
territorial swaps, as we now know from various post-mortems on
the last round of intensive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, are not
far from reach. Whats needed is the political will. The question
now is whether Washington really cares about peace in the Middle
East, or whether US policy-makers dont mind what Israel does
there as long as all-out war does not break out.

Enrons Rise and Fall

he rise and fall of Enron is an instant classic in the annals of

capitalism because, in one calamitous stroke, it wipes out so
many sanctified illusions that rule in the magic marketplace.
Enron embodies Nobel-class hubris like that of the market sophisticates who brought Long-Term Capital Management to
ruin in 1998. It also smells of the raw monopolistic greed common
a century ago. An energy-trading company that Wall Street had
valued at $80 billion ten months ago is now a penny stock.
Meanwhile, California consumers and businesses are stuck with
the ruinously inflated electricity prices that Enron rode to brief
financial glory. The firms gullible creditors include some of the
best gilt-edged names in American bankingJ.P. Morgan Chase,
Citigroupwhose ancestral houses were big players during the
first Gilded Age too. Unfortunately, then and now, these venerable
financial institutions lured millions of innocents to the slaughter,
unwitting shareholders who bought the exuberant promises.
In this case, the lambs include Enrons own employees (thousands of whom are abruptly out of work) because top management
cleverly prohibited their 401(k) accounts from selling Enrons
plummeting stock while the big boys were dumping theirs. If the
financial losses to banks are severe enoughwe dont yet know
the full truththen US taxpayers may be burned too, their money
used once again to rescue delinquent financiers from their just
deserts in the name of saving the system. Nobody ever said capitalism was pretty.
Markets are imperfectible human artifacts and always subject
to gross error, not to mention high-stakes fraud, because the
transactions are always the work of human beings. Computerization and esoteric mathematical formulations do not change that
humble fact; neither does the Internet. This same lesson was
learned from great pain and loss in the early twentieth century and
led eventually to the political understanding that markets without
governors and regulators will repeatedly throw off disastrous consequencesextreme price swings, occasional busts and clever
larceniesso stabilizing rules and limits were imposed. That
knowledge was pushed aside by the modern eras deregulation.
Enron was a massive experiment in e-commercea commodity-trading firm that used the Internet to connect distant buyers
and sellers of everything from electricity and natural gas, steel and
newsprint to pollution credits and financial derivatives hedging
against interest rates or the weather. If you check out Enron Online, you will see the hubris still on display, despite the bankruptcy.
Why Enron? the companys website asks. We have strong skills
in risk intermediation and good systems to control risk. We have
successfully sourced capital for all potential investments. As it
turns out, these are the very qualities that were missing, the new

economy conceits that brought it down. Enrons siren song was

plausible enough (if you left out the human folly and greed). Deregulation, combined with Internet trading, exposed the old-line
utilities to fierce, continuous price competition, the firm explained, forcing them to eliminate inefficiencies or get out. Consumers would win from the lower wholesale prices; so would
producers of soft energy alternatives, like wind or solar. Enron
would preside like a wise monarch.
But while Enron promised to scrutinize the soundness of buyers and sellers, nobody was scrutinizing the trader king. The
middleman is unregulated in this brave new world. When Enron
management made a series of outrageous and self-interested offthe-books deals to raise capital, its auditor, Arthur Andersen,
gave approval. The credit-rating agencies remained mute. Enrons
bankers were busy touting the stock as on its way to the moon.
Enron and chairman Kenneth Lay, meanwhile, pumped nearly
$2 million into the election of George W. Bush, who returned the
favor by letting Enron pick federal regulatory appointments. Lay
and his agents were all over Vice President Cheneys secretive
energy task force, and White House economic adviser Lawrence
Lindsey received $50,000 last year as an Enron adviser.
The disaster of Californias blackouts and soaring electric
bills was a prima facie case of monopoly price-gougingartificial scarcity induced by utilities simultaneously shutting down
electricity generation for repairsthat cries out for criminal
investigation. Collusion has not yet been proved nor Enrons involvement, as far as I know, but the firm profited spectacularly.
While California groaned, Enrons share price more than doubled.
Enron then used its new glamour status to leverage still more debt,
expanding its reach worldwide and opening more trading tables
financing it all in ways even savvy analysts couldnt understand.
It was the classic behavior of unfettered freebooters, and it
ended in the familiar way.
What did we learn? First, wholesale deregulation has a vicious
downside for ordinary citizens and is open to gross manipulation.
Second, as Floyd Norris of the New York Times pointed out, Enron
is essentially not an energy company but a financial institution
that trades various financial instruments, utterly free of regulating
limits. Like a bank, it must raise huge capital flows to maintain
liquidity to underwrite the transactions, but unlike a bank or a financial market, it operates without oversight. Third, nearly every
party to this debacleEnron itself, its auditor, the bankers and
brokeragesis guilty of profound conflicts of interest. They do
not tell the truth to retail customers like small-scale investors for
fear of offending their big investment clients. Enron, it seems,
didnt tell the truth to its bankers either, and they didnt ask.
As we learn more, the fall of Enron may be seen as the logical result of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited
commercial banks from merging with investment houses. The
remedial agenda would start with the reregulation of banking
and finance, in order to restore a milieu of prudence and honest
dealings at the heart of capitalism. Other sectors should follow:
energy, telecommunications and airlines, for starters.
It would be comforting to think this event will turn politics
around and put a little spine in our legislators. Certainly many
state governments have learned from Californias pain. But dont

The Nation.

December 24, 2001

COMMENT
count on Washington. Even after Enrons meltdown, leading
Democrats continue to shill for more deregulation, aware that their
money patrons will be most upset if they reopen fundamental
scrutiny of how wealth is created in the magic market. Elite
opinion leaders will probably stick with the laissez-faire dogma,
as it continues to fall apart, until the bloody losses lap over their
shoes too.
WILLIAM GREIDER
William Greider is The Nations national affairs correspondent.

Wars Without End

ith the war against the Taliban nearing conclusion, many in

Washington are urging Bush to expand the current conflict
into a vast, open-ended campaign against assorted terrorist
groups and rogue states like Iraq. The President has encouraged such thinking. The current struggle in Afghanistan
is just the beginning on the war against terror, he told US soldiers the day before Thanksgiving. There are other terrorists who
threaten America and our friends, and there are other nations willing to sponsor them. We will not be secure as a nation until all of
these threats are defeated.
Originally, in his address to Congress on September 20, he said
the war would extend with a global reach to every terrorist group
and to states that knowingly aided or harbored such groups. But
on November 26 he expanded the target list to include states that
terrorize other nations by secretly pursuing the manufacture of
nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, a category that conceivably could include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and North Korea.
With the door open to so many options, hawks and hard-liners
of many stripes have been arguing for a wide range of punitive
military strikes. At the top of the list is a campaign to kill or oust
Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Other oft-mentioned targets include Abu
Sayyaf in the Philippines, Hamas and Hezbollah in the West Bank
and Lebanon and assorted rebel groups in Somalia.
With fighting still under way in Afghanistan, the White House
is reluctant to provide any specifics about the next stage of the
war. But various officials have suggested that the Pentagon is
already gearing up for a wider range of attacks, including a
stepped-up campaign against Saddam Hussein. From all that can
be discerned these plans envision far more extended and risky
operations than those now under way in Afghanistan.
Many signs point to preparations for an expanded war. Most
conspicuous, of course, are the threatening comments by senior
Administration officials. The objective is to dismantle the global
terrorist networks and state support for terrorism, said Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on November 18. There
are a number of states that support terrorists. Saddam Hussein
[leads] one of them. Equally suggestive is the Defense Departments continuing mobilization of forces for deployment to the
Persian Gulf area even as the Taliban regime appears to be disintegrating. Several aircraft carrier battle groups have already
been stationed in the area, and at least one other group is on the
way. We want to continue planning, so that we canprovide the
President of the United States with credible military options,

Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the US Central Command,

said on November 8.
A war with Iraq would conceivably jeopardize the flow of oil
from the Gulf, so it is particularly significant that George W.
Bush has ordered the Energy Department to completely fill the
Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time ever. The reserve
is designed to provide the United States with a secure supply of
oil in the event of war or a major national emergency.
Although none of this evidence can be considered definitive,
it makes it increasingly apparent that the Administration plans to
start a new round of attacks once the fighting in Afghanistan is
over. This could entail an intensified air campaign against Iraq or
commando raids on suspected terrorist camps in Somalia, the
Bekaa valley of Lebanon or other sites in the greater Middle East
or Asia. Stepped-up US involvement in the Philippines counterinsurgency campaign against Muslim rebels in southwestern
Mindanao is also likely. (US military advisers have already been
assigned to the government forces involved in this effort.)
Whatever the immediate outcome of these engagements, the
United States is likely to find itself embroiled in one bloody and
uncontrollable conflagration after another. Except possibly in the
Philippines, where support for the rebels is limited, US intervention will provoke a hostile reaction from at least some segments
of the local population, leading to a larger conflict and/or new
outbreaks of terrorism. It will also divert resources from the effort
to track down surviving offshoots of Al Qaedagroups that most
directly threaten the United States. In addition, an expanded US
war effort will alienate our partners in the global antiterror coalition, most of whom insist that the current campaign be confined
to attacks on Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
A US attack on Iraq presumably would be justified on the
grounds that Iraq is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction
that threaten the world community. But there is no clear evidence
of such activities. The only way to find such evidence is by sending UN arms inspectors to Iraqa step Saddam has opposed since
1998. The best way to compel him to let inspectors in is to impose
smart sanctions of the sort proposed by Secretary of State Colin
Powell and by others who oppose the current regime of sanctions,
which inflicts great suffering on ordinary Iraqis. Any US military
action that pre-empted such an effort would invite worldwide
condemnation.
The Bush Administration enjoys strong support from Americans and the international community for the campaign against
Osama bin Laden. As Richard Falk suggests on page 23, a war limited to the destruction of Al Qaeda can be considered a just and
proportionate response to the September 11 terror attacks. But a
larger effort, aimed at any number of states and individuals with
no apparent connection to September 11, must not be viewed in
that light. Such a campaign should be denounced as a dangerous
example of mission creep, intended to further the ambitions of
certain strategists and politicians in Washington while exposing
US soldiers and the American people to additional bouts of deadly
violence.
MICHAEL T. KLARE
Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at
Hampshire College, is The Nations defense correspondent.

December 24, 2001

The Nation.

COMMENT

Cable Snooze
On the evening of Saturday, December 1, when three
PRESS bombs went off in Jerusalem, causing mass carnage,
CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all pounced on the
story, showing footage from Israeli TV accompanied
by interviews with Mideast experts. ABC and CBS
stayed with their college football games, and NBC remained
with the NBA. The contrast provided further evidence of how the
center of gravity in television news is shifting from broadcast to
cable. At any time of day or night, Americans have three newscasts they can tune into. Thats the good news. The bad is that all
three remain of pretty poor quality. Since September 11, Fox has
solidified its reputation as the most blatantly biased source of
news on TV. As Jim Rutenberg recently observed in the New York
Times, the network has become a sort of headquarters for viewers who want their news served up with extra patriotic fervor inflected by unabashed vehement support of a war effort, carried
in tough-guy declarations often expressing thirst for revenge.
Yet CNN and MSNBC are not much better. If you watch the
former for even a short while, for instance, youre likely to see retired general Don Shepperd standing before a map of the Middle
East discussing US military capabilities. Shepperd makes no effort to divorce his role as a news commentator from his position as
a former Air Force officer. Worse, CNN seems increasingly to rely
on him to comment on political matters that extend well beyond
his expertise. On a recent segment, for instance, reporter Catherine
Callaway fed the general a series of leading questions about which
countries the United States should go after next in its war on terrorism. Do you think Somalia could be a likely target? she asked.
Well, yes, Shepperd said. If youre serious about terrorism, you
have to go against Somalia at some time.
The problem extends beyond flag-waving, though. For all its
aspirations to be a global news network, CNN remains relentlessly parochial. Its anchors love to engage in happy talk, making the
network at times seem like a local TV station. Interviewing Danny
Glover about a benefit he was planning for Afghanistan, the endlessly effervescent Paula Zahn fawned all over him. Stories about
September 11, meanwhile, tend toward the mawkish. When we
went by ground zero, what went through your mind? a reporter
asked tourists aboard a Circle Line trip around Manhattan.
Even more troubling, CNN, while devoting far more time to
international affairs since September 11, has narrowed its definition of the world. In the initial weeks after the attacks, the network
made at least a token effort to explore the nature of Islam and the
politics of the Middle East. Over time, though, it has essentially
conflated foreign news with the war on terror and the fight in
Afghanistan. While obsessively covering the hunt for Osama bin
Laden, it has spent next to no time examining Third World poverty,
the exploding AIDS epidemic, the economic meltdown in Argentina or the changes sweeping Putins Russia.
MSNBC has seemed similarly fixated. In recent days, for instance, as the military campaign in Afghanistan has progressed, it
has become fascinated with the caves of Afghanistan, flashing sophisticated diagrams of underground bunkers as military experts

WATCH

describe how to penetrate them. Its daily show A Region in Conflict, meanwhile, seems largely a star vehicle for correspondent
Ashleigh Banfield. With her stylish haircut, designer glasses and
plucky reporting style, Banfield has become TVs new It girl,
but her dispatches from the field often seem cartoonish. In one
early report from Peshawar, Pakistan, she charged into a marketplace in the middle of the night to interview displaced Afghans
about their political preferences. OK, which do you support,
king, Taliban or Northern Alliance? she asked over and over,
moving restlessly from one startled subject to another, conveying
little to viewers beyond the fact that she, Ashleigh Banfield, was
willing to go out among the great unwashed at 2 in the morning.
In the past two weeks, however, MSNBC has given some sign
that it is willing to break the mold of cable news. As retired general
Anthony Zinni arrived in the Middle East on his peaceseeking
missionan event largely ignored by CNNMSNBC correspondent Gregg Jarrett began a week of on-the-ground reports
from Israel and Palestine. Peering into places TV cameras rarely
venture, Jarrett took us to a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem
that is so often targeted by nearby Palestinians that each apartment
has at least one room with bulletproof glass, where family members can gather when the shooting starts. He also filed from a
Jewish settlement in the West Bankthe first time I recall seeing such a report on American TV. Jarrett spoke with the parents
of Yaakov Mandel, the 13-year-old boy who last spring was beaten
to death while hiking in the nearby hills. Despite the guilt they
said they felt over his death, the couple expressed their determination to remain.
On the other side, Jarrett reported from a refugee camp in
Ramallah. A lot of Americans wonder why Palestinians are so
angry, he said. They feel this is their land, and that its occupied. In many areas, he went on, there are no running water, no
toilets, no jobs. At an Israeli-manned checkpoint, Jarrett highlighted the humiliations Palestinians must endure, and in Bethlehem he showed the physical scars left from ten days of occupation
by Israeli troops. One family showed him the remains of their
house after the Israelis got done with it; they were living in a tent.
Overall, Jarrett did an extraordinary job of capturing the
grievances on both sides and of showing the need for a peace settlement to end the escalating bloodshed in the region. He also
showed what cable news is capable of, if only it has the imagination, and the nerve.
MICHAEL MASSING
Michael Massing writes on press coverage of the current crisis.

Deported Disappeared?

n November 27, Samira Dahduli waited in the Amman, Jordan,

airport to pick up her husband, Ghassan, who was being deported after two months in a Denton, Texas, INS detention facility. Having lived in the States for twenty-three years, she had
arrived in Jordan just weeks before with her five children, all
US citizens, with the expectation that Ghassan would follow. But
when the flight came, she saw no sign of her husband, a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport. She was about to leave when her 15-

The Nation.

December 24, 2001

COMMENT
year-old son spotted his father surrounded by Jordanian security
and American INS agents. Her son recognized one: Donna
Chabot, an INS criminal investigator who had attended hearings in
Dallas wearing a jacket with an antiterrorism task force insignia.
Samira Dahduli returned home and waited for her husbands
call. After a week she still hadnt heard from him. I would love
to hear his voice, she said from a furnished apartment she has
rented in Amman. Friends there tell her not to worry. They need
to make sure that he is not a danger to his community, she said.
Everyone says that this is normal procedure.
If the first chapter of the 9/11 detention story was the rounding up of 1,200 people, Dahdulis case ushers in the next phase,
in which the government will decide their fate. Amnesty International believes that Dahduli is the first 9/11 deportee who could
be facing ill treatment or torture in another country, says Angela
Wright, Amnestys chief US researcher. The arrest at the Amman
gate and the accompaniment by a US task force member are
troubling and unusual, according to immigration advocates and
Dahdulis Dallas lawyer, Karen Pennington. Nobody represents
him now, said Pennington. They took him away, and now he
will be without the protections of American law, and they can
torture him as much as they want.
Dahduli had a tense relationship with the US government well
before September 11. He had been a leader of the Islamic Association for Palestine, an Illinois-based nonprofit with an office in
Texas that has been the subject of federal scrutiny for allegedly
having ties to Hamas. On September 25, 2000, federal agents
confronted Dahduli in a Wal-Mart parking lot and then threatened
to deport him, but offered to halt the proceedings if he agreed to
become an informant on the IAP and other Islamic organizations.
The FBI warned him that if he refused and was deported to Jordan,
officials there would not be so understanding, according to three
lawyers who worked on his case. Says Pennington, The FBI said
he would be treated a lot better by them than he would be by Jordanians. Elise Healy, a lawyer who represented him during the
early deportation proceedings, adds, He was perfectly willing to
give information if he had it. But he was unwilling to be a lifetime
mole. Dahduli not only rejected the governments offer but made
it public, and news of it soon appeared on the Internet. He became useless to them, says Healy. The INS began deportation
proceedings but set him free on $50,000 bond.
Meanwhile, Dahduli was pursuing several avenues in immigration court to stay in the United States. He also filed an asylum
claim, arguing that the FBI would paint him as a terrorist if he
was returned to Jordan, rendering him vulnerable to torture.
Amnesty has documented Jordans practice of torturing terrorist
suspects. In a trial last year in Jordan of Al Qaeda associates
accused of planning bombings in Israel and Jordan during the
millennium celebrations, the defendants testified that they had
falsely confessed after beatings that included shabeh (suspending the victim by the feet with arms tied behind the back) and
falaqa (lashings on the soles of their feet, sometimes followed
by dousing in salt water). In the mid-1980s, in order to penetrate
the Abu Nidal organization, responsible for 900 deaths or injuries
in twenty countries, Jordanian security moved against suspects
family members.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, INS officials revoked Dahdulis bond and arrested him on September 22 at his
home in Richardson, Texas. A few days later, news accounts
said, the name of Dahduli had turned up in an address book of
Wadih el Hage, a former personal secretary to Osama bin Laden
who was convicted in the 1998 bombings of the two US embassies in Africa. Pennington says that in the 1980s, when the
two were students in Tucson, Dahduli and el Hage were members
of the same mosque, the Islamic Center of Tucson. Later, they
had a brief encounter in 1998 at a Dallas restaurant.
In late November, Dahduli gave up his asylum claim and
agreed to be deported to Jordan. Now, in the Dallas Muslim
community, everybody is sick and worried, said a colleague at
Dahdulis mosque, where he was a leader. INS spokesman Russ
Bergeron said the INS accompanies deportees who pose a risk of
flight or a risk to public safety. He declined to comment on Dahduli and denied the possibility of torture. As a signatory of the
torture convention it is a US policy not to deport someone to a
country that there is reasonable cause to believe that person will
be tortured or physically or mentally abused, he said. (Chabots
voicemail says she wont return calls until December 11. Lynn
Ligon, INS spokesperson in Dallas, says Chabot is on leave
until then. The Jordanian Embassy did not return e-mails or calls.)
Other 9/11 detainees could encounter similar problems. The
government has reported links to Al Qaeda among only ten to fifteen detainees; the rest are being held on material-witness warrants and on immigration charges for violations like overstaying
visas or lying on documents. It is doubtful that theyll be allowed
to stay, although under the revamped responsible cooperators
program, some who offer helpful information might remain.
Many, however, will likely be deported, often to countries that
dont offer protection from interrogational abuse.
Its possible that the Jordanian government is holding Dahduli
as part of a routine check on a man with a native passport who
has been detained in the United States; or maybe Jordan has some
information on Dahduli; or Dahduli may have made an extradition deal with the United States and Jordan, in which he agreed
to work as an informant (his lawyers and wife deny this); or
perhaps, as Pennington fears, the FBI hopes to reap the benefits
of interrogation tactics that contravene US law.
Why did Dahduli decide to abandon his fight with the US
government and agree to be deported to Jordan? Pennington says
it was because his application to the United Arab Emirates took
too long, and he wanted to get out of jail. An Amnesty memo on
postSeptember 11 human rights abuses, which describes Dahdulis case without naming him, says he was shackled during contact visits, held in solitary confinement for months and allowed
only one hour of exercise per week. He seemed to be treated more
harshly than other detainees, said Wright of Amnesty. Could
Americas justice system have appeared so bereft of due process
that he preferred the possibility of torture in Amman? We had exactly that discussion, said Pennington. If he didnt end up killed
in Jordan, he thought he would be treated much more fairly there.
He thought he would get out much more quickly.
AMY BACH
Amy Bach is the Haywood Burns Fellow at the Nation Institute.