A Brief Chronology of My Rights Abuse in United States

Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Ph.D.

Author of Looking For Rights At Harvard

Over the past 25 years, my civil, constitutional, and human rights have been
systematically violated, despite the fact that I am a political scientist with
extensive publications. On four separate occasions, I have suffered the pain and
humiliation of false arrest and imprisonment, head injuries, and the related public
defamation that usually goes along such unpleasant experiences. On all four
occasions, I have proved my innocence and have been fully exonerated. The
following is a brief chronology of these egregious instances of rights abuse that I
have repeatedly brought to the attention of human rights organizations since
1996. As a victim of rights abuse, this writing is to educate the public about the
horrendous and painful injustices that I have suffered repeatedly in a country that
professes to stand for freedom and equal justice.

Episode One: Arrest by Harvard police on extortion and death threat charges, in
January, 1996. A dozen Harvard cops raided my home in Newton, Massachusetts
at early morning hours falsely accusing me of making death threats and extorting
money from two Harvard employees. They convinced a Cambridge judge that I
was so dangerous that I should be denied bail and I spent the next nine days in
jail, meanwhile they held a press conference at Harvard police headquarters and
broadcast to the world their major round up of a dangerous criminal, without
bothering to mention that I was a former Harvard scholar and a university
professor, whose only sin was to file a complaint against a Harvard professor who
had vilified me with Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes.” Subsequently, Mr. Wallace
testified on my behalf and confirmed that the professor, Roy Mottahedeh, had
lied to him about me and he called Mottahedeh a “pathetic liar.” The so-called
victims were Mottahedeh’s assistants who were quickly whisked out of US after
being used as patsy against me. A month later, all the charges against me were
dropped and, having lost my teaching job due to the adverse publicity, I had no
choice but to commence a civil rights law suit in the federal court in Boston that
went to jury trial for ten days exactly three years after my wrongful and
retaliatory arrest. Two handwriting experts found that the Harvard detective on
trial had notes that matched that of the “extortionist,” thus proving my
conspiracy claim that there was no crime and I had been arrested based on
trumped-up charges. The judge excluded their findings after initially allowing it
and stating on record, “this is so critical it can win the case,” and then went on to
make sure I had no chance to win against the mighty Harvard. I then took
Harvard to US Supreme Court and lost narrowly, 5 to 4, in early 2002. To this
date, Harvard has refused to apologize to me for subjecting a Middle East scholar
to the horrifying experience of a false arrest. Since then I was, and remain, on
Harvard’s black list, facing numerous setback, such as when one of their cronies
convinced the Middle East Institute to withdraw a fellowship for me, leading
Wallace and historian Zinn to write protest letters to the Institute, reproduced in
my book, Looking For Rights At Harvard. Not only the arrogant Harvard did not
apologize, they delegated the next episodes of my rights abuse to the capable
hands of Cambridge police, that nearly killed me in 2010.

Episode Two: False arrest by Cambridge police, who nearly killed me like Freddie
Gray in Baltimore in the back of a pattywagon. This time the excuse for my false
arrest was that I had not paid a 1986 ticket out of Newton, which turned out I had
and there was absolutely no reason for my arrest, and then the Cambridge cops
took me to their station and held overnight without allowing me one phone call,
and then the next morning they separated me from other inmates and put me in
the back of a police wagon with my hands cuffed tightly from behind and nothing
to hold onto, then they sped on the highway and slammed the brake so that my
body would go flying into a middle iron bar. It was a miracle that I did not break
my neck and I ended up in Cambridge hospital with multiple bruises. A few days
later I went before a judge in Newton who told me the record showed I had paid
that old ticket and there was no reason for my arrest. I then complained to
Cambridge newspapers that covered it on the front page two weeks in a row. Yet,
despite the glaring false arrest without any basis whatsoever, the Cambridge
police never apologized and, instead, became even more determined to harm me
for daring to criticize them.
Episode Three: Arrest by Cambridge Police based on false harassment charges.
The sequel to Cambridge Police’s gross misconduct against me featured a waitress
and her mother being used to cry foul against me, by claiming that I had harassed
them by calling and texting them several times a day for several months. When I
threatened to sue my accusers for levelling absurd charges, after extensive
discovery that showed not a single text and or phone call be me to either of them,
a Cambridge judge ordered me arrested and held without bail. After a few days
however, another judge, more sympathetic to the cause of justice, ordered me
released and then the charges against me were dropped and I sued both
Cambridge police and the two female they had used as patsy in the federal court
in Boston, resulting in an out of court settlement and a letter of apology to me. A
clue to the horrible ordeal I suffered in this episode, it took 5 court orders to get
the telephone record of my accusers, who kept giving the wrong name for their
telephone company, each time chewing up a few weeks, until they ran of out of
option and we finally got the records that proved their false accusation. At one
point, I went to Cambridge police to get the incident report and a clerk at the
records office told me that I had back to back arrest records – that had never
happened and had been maliciously created to smear me. Such is the horrendous
Orwellian state of affairs in America that their police departments are capable of
creating false arrest and even conviction records for someone targeted by them
and get away with it. After I protested publicly, their records office finally cleared
the “clerical error.”

Episode Four: 51 days in solitary confinement over an unpublished email

criticizing the unjust legal system. Shocking but true, in late 2014, I spent 51
grueling days in solitary confinement at a facility in Billerica, Massachusetts, solely
because I was accused of violating a gag order by a judge in a civil dispute with an
Arab restaurant owner in Cambridge. To elaborate, I had initiated a talk by my old
friend M.I.T. professor and peace activist Noam Chomsky at Andala Restaurant
and, sadly, it coincided with ISIS mayhem in Syria and Iraq, which had poisoned
some Arab minds. Professor Chomsky has written a notarized letter confirming
the basic facts of this case. At one point, my lawyer informed me that due to a
clerical error, there had been an arrest warrant issued for me and he immediately
cleared it the next day. I was upset over it however and sent an email to Chomsky
and a few others in the middle of night criticizing the racism in Cambridge court
houses. A prosecutor immediately convinced the judge that my email constituted
a violation of the gag order and the judge ordered me held without bail, for 51
days, until the justice of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court vacated it and
wrote that the gag order was unconstitutional and I had simply exercised my
freedom of speech.
I ask the readers to pause and ask themselves, what kind of country throws a
published author and professor in jail for exercising his 1 st Amendment right to
freedom of speech? A free and democratic country or a repressive police state? I
suppose I ought to be thankful of the appellate judges who freed me, but then
again what can compensate for all the pain and humiliation of being thrown in jail
and repeatedly taken to court in triple handcuffs and foot chains like a modern
slave, just because the Kafkaesque DA and judge were blind to my basic
constitutional rights. The massive pile of rights abuse and injustice against me
would be a cause for a huge outcry had these happened in another country,
particularly one deemed as adversary, yet the compliant US media has never even
bothered to raise an eyebrow over my atrocious rights abuse that, over the past
25 years, have acquired a cyclical pattern about them, transpiring every four or
five years, each time inflicting serious harm to me. In this fourth episode, I also
suffered another head injury while being transported to and from the court,
which was a subject of my subsequent law suit – that was dismissed after two
years because the perpetrators enjoyed “immunity” under the law. In other
words, they can commit human rights abuse and there is absolutely no
accountability. My sad mistreatments under the guise of law and order simply
reinforce the fact that United States of America operates more by the darkly
Kafkaesque principles than anything else.