"Guilty Until Proven Innocent": CRS at UCLA Panel

Went to a panel discussion put on by the UCLA School of Law's Critical Race Studies Program (CRS ) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). The panel was titled, "Guilty Until Proven Innocent: A Panel Discussion of Civil Rights Abuses Against Muslim Americans and Middle Easterners," and featured three very different speakers. Each speaker spoke to how the strength of US Democracy is being threatened by the US Government because certain agencies use tactics that undermine our constitutional rights, our civil liberties, and our human rights.

Georgetown Law Professor, Dr. David Cole, discussed what he calls the US Preventive Method, highlighted in his book, Less Safe, Less Free, which are some of the methods the US Government uses to counteract terrorism. Some examples include: Preventive Detention, which is the act of detaining a suspect simply because that person might do something wrong in the future, and Preventive War, which is a unilateral attack on another country because--for example--it might have particular weapons and it might provide said weapons to terrorists. Preventive war rejects International Law because it initiates an attack on another country without there first being an imminent threat of attack. Preventive detention rejects our human and civil rights because a person is detained without evidence and are considered suspects before they commit a crime.

Cole spoke briefly of a gentleman named Maher Arar who fell victim to preventive detention and coercive interrogation. Arar, who is a Canadian citizen, was to catch a connector flight from JFK to Canada. Seems the US Government felt he was connected to Al Qaeda and--after hours of interrogation and lying to his family-appointed lawyer--shipped Arar on a government chartered jet to Jordan and then to Syria, where he was detained for a year in solitary confinement in a cell that was the size of a grave. After countless interrogations, beatings, and electric shock, Syria could not corroborate the US claim that the man was in fact tied to Al Qaeda and sent him back to Canada. The Canadian government later compensated Arar with $11.5 million for their role in his detainment.

Dr. Layla Al-Marayati, Chairperson of KinderUSA highlighted personal and anecdotal experiences of how the US Government has had Muslim-serving organizations' budgets frozen, often destroying the organizations, their local and international social activism work, and various persons' reputation because they are black-listed in the process.

The last of the speakers, Dr. Maher Hathout, spoke on something dear to me because he provided a rationale to why people in Dr. Al-Marayati's anecdotes would continue to work tirelessly in social activism despite US Government efforts to prevent their work. The principles he used were familiar to me because they're also found in the Christian bible: charity, tending to the needs of orphans, widows, and aliens, and testifying against the various injustices that people face. He highlighted that Muslim-serving organizations will not falter in their work because they believe in these exact principles.

I had to leave the event early but if you would like to see a video recording of it, click here.