I'm currently traveling around the US on a speaking tour, and as I've written before, one of the prime benefits of doing that is being able to meet people and their families whose lives have been severely harmed by the post-9/11 assault on basic liberties. Doing that prevents one from regarding these injustices as abstractions, and ensures that the very real human costs from these government abuses remain vivid.
Such is the case with the treatment of Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer who just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the "crime" of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives in Iraq - including his blind mother - during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family's suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.
Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi's son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi's son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master's student in MU's School of Journalism. The travesty of this case - and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family - is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.
Hamoodi came with his wife to the US in 1985 to work toward his PhD in nuclear engineering from MU and, not wanting to return to the oppression of Saddam's regime, stayed in the US. He was offered a research professor position at the university, proceeded to have five American-born children, all of whom he and his wife raised in the Columbia community, and then himself became a US citizen in 2002.
But US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jones about the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime "killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history".
The sanctions regime decimated Hamoodi's family. His elderly blind mother was unable to buy basic medication. His sister, one of 11 siblings back in Iraq, suffered a miscarriage because she was unable to buy $10 antibiotics. His brother, a surgeon, was earning the equivalent of $2 per month and literally unable to feed his family.
Hamoodi was earning a very modest salary at the time of roughly $35,000 per year from the university, but - as would be true for any decent person of conscience - could not ignore the extreme and growing suffering of his family back in Iraq. Because sending money into Iraq from the US was physically impossible, he set up a bank account in Jordan and proceeded to make small deposits into it. From that account, small amounts of money - between $20 and $100 - were dispersed each month to his family members.
When other Iraqi nationals in his Missouri community heard of his helping his family, they wanted to help theirs as well. So Hamoodi began accepting similar amounts of money from a small group of Iraqis and ensured those were disbursed to their family members suffering under the sanctions regime. From 1993 until 2003, when the sanctions regime was lifted after the US invasion, Hamoodi sent an average of $25,000 each year back to Iraq, totaling roughly $250,000 over the decade: an amount that fed and sustained the Iraqi relatives of 14 families in Columbia, Missouri, including his wife's five siblings.
Nobody, including the US government, claims that these amounts were intended for anything other than humanitarian assistance for his family and those of others in his community. Everyone, including the US government, acknowledges that these funds were sent to and received only by the intended recipients - suffering Iraqi family members - and never got anywhere near Saddam's regime, terrorist groups, or anything illicit. As a Newsweek article on the Hamoodi case made clear:
"The cash . . . was doled out mostly in dribs and drabs, even the authorities concede; $40 a month to the son of a friend trying to eat while attending medical school, $80 to Hamoodi's blind mother. There was no suggestion that Hamoodi . . . aided terrorists, or that the money wound up in Saddam Hussein's hands; his elaborate email trail served as receipts, as tidy as his bookkeeping at the store.
"'I would get messages from my sisters, I have 11 siblings,' he says, as he shares a somber meal - piquant red peppers from South Africa, French cheeses, crusty baklava - with his wife and sons at the long dining room table. 'They would be starving. Starving. So I did what anyone, any American, would do.'"
But in 2002 and 2003, Hamoodi was not just a nuclear engineer. He was also a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration's plan to attack Iraq. And his position as a nuclear engineer made him a particularly potent threat to the case for that invasion, as he continuously insisted that Saddam did not have an active nuclear weapons program and that the case for the war was grounded in lies. In his antiwar activism, he emphasized how much already-suffering Iraqi civilians would suffer more, and how the invasion would lead to mass instability.
On 18 September 2006, two of Hamoodi's children, Owais, then 17, and his college-aged sister Lamees, were at home when there was a knock on the door. Owais answered and saw two FBI agents who stood there, and behind them were 35 armed federal agents, many with guns drawn, from ten different federal law enforcement agencies. They told him they had a search warrant to search their home and then entered.
"We wanted to stay and watch what they did, but they told us we had to leave because they claimed they had nobody to keep an eye on us", Owais told me, noting again that 35 agents were present. The agents spent 9 hours in Hamoodi's home alone and unsupervised. They took every passport they found, all identification (including the learner's permit of Owais' 15-year-old brother, who was left without any identification), family heirlooms, photo albums, and boxes of documents. They even insisted that Owais give them his calculator that he used for algebra class on the ground that it had memory potential. To date - six years later - the family has received none of those materials back.
The massive, flamboyant FBI raid on Hamoodi's home predictably generated substantial media coverage in his community. "FBI agents today searched the home of a Columbia businessman and former Iraqi who has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq," read the first line of a long article in the local Columbia Daily Tribune. "People of course automatically assumed terrorism", said Owais.
Several years later, Hamoodi was finally indicted and for the first time learned of his "crime": that, as this excellent Inside Columbia article on his case put it, he "ran afoul of a couple of Gulf War-era executive orders, an act of Congress and Treasury Department regulations" banning the sending of any money to Iraq.
From the start, Hamoodi fully cooperated with federal investigators. He readily admitted that he had sent the money to Iraq to help his starving family and those of other families in Columbia. Calling it a "crime of compassion", he pled guilty to the charge of engaging in "a conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act".
Owais says his father's guilty plea was accompanied by the near certainty that he would receive no jail time. "There were like five other cases involving much greater amounts sent to Iraq, some with accusations that the money had reached the regime, and very light sentences were given, including by the same judge in my father's case, who had just given another Iraqi national probation for having sent more money than my father." Moreover, delays in the proceedings meant that the sentencing hearing was not going to occur until the Summer of 2012 -- nine years after the sanctions expired, and nine years after Hamoodi had sent his last payment back to Iraq.
But on 16 May 2012, Hamoodi stood before US District Judge Nanette Laughrey, a Clinton appointee, as she sentenced him to three years in a federal penitentiary - only two years less than the maximum sentence under federal sentencing guidelines for this offense - followed by three years probation. Hamoodi's son-in-law, Amir Yehia, was at both his father-in-law's sentencing hearing and the one of another Iraqi national who had received probation from Judge Laughrey just four months earlier for a similar offense. "This time, it was like she was a totally different person," he told me. "I don't know if she was pressured or had received pushback after the probation she gave in the other case, but it was amazing how completely different she was at his hearing."
In a country that has stood by while torturers, government kidnappers, and Wall Street thieves have been completely protected - to say nothing of those who aggressively attacked Iraq - Judge Laughrey, as recounted by Inside Columbia, invoked the mandates of the "rule of law" to explain why Hamoodi, now 60, would have to spend the next three years in a federal prison despite having harmed absolutely nobody:
"'He obviously has a model family, a lovely family, lovely children . . . I am sure it is largely as a result of your leadership in the family,' [the judge] told [Hamoodi]. 'But I have also had to take into account what you did . . . you disagreed with the law, and you decided not to comply with the law. That does not show respect for the rule of law, which is the foundation of this country.'"
The lawyer from the Obama justice department - the same agency that shielded all Bush-era criminals from even an iota of accountability on the ground that we must "Look Forward, not Backward" - invoked the same rationale for why Hamoodi must be punished for the payments he sent to his suffering family nine years ago:
"'It's easy to say it's all in the rearview mirror, the sanctions have expired[', said Garrett M. Heenan]. 'But it is still a serious crime, and the larger United States government interests in having sanctions and, moreover, having people in the United States - citizens - abide by the requirements of [the] Treasury [Department] and not violate those sanctions is an important thing that the United States would seek to promote."
As of three weeks ago - beginning on 28 August - Hamoodi is now at Fort Leavenworth, where he just began serving his three year sentence. Yehia, his son-in-law, says that he is holding up reasonably well but is extremely worried about how his family will manage. Owais says that he's most concerned about his youngest brother, now in the tenth grade: "That's a really vulnerable time for a kid, and now he has to live it with his father gone, in prison."
As harrowing as this is, these stories are incredibly common in American Muslim communities. But what makes this case particularly horrific is that the suffering Hamoodi sought to alleviate was caused by the very same US government that is now imprisoning him for his humanitarianism.
The reason his relatives were starving and living in abject misery was precisely because the US government enforced years of brutal sanctions. To have that same government then turn around and punish him for the "crime" of helping his family members survive is warped sadism. I really don't see how prosecutors and judges who participate in these sorts of travesties can live with themselves. Worse, US officials who twice completely destroyed Iraq - first with the sanctions regime, then with an aggressive war - are permitted to thrive in freedom and enrich themselves. As one local activist, Jeff Stack, wrote after Hamoodi received his shocking sentence:
"Who will truly be served by incarcerating our friend Shakir Hamoodi? Certainly not his wife and their five children, who collectively exemplify what is most hopeful and encouraging about this nation. They are hard-working and high-achieving contributing citizens. Three of their children have completed undergraduate degrees. Two of them finished master's programs and one is attending medical school. The youngest two are in college and high school."Society won't benefit by his costly imprisonment, which will leave a painful void in our community. He poses no threat. . . . The [Newsweek] article notes Justice Department officials provided the reporter a list of seven individuals who have been incarcerated for violating sanctions. The 59-year-old Columbia resident stands out as the only one facing prison for undertaking purely humanitarian actions and taking nothing for himself."
Hamoodi's family has now placed all of their hopes in trying to persude President Obama, or whoever is in the Oval Office after the election, to pardon him or at least commute his sentence. A petition has been created and currently has over 3,000 signatures; you can and, I hope will, add your name here. You can also donate to help his family on this page.
The 9/11 attack was exploited to create what New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal has accurately described as "a separate justice system for Muslims". These are the kinds of horrific injustices which that separate - and decidedly not equal - system routinely creates.
Speaking tour
The event in which I participated last night at the University of Missouri Law School on America's civil liberties abuses was truly excellent. There will be a video of the event online shortly, but in the meantime, here is a good newspaper account of what took place, along with a Q-and-A I did on related issues. Over the next week, I'll be doing similar events in Detroit, San Jose, Dallas and Northern New Jersey for the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms and the Muslim Legal Defense Fund; event information is here.