Al-Hussayen case called ”inversion” of legal process
MOSCOW, Idaho - The 2004 trial of University of Idaho student Sami Al-Hussayen was an inversion of the legal process, his attorneys said Monday during a discussion of the state of civil rights in the war on terrorism.
Normally, said attorney David Nevin, a crime is committed, an investigation turns up a suspect and a case is built against him. In Al-Hussayen’s case, he said, federal prosecutors had someone they were suspicious of and said, “Let’s go out and find something he’s done wrong.”
A federal jury in Boise acquitted the 34-year-old Saudi national of terrorism and immigration charges in June 2004. Al-Hussayen returned to Saudi Arabia the following month after a deal worked out with prosecutors on remaining immigration charges. He had been incarcerated 18 months, much of that time in solitary confinement in the Canyon County Jail, Nevin said.
Nevin and his partner, Scott McKay, discussed the case and its effect on Moscow and Pullman with an audience of about 70 people Monday at the UI Student Union Building. Nevin said the U.S. attorney’s office in Boise declined an invitation to speak at the event, sponsored by the UI College of Law, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights and Amnesty International.
An attempt by The Spokesman-Review to contact the U.S. attorney’s office for comment was unsuccessful late Monday.
“I’ve never seen a community come forward as this community did,” Nevin said. “This was not a good time in our country to be a Muslim, an Arab.”
But Al-Hussayen’s friends stood up for him and his family, Nevin said; they withstood interrogations by FBI agents who threatened their immigration status.
Nevin recounted the “shameful spectacle” of a news conference at which UI President Robert Hoover appeared with federal officials after Al-Hussayen’s arrest on Feb. 26, 2003. Gov. Dirk Kempthorne also appeared at the event via video conference.
Hoover said he felt “betrayed” by the Saudi graduate student, and Kempthorne used the arrest to justify barricades he had placed around the state Capitol, Nevin said, everyone ignoring presumption of innocence until a suspect is proven guilty.
Both Nevin and McKay detailed for Monday’s audience the difficulty in defending against evidence gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which voluminous transcripts of telephone calls and e-mails in Arabic were immediately classified by the federal government until four days before trial was to begin.
In the end, the government’s case was so weak, McKay said, only one defense witness was called, a former CIA agent who testified that the Islamic-American group Al-Hussayen was accused of aiding had no links to terrorism.
“The government had a strategy to come to the most law-and-order state in the country and make it a beachhead for the war on terrorism,” Nevin said. “And Idaho said, ‘No, this is not what we are all about.’”