ARTICLE: The Case of the LA8: U.S. Drops Twenty-Year Effort to Deport Arab Americans for Supporting Palestinian National Rights

Link to article:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/02/1336234

The Case of the LA8: U.S. Drops Twenty-Year Effort to Deport Arab Americans for Supporting Palestinian National Rights via Democracy Now.

The LA 8's National Lawyer's Guild Lawyer, Marc Van Der Hout, said during the radio/tv interview with Amy Goodman:
"The government, from day one, tried to use this case to establish its right to go after immigrants in this country who have done nothing illegal. William Webster, the head of the FBI, admitted when he was being confirmed for the CIA that the government had done a three-year undercover operation -- surveillance of Michel, Khader and the others -- and had come up with nothing they had done illegal, no crimes committed.

"They turned it over to immigration and said, 'Can you figure out some way to deport these people? Why? Because we don’t like their views. We don’t like what they're doing, about their supporting the rights to a Palestinian homeland and their organizing efforts in the Los Angeles community.'

"So the government went after them. As you mentioned, the first statute, the McCarran-Walter Act, was declared unconstitutional. Then Congress passed a law saying we can deport people for providing material support for terrorist organizations, and it said in furtherance of their terrorist activity. We thought, 'Great! Case over.' They had never been accused of furthering terrorist activity. But the government used that to say, we're going to try to deport people and establish the right to deport people if they raise money for humanitarian causes, distribute literature of an organization that also has a military component to it. And that’s what this case has been about since day one."

Courtesy of: SKAndi;