Bias and The Holy Land Foundation

Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney made a very impressive speech to the Dallas Muslim Legal Fund of America. In it she discusses the Holy Land Foundation case, where the Federal government spent millions of dollars investigating and prosecuting the Muslim Holy Land Foundation only to have the Jury return a verdict of Not Guilty.

To have a verdict of Not Guilty returned in the current hysterical environment is a testament to the American system of justice.

But the fact that the prosecution took place also demonstrates the tremendous political pressure present being applied to any group seemingly trying to help the Palestinian people.

Here is a great outtake from the speech.

For eight long years, the FBI watched the Holy Land Foundation with surveillance that included illegal wiretaps. The government would have had the jury believe that the supporters and the managers of the Holy Land Foundation and just about every other Muslim organization in the United States that was tied into the litigation was guilty of a crime. Millions of dollars later, after wreaking fear and terror inside this country's Muslim community, the jury told the government what the men and women whose lives were on trial already knew. The charges leveled by the government could not stand the jury's scrutiny. So why was the allegation even leveled in the first place? Why did the press parrot the allegations without one moment of questioning whether or not the government could have been as off in its assessments of the Holy Land Foundation as it was in its estimates of pre-war Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?

Impressive stuff. But it goes on:

I would like to take a moment to follow the trail of another trial involving the sale or give-away of U.S. national security secrets to a foreign government; the name of that government is never mentioned; and the litigation never pierces the American psyche due to an effective news blackout.

Yes, what trial is that?

In case number one, a Pentagon man is found with 83 top secret documents at his home, some of them having been passed to American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who then passed them to Israel - known in the newspapers as Country A. The other case involves the outing of a CIA agent who was tracking nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. This is the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, that saw the chief of staff of the Vice President of the United States sentenced to prison, only to be later pardoned by the President!

She has a point. In terms of likelihood of spying, Israel is a much greater threat than the Muslim community.

I will discuss this more in the next post.

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