End to a Shabby Prosecution

The federal government agreed this week to terminate 20-year-old deportation proceedings against two Palestinian men who were wrongly targeted for their political beliefs and activities. Better late than never, but we fear that there is little hope that the Bush administration will learn any lesson from this shockingly mishandled prosecution.
The two legal United States residents at the center of the storm — Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh — were the remaining defendants in a travesty dating back to the Ronald Reagan administration known as the L.A. Eight case. They were arrested and marked for deportation along with six others in 1987 for supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the government lists as a terrorist group.
The key allegation was that they had distributed a magazine published by the Popular Front and raised funds for lawful charitable organizations somehow linked to the group. Yet, fairly early on, the government conceded that it had no evidence that the two defendants had ever been involved in any criminal or terrorist activity — and that had they been citizens, there would have been no grounds for their arrest.
Unfortunately, that did not stop the government from obsessively pursuing the case under four presidents.
The defendants were originally charged under provisions of the notorious 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which helped raise guilt by association to a broadly practiced dark art. In 1989, a federal court declared those provisions unconstitutional, and Congress subsequently repealed them. Still, the government pressed on, eventually moving to retroactively apply provisions of the 2001 Patriot Act that punish people who provide “material support” for terrorism.
In January, Bruce Einhorn, an immigration judge, issued a ruling denouncing the long and winding prosecution as “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” He also castigated the government’s “gross failure” to produce potentially exculpatory and other relevant information.
We would like to believe that the government’s decision to withdraw its appeal means that Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, and his colleagues were embarrassed by the case and concerned about how it has fueled distrust and anger among Arabs and Muslims. We suspect, however, that they were more concerned about getting the judicial findings of prosecutorial misconduct vacated as moot.
It’s easy to see this case as a tragic anachronism, a relic from the bad old days of the Red Scare and cold war. But the Bush administration continues to risk injuring innocent people and deflecting resources from real terrorist threats with cases built on weak allegations of guilt by association.