Arab-American Terrorism Suspect Trapped in Legal Limbo in U.S. Jail

Mahmoud Abed Ahmad is an American citizen and is charged with no crime in this country.

For more than two years, he has languished in a Manhattan jail as governments and lawyers argued over whether he would get a fair trial in Jerusalem, where he is wanted as a “dangerously violent” member of the Abu Nidal terror network.

Israeli and American authorities believe Ahmad took part in a 1986 attack on a bus outside Tel Aviv that killed the driver and injured three Jewish settlers.

Ahmad’s lawyer, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, insists that his client is innocent and that the FBI illegally kidnaped him in South America. Clark said that an Israeli Shin Beth security squad tortured two of Ahmad’s cousins until they implicated him in the bus attack.

‘Cruel and Unusual’

“Of all the cruel and unusual punishment you could be subjected to, perhaps the worst is to be convicted of a crime you didn’t commit,” Clark said.

“If the only evidence they have is a confession that is inherently unreliable--taken by torture of another person who cannot be objectively examined--there’s no justice, search for trial or truth,” he said.

The U.S. and Israeli governments insist that they have indisputable evidence linking the 36-year-old man to the attack.

Over 28 months, a parade of legal experts and personalities have passed through the federal courthouse in Brooklyn to give their opinions on why Ahmad should or should not be sent back to Israel.

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor and legal writer, appeared for the prosecutors and the fairness of Israel’s courts. The noted Israeli civil liberties lawyer and anti-Zionist, Leah Tsemel, said that physical and emotional torture are commonly used in Israel to force prisoners to say what the authorities want to hear.

Habeas Corpus Motion

U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein is considering a writ of habeas corpus filed by Clark, and a decision could come next month. A habeas writ would put the burden of proof on the federal authorities to justify Ahmad’s continued detention.

Tsemel, born in Jerusalem several years before Israel was founded, represents hundreds of Palestinians and other Arabs who maintain that their rights are routinely trampled by Israeli security forces trying to maintain control of the Occupied Territories, seized in 1967.

“There is a stage where it’s mistreatment, and then it becomes torture,” she said of Shin Beth interrogation methods. “I don’t think all the security services men are sadists. I think they have a target--they want a confession.”

Should Weinstein decide for the government, he could well be sentencing Ahmad to such treatment by sending him to prisons that are “considered among the worst in the world,” Tsemel told the judge.

Shin Beth does have a nasty reputation, Dershowitz conceded, but he said that his studies of the Israeli legal system have found that perception to be largely hype designed to intimidate recalcitrant Palestinian suspects.

Israeli interrogators “rely very heavily on the fear that things are going to be a lot worse than they are at the interview,” he said. “Both sides have reason for wanting it to be believed that interrogation subjects are tortured.”

The state attorney for Israel, Dorit Beinish, insisted that Ahmad--charged with murder, attempted murder, attempted arson and other crimes--will be treated fairly, tried in civil court by a three-judge panel and not held under the harsh conditions common in the jails of the Occupied Territories.

Ahmad, whom Israeli authorities sometimes call Mahmoud Abed Atta, is charged with taking part in an April 12, 1986, attack in which three men--allegedly him and his two cousins--hurled Molotov cocktails and then fired machine guns on a bus carrying Jewish settlers in the Occupied West Bank.

Became U.S. Citizen

Ahmad was born in the West Bank town of Ramala and became a U.S. citizen seven years ago. His last job was at his brother’s gasoline station in Puerto Rico. According to travel documents, he was visiting his family near Ramala at the time of the attack, but he denies that he was involved.

A month later, when his visa expired, Ahmad left Israel and traveled to Europe and then New York in an unsuccessful effort to get a visa extension so he could return to Ramala, where his wife and children were living, Clark said in an interview.

Ahmad then went to Venezuela. For the next several months, as Israeli authorities mounted an international search for him, Ahmad made frequent trips to Spain, Cyprus, Colombia and Mexico to address gatherings of Palestinians.

He was arrested entering Caracas on April 27, 1987, but because Venezuela has no extradition treaty with Israel he was handed over--illegally, Clark maintains--to the FBI. Agents hustled him onto a flight to New York, and U.S. authorities arrested him once he was within American jurisdiction. Since then he has been held without bail at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

Ahmad was likely involved in the attack, a federal magistrate and a federal judge in Brooklyn agree; but they disagree as to what should be done with him.

In June, 1988, Magistrate John L. Caden found that the attack had a “political objective” and thus was outside the jurisdiction of the U.S.-Israel extradition treaty. He also said the way the FBI nabbed Ahmad and put him in an American jail was unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman later reversed Caden. In his sharply worded ruling, he said that the magistrate had applied “erroneous legal standards” and that his findings were “plainly erroneous.”

Korman ruled that Ahmad could be returned to Israel has been appealed before Weinstein.