Laila Al-Arian, Huffington Post, 3 December 2007
For nearly one year, my father, Sami Al-Arian, has been imprisoned on civil contempt for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in Virginia. During plea negotiations in early 2006, federal prosecutors in Florida promised him he would not have to testify in any other cases. The moment he signed that agreement, his business with the government was supposed to have ended. He would serve the remainder of his sentence and finally be deported.
But a vindictive prosecutor from Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, resented that my father and his three co-defendants were largely acquitted by a jury following a lengthy trial in 2005. Kromberg is using every legal maneuver in his arsenal to prolong my father’s imprisonment. A U.S. Attorney in Florida admitted, during a hearing regarding the plea agreement, that the boilerplate language dealing with cooperation was deleted from my father’s agreement precisely because it was negotiated away. In Kromberg’s world, his colleagues’ words to my father, and the plea agreement both sides signed in good faith, are meaningless.