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Held in solitary confinement for three years, facing 70 years imprisonment if convicted, Hashmi coped a plea for a lesser 15 year sentence, even though he committed no crimes. Like dozens of others, he was targeted for their activism, prominence, faith, race, and ethnicity.
Since first arrested in the UK in June 2006, he been brutally treated, the past three years in merciless solitary confinement at New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the effects of which harmed his health, emotional well-being, and spirit enough to accept 15 years in federal prison despite his innocence.
On April 30, Faisal Hashmi said this about his brother:
"Earlier this week our beloved son and brother Fahad pleaded guilty to a single charge of material support for terrorism. He took the plea after spending four years in prison, three of them in complete isolation. Fahad's lawyer, David Ruhnke, said (he) "made the best deal that was available under the circumstances....the government wanted to lock him up for the rest of his life. They were not successful in that goal."
Though he may be free by age 40, "we are extremely troubled by the process that has brought us to this point. We are troubled not only for our family but by the message a case like Fahad's sends to our community. It disturbs us greatly that a young man known as a pillar of his Queens community, who worked and studied hard and who, in the tumult of growing up Muslim in America, choose a path of religious and political activism, (yet) came to be demonized as an extreme danger to the country he called home."
They bogusly called him a terrorist, tortured him in solitary confinement, and left him no choice than a one count lesser sentence, given his prospect of "going before an anonymous jury based in part on the prosecution's ugly assertion that his friends and family were as dangerous as they alleged he was."
What does this say about a nation that reigns terror on its own?
Given the barbarous treatment of innocent people, charging them with crimes they didn't commit, locking them in federal gulags for political advantage, and denying some of our most dedicated no chance for justice, America is no longer fit place to live in. For blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, the poor and disadvantaged, and today Muslims it never was nor will be as long as wealth and power trump equity, democratic freedoms, and principles that have been desecrated from the beginning.
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