-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peace be upon those who follow the guidance,
====
Victims of the American Inquisition III - The Voice of Truth Cannot Remain Silent in the Face of Evil
---
In the Name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Bestower of Mercy, I write.
What you are about to read is the third, and perhaps final piece regarding the gross injustice committed by agencies of the American government as well as my own family in regards to their stealing my wife's and my child from us on grounds that an American child ought not be allowed to be exposed to Islam, even if it means tearing him from the ones who love him the most. The reason it may be the final piece is that I have been informed that my mother has sought a court order requiring us to be silent regarding her crimes, on grounds that she claims it would be endangering the child whom she stole from us with her lies and treachery. Previously, I was deliberately leaving her actions and role in this crime unmentioned, hoping that perhaps with time she would understand the great wrong she has committed, but this is clearly not going to occur, unless Allah wills, so there is no point remaining silent any longer.
+|Background|+
For a more full understanding of the situation, the reader is advised to read the previous posts related to this issue entitled "Victims of the American Inquisition" (I & II), but, by the will of our Lord, I will proceed to offer an overview of the situation for more clarity.
My name is Abu Talhah Zakariyya Chesser Al-Amriiki (legally "Zachary Adam Chesser") and on July 21st, 2010, I was arrested in the United States for providing material support to the military of the government of Somalia which is known as Al-Shabaab. I had also been partially in charge of affairs with a website known as Revolution Muslim which promoted Islamic governance and education around the world. As a part of this, I orchestrated a campaign designed to raise awareness of the fact that a popular television show named "South Park" had dedicated two entire episodes to mocking the Prophet Muhammad, sallAllaahu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings from Allah be upon him), as well as the Islamic ruling regarding it. The American government construed my campaign as constituting threats of violence against the creators of the show as well as the solicitation of their murder, so they charged me with these activities.
After having spent a month or two in prison, the prosecution began to threaten my wife with charges of putting the wrong address on a passport application for our son. We did not have a mailbox, so we could not use our living address on the form. There was no fraudulent or criminal intent involved in this, but we were never given keys to the mailbox where we lived. In fact, the government actually accused my wife of using her friend's address instead of her mother's address, alleging that this was the devious element of the action. What makes this point ridiculous is that what they claimed she should have done (write her mother's address on the form) is also technically fraud, because we were not living with her mother either.
They then began to threaten her with other charges which probably would not have stood up in court, but which carried large possible penalties if she was convicted of them. This is just one of their tactics to force someone to plead guilty. Even in my own case, the prosecutor admitted that many of the charges he was threatening me with would not stand up in court, but he claimed that at least some of them would. In fact, the only reason they even bothered with my wife was to pressure me to plead guilty and cooperate.
My wife and I did not want to risk that our son would be given away to people who would not raise him as a Muslim, as both of us have only non-Muslim parents and our son would have gone to one of them, so we worked out a deal with the government where my wife would plead guilty to making a false statement to the police (the "false statement" was not actually a false statement, but we did not really care about this as we were just trying to protect our son), and in exchange for them giving her no jail time, I would plead guilty to three charges for which I wound up receiving twenty-five years in prison as a sentence. A further part of her deal was that she would leave the country, as she was not a citizen of the United States.
This deal ensured that we would not see each other again until at least the year 2032, unless Allah wills. All of this was to protect our little boy, Talhah, and to guarantee he would be raised by the same woman who gave birth to him and sacrificed so much for him. My own attorneys even mentioned this at my sentencing despite the fact that the court is almost always looking to hear that a defendant pled guilty, because he felt bad about what he did, not because he was forced to by threats against his family. Of course, I am still grateful to my Lord who has favored me above much of His creation, and despite these trials, I have many many blessings in my life.
+|Barbara Chesser|+
In December, 2010, shortly before my wife was to be sentenced to zero jail time, my mother, Barbara Chesser, sued for custody of our one year old son, Talhah. The following is an overview of my life with her:
My childhood with my mother began rather normally, and it remained so until I was about ten years old. It was at this time that my family moved back to Virginia from Missouri and my parents got a divorce. My mother, essentially immediately called up a woman whom she knew from back in Missouri, "married" her, and had her move in with us. This woman's name was Stacy Anderson and both she and my mom are prosecutors in Washington, D.C.
Anderson was what one might call the "butch" member of the couple, and she was also a terrible alcoholic. Virtually every single night, she would drink wine until she was intoxicated. She also used to curse excessively, and do many other things which were detrimental to any child living in the same house as her. At first, she kept her distance from my brother and I, but gradually she began to assume the duties that belong to a parent until she was handling more of our affairs than my own mother.
By the time I got into high school, the situation had grown extremely difficult with my mother's girlfriend. Virtually every singly day I spent at my mother's house would be conclude with Anderson drunkenly screaming at me over some little thing I did or did not do. Sometimes, as is the case with all kids, I would actually have done something to merit such a response, but most of the time I would be getting screamed at over something like accidentally letting the cat get outside or not remembering to clean my plate after dinner.
I really was not that bad of a kid by American standards. I did not sneak out of the house, go to parties, do drugs or even drink. In fact, when my little brother started using drugs, I used to go into his room myself and do the job of my parents by taking them and throwing them in the trash and then lecturing him about it. This had nothing to do with my mother's parenting, and it was basically just a part of the character I had picked up on my own, and the praise belongs to Allah. I was a bit forgetful of my chores and I had a tendency to fight with my parents in the way that is typical of teenagers, but the vast majority of my fights, and certainly the worst of them, were with Stacy Anderson while she was intoxicated from drinking alcohol.
In school, I had a B+ average, very good SAT scores, and was initially accepted into the honors program at the college I attended (it is a long story how I was "unaccepted" from that program). I even completed a significant amount of my college credits while still in high school, by the grace of Allah.
I received "Scholar Athlete" awards, graduated with honors, and just about everything a person could do without doing very much homework or studying (by the way, if any youth are reading this, not doing your homework and not studying are big mistakes, and it is not something to brag about as kids often do). Allah blessed me with a decent intellect, so I was still able to achieve high marks while not doing very much of the work at the facility I was attending. Often, my mother or Anderson would review my assignments before I would turn them in, and it was not infrequent that I would be screamed at for papers and projects I would later receive perfect marks on, because either my mother or her girlfriend thought they were not sufficient.
In her drunken fits, Anderson would usually verbally insult me, curse at me and say things which I will not repeat. Occasionally she would even threaten violence, tell me she could "kick my a**," or challenge me to fight her. My mother would usually just break down crying in the middle of our fights. Obviously she understood on at least some level that she was letting someone abuse her child in order to satisfy her own earthly desires, but the sympathy she might have held for me did not outweigh her love for her own self. I always thought this was strange considering that Anderson treated her like garbage too, threatening constantly to throw her, my brother and me out of the house and onto the street, abusing her verbally, and much more.
I was the "scapegoat" for Anderson's alcoholism, so I bore the brunt of her disease, but my little brother would from time to time tell me he was thinking about committing suicide because of her.
Once, Anderson assaulted my father while she was drunk, such that my father refused to allow her in his house after that. This is actually something I never knew about until it came out in the trial over my son Talhah. I only knew that my father had banned her from entering his house which my mom then tried to use to make him look like a bad person whenever she would talk to me about him.
Toward the end of my time in high school, matters between Anderson and myself reached an apex, and our fights were growing increasingly frequent and severe. One night, and it was actually the same night on which I resolved to become a Muslim, I got a call from a friend that their older sibling, had broken down and resolved to commit suicide due to some issues with their family. I spent the night in an extremely frantic state trying to talk them out of it, trying to calm them down, and I even called the police to try to have them intervene when they had reached a point where there seemed like there was nothing else to do.
I requested to be allowed to go to my friend to give them a place to stay where they would be safe until they could calm down, but Anderson, who was severely intoxicated, refused. This was after I graduated from high school, so there was nothing in particular I had to be doing the next day. When I tried to convince her to allow me to go to them, she became belligerent and started screaming at me, insulting me, and showering verbal abuses upon me. She became so irrational that it is hard to describe. She shut herself in the basement and just kept cursing at me while I tried to save my friend over the phone.
This fight, and the ones we had engaged in over this period, were so bad that my mother decided that I should no longer live with her. Of course, she understood that Anderson was an alcoholic (although she lied about this in court, and said that Anderson was not), and that it was her who was committing the vast majority of transgressions, but her solution was not to get rid of the one who was abusing her child. No, her solution was to get rid of her child instead, so after that night, I lived with my father until I moved out and began living on my own.
I became Muslim just a few short days after this occurred.
During this period my mother continued to have a relationship with me, albeit a somewhat distant one, until I got married to my wife, Umm Talhah. I got married while I was still in college in order to protect myself from falling into sins, but my mother could not accept this, so she stopped talking to me and cut me off financially which negated the possibility of me finishing college. I was not attending class very much at that point anyway, because I had other plans, but she did not know that when she decided to cut me off.
Shortly after this, I came down with something called Crohn's disease, which is potentially, although not usually, fatal. When this happened my mother began speaking to me a little bit again, although she did virtually nothing in terms of supporting me or my family in any other way than this. Before my son Talhah was born, she gave us a few gifts to help with raising him, but the extent of her interest in our son is best expressed by her request that my wife just "send her a picture" when he was born, even though we lived fifteen minutes away. All of Talhah's other grandparents, although they are not Muslims, were far more supportive, visited him in the hospital, and helped in many other ways.
Thereafter, my mother refused to visit our son, because I would not violate the teachings of my religion by being around her girlfriend. In court, she lied and said I would not let Talhah be with her, because of her girlfriend, but the truth is that she refused, because she wanted to make a statement about her "right" to be gay. She protested my not visiting her with her girlfriend present by refusing to visit her grandson. I am sure the FBI has some recording of her saying this, probably more than one, because she said it on a phone they were bugging, but they will never prosecute her for lying in order to take a Muslim child.
This period continued for a while, until the incident with South Park took place, and she refused to speak with me again until I got arrested. What upset her the most was a mistaken article written by a journalist at Fox News which claimed I lived with her. She thus received dozens of phone calls from people who wanted to threaten to kill me, but instead called her up at her home. In response, her girlfriend called me up, again on a phone which was being recorded by the FBI, and threatened to murder me. My mother's voice is in the recording telling Anderson not to say what she was saying, but in court my mother later denied having knowledge of Anderson's threats. This is clearly a lie, and the FBI knows about it, but they will never prosecute her for lying in order to take a Muslim child.
Despite the fact that Anderson had threatened to murder me, and my mother had told me she would never speak to me again, I e-mailed the journalist with Fox to tell him he had made a mistake which was causing people who had nothing to do with the South Park issue a lot of problems. He then fixed the article. However, despite later being informed that I did this, my mother apparently decided to lie to an attorney who was supposedly representing my son - it seemed more like she was just representing my mother -, because this attorney claimed in court that I had posted my mother's information on "Jihadist" websites in an effort to have her killed, and, according to her, this is why my mother stopped speaking to me.
Truly, this was the most ridiculous lie which was mentioned in court in order to steal our child, but nobody challenged it at all. It was just accepted without scrutiny. The FBI knows that this was a lie. They have recordings of me informing my mother of the things related to what occurred with Fox News, but of course, they would never arrest anyone for lying in order to take a Muslim child.
When I was eventually arrested, my mother agreed to communicate with me again, and she finally decided she was willing to visit her grandson, Talhah. However, this was apparently just part of a scheme to steal our child from us.
+|Stealing our Child - The Beginning|+
In October, 2010 my wife and I pled guilty to the charges mentioned previously. She was scheduled to be sentenced to leaving the country voluntarily in January of the following year, while my sentencing was supposed to be in February. My wife was not allowed to leave until she had been sentenced due to some silly court formality.
My wife could not return to Uganda, because I was associated with Al-Shabaab which was at war with them, and coincidentally I was supposed to be arriving in Uganda literally just after Al-Shabaab had carried out an attack on their homeland during the World Cup. I was not tied to this in any way, and it was just a case of unfortunate timing. Due to this, and the fact that my case was very widely reported on in Uganda, there was a strong likelihood that my wife could be tortured or killed by the government if she were to return to her native land. Further, even if the government were to leave her alone, it would not be safe for her to be around the general people there.
We expressed this to my mother, because we did not suspect her of having ulterior motives in regard to her dealings with us and our child. We also informed her at some point that we were having trouble finding a location for my wife to move to. Thus, in December, my mother filed an emergency motion to take Talhah from us, and it was scheduled for the day before my wife's sentencing. However, despite her filing it in December, we were not informed of it until just about a week or so before the hearing was supposed to take place. My mother filed for custody on grounds that my wife was likely to be tortured or killed if forced to return to Uganda. She claimed that due to the fact that my wife did not yet have a visa, she was likely to be forced back to her homeland where she would most likely suffer torture and/or death at the hands of her government.
By Allah, there has never been a day in my life which was more difficult than the one on which I got word that my mother had filed for custody of my son. I have been through arrest, through being told I was facing life in prison, through then being told that the government was targeting my wife, through many things, but nothing was ever as difficult as this. What my wife went through is not even describable. And I praise Allah who has favored me above much of His creation, who prevented any further harm, and who blessed me and my family tremendously.
My mother did not know - because she did not ask - that we had found a place for my wife and Talhah to go to. We found that Jordan's visa application process was likely to accept my wife, and we had four different groups of people who were willing to care for her once she got there. As far as we could tell, she and Talhah ought to have been safe to travel to Jordan. First they approved Talhah, then they approved my wife. However, when we told this to my mother, she refused to drop the suit. Her alleged reason for trying to take our child was no longer valid, but she did not seem to care. It did not bother her that she was crushing the heart of a woman who had been through more than she could imagine. It did not matter that she was breaking her own son. She just wanted to take our child.
+|Sending Talhah to Jordan Early|+
We were not willing to risk going to court and having a bigoted judge rule in my mother's favor just because he hated Islam. My mother's reason for filing for custody was clearly no longer valid, but the American family courts are one of the most horribly unjust bodies in the world, and we had no faith in the court to rule fairly, even by their own standards. It was these same courts that took a child from his mother for years, because she was a soldier in their own army, and thus they said she was unfit to care for her own child! What then if the child's parent was associated with an enemy army, much less their own? Thus we decided to try to send our son to Jordan before my wife was to be sentenced, and this way we thought that at the very least we would prove my mother's argument incorrect, because my son would be overseas and safe already.
We arranged to have our son leave early with the mother of a friend of ours. This woman was a non-Muslim American, but somehow in court she turned into a random Jordanian woman nobody knew anything about. In the first part of this series, an affidavit from her is included with the name signed "Umm Julaybeeb," but this is only written this way to respect her privacy. Actually, her real name is about the most generically American sounding name you could come up with, and sounds nothing like an Islamic name whatsoever. Anyway, the issue of her religion or nationality ought not have been an issue, but it was turned into one in court, and again lies were just haphazardly accepted as evidence to take Talhah from me and his mother.
The main details of this story are included previously, but basically what happened was Umm Julaybeeb was followed by U.S. Marshalls from Tallahassee, Florida to my wife's residence in Northern Virginia where she picked up Talhah. Then she was followed to JFK International Airport in New York City. At this airport, she was confronted by the FBI, Secret Service, NYPD, TSA, and Port Authority, harassed severely, had her cell phone taken, and she went through numerous other ordeals. They expressed very clearly that they were not going to be allowing her to leave the country with Talhah, despite the fact that they told her it was perfectly legal for her to go ahead.
Prior to this they had called my mother and told her what was going on. They asked her for legal advice, despite the fact that she knows nothing about family court and that she is also clearly biased, and she told them that she considered it to be a violation of the court's order. In fact, it was not a violation of the court's order, because the court did not issue any order regarding Talhah, but the American government did not care about this, and they spent Allah knows how many tens of thousands of dollars trying to prevent my son from leaving the country.
My mother agreed to drop her suit if we told Umm Julaybeeb not to leave with Talhah, so we eventually got a hold of her through the government's harassment and called the whole thing off. However, my mother was just lying (as usual) and refused to drop her petition for custody.
+|Court Agreement|+
The day before my wife was to be allowed to leave the country, the hearing was held, and my mother agreed to non-suit her petition for custody in exchange for an agreement where my wife would give temporary joint custody to her own mother until she was safely settled overseas, whereupon her mother was required to return to her our son. Somehow my mother also had the court order that she be given visitation rights during this period.
+|Attempted Torture and Murder|+
Something my wife and I did not know at the time was that my mother's girlfriend, Stacy Anderson, had sent the Jordanian government an e-mail in an attempt to prevent my wife from being able to settle in that country. She did this after Talhah arrived back in Virginia from the canceled flight out of New York, so it had nothing to do with her trying to prevent that from occurring, and this was admitted to in court. There was no attempt made to hide the fact that Anderson was trying to prevent my wife from being able to travel to Jordan safely.
This is particularly significant, because my mother had expressed explicitly numerous times that the whole justification for her continuing with her custody petition was due to the fact that she believed that if my wife was not able to settle in Jordan, or if she was denied entry at the airport, then she would be forced to return to Uganda where her life would be in danger. Her girlfriend was also of the same disposition. Therefore, Anderson's attempt to force my wife to return to Uganda can only be construed as an attempt to have her tortured or killed. Whether she was doing this specifically with the intent to have my wife taken out of the picture by torture, illegal imprisonment, or murder, or she was simply trying to spite her by doing something carelessly that was likely to cause this, what she did constitutes an attempt to inflict serious harm or death upon my wife, and it does not matter whether or not it was out of negligence or a malicious intent.
It does not matter from the perspective of the Sharii'ah, because so long as a person should reasonably suspect that their actions could cause a certain result, then they are held accountable for that result. For example, if someone takes a metal rod and they hit someone in the head with it only intending to wound them, they are still held responsible for murder if the person dies.
The American law has a similar concept, although it is much more complicated and less just, where one is still prosecuted for the crimes of torture, attempted murder, and other related statutes regardless of whether or not they intended to cause the crime to take place or not, so long as they should have reasonably suspected that what they were doing was likely to cause a particular result. It is not at all an unclear case when a person expresses clearly, and in court, that they were trying to cause a certain thing to happen, and then elsewhere in the same court, they express clearly that they were informed that the likely result of the thing they were trying to cause to happen was the torture, illegal imprisonment, and possible murder of an individual.
Of course, despite this, the American government would never prosecute anyone for doing anything, no matter how heinous, if it was part of a plot to steal the child of a Muslim. I have not failed to point this out to them, but they have failed to care.
What is more outrageous, is that had my wife refused to sign an agreement in court, and then the judge had ruled in her favor, my mother's concealment of the matter and her girlfriend's actions would have actually been placing Talhah the exact danger she was supposedly filing to prevent.
This has always reminded me of the story where a woman stole the child of another woman, so they were brought to be judged before one of the Prophets. The prophet they went to ruled that the child should be cut into two pieces and that each woman could have one half of it. One of the women was satisfied with this solution, but the other rushed to say that the child was not hers and that the other woman should have it. This prophet then knew that this woman was the true mother of the child, so he ordered that the child be given to the woman who was willing to give up her child to save its life, because she was its true mother. My wife signed an agreement where she would not be able to see her son for at least a good while, but my mother seemed content that she and her girlfriend had taken steps to ensure that if they could not have him, then nobody could, or at least nobody outside of those running Ugandan foster homes.
+|The Jordanian Intelligence get Involved|+
I cannot mention all of what the Jordanian intelligence has done, because this effects the safety and security of my wife, but a few months after she settled in Jordan, she was interrogated for a number of hours over the e-mail my mother's girlfriend sent to the Jordanian intelligence. My mother, her girlfriend, and the FBI have all apparently been continuing to try to cause my wife as many problems as possible in Jordan by using their intelligence apparatus as a vehicle. Allah knows best if they are trying to cause her harm or if they are just trying to disrupt her ability to settle down long enough to fight my mother in court, but they have been doing a great deal of harm with extreme viciousness and disregard for safety."
+|Relationships Begin to Sour|+
When all of this occurred, my mother-in-law confronted my mother regarding what had happened and the problems she and her girlfriend were causing for my wife, but my mother expressed no sympathy and claimed she endorsed Anderson's actions, despite the fact that they had endangered my wife's life. It was after this point that relations between my mother and my wife's family began to sour. My mother could not accept that she had done something horrible, so she was offended that anyone would be upset with her.
Over this period, my mother began to be hostile toward me, my wife and my mother-in-law. She began demanding things which she was not entitled to under the court agreement such as taking our son Talhah to the beach for a few days. Understandably, my wife did not want our son spending the night with a woman who endorsed actions meant to cause her severe physical harm, so she was against this. I was also against it, because I knew that most of what my family does at the beach involves drinking, dressing improperly and many other things which violate our religious beliefs. This made my mother furious and she threatened to take my mother-in-law to court, and said that she was not allowed to listen to my wife regarding how Talhah should be raised. This was preposterous considering that nowhere in the agreement did it say this, and Talhah was only supposed to be with my mother-in-law for a short amount of time before being taken back to his real mother.
It was at this point that we began to suspect my mother of somehow obtaining information from the government about things my wife and I had been discussing, because her questions and threats seemed to indicate this. However, I dismissed this notion to a degree, thinking that it was preposterous that the government would be involved in such a minor thing as the affairs of our little child.
My wife and I were originally looking to have the court force her mother to uphold her end of the deal by returning our child, but the level of hostility being expressed by my mother caused us to shift to wanting to have her removed from visitation before pursuing this, because we considered her to be a danger to Talhah's wellbeing. However, the Bureau of Prisons would not approve the attorney who was my representative as one of my contact's, so I was unable to file any motions in this regard. My wife was also worried of the things my mother would do to her if she provided any contact information to my mother which was a requirement of the original deal, before her mother could return Talhah, so we had to pursue this before getting our son back.
+|My Mother Files for Custody Based on a Lie from the FBI|+
In the middle of July, 2011, my mother filed an emergency motion seeking custody of our son Talhah based on the fact that the FBI had informed her that my wife and I had a "secret plot" to remove Talhah from the country illegally. This was not true at all, and it was a complete fabrication. I do not know whether they misunderstood something and thought it was true, or if they simply flat out lied to my mother, or if they had some plan to just take our child from us out of spite, but the allegation was patently false. However, the judge stripped my wife of custody and gave Talhah to my mother and my wife's mother, all without hearing from either one of us.
(After this point, I am having to cut this story short, because I was "written-up" for allegedly praying. Whenever they think they have caught me praying, they usually take my e-mail for a while)
This decision was later overruled in part, but my mother simply re-filed for custody on essentially the same grounds.
At the trial, which was on January 5th, 2012, the judge awarded her legal custody, gave my wife's mother partial custody, and stripped my wife and I of all rights except for a phone call once a week. The judge claimed he had done "his own research" in the case and that he already pretty much had his mind made up before the trial. He ruled that Talhah could not go to a mosque on grounds that the FBI had informed Talhah's "representative" in court that they had reason to believe he had been taken to a mosque at some point after my wife left America. They ruled that he cannot be spoken to about Islam, because the judge felt more-or-less that kufis (a hat that many Muslim men wear) constitute "radical Islam," and thus, this kind of thing must be censored according to him.
Details of all of the proceedings and the blatantly prejudiced activities of the FBI and the court can be found in the two previous postings in this regard.
+|My Mother will not let me Speak to my Son|+
After the ruling, my mother decided that she would not let me speak to my own son. She effectively told me that if I make the world aware of what went on in the case or kept fighting her in court, then she would never let me speak to my own little boy. My primary concern is that Talhah's upbringing is proper, and that it is not with an immoral, selfish crook who has no problem having other people killed to achieve her own personal goals, so I have prioritized that he be able to see his mother again over my being able to speak with him. Thus, I have continued to expose what has occurred, and I have continued to fight her in court.
+|The FBI Continues to be Involved|+
Very recently, the court had a hearing to remove my wife's and my representatives as well as the lady who was "representing" our son. This was supposedly due to the fact that the case was over, even though my wife and I as well as her mother are all appealing the ruling on numerous grounds. Despite this, and in spite of the fact that I am in prison and my wife is overseas, and we have no way of fighting the case without attorneys to help us, the court ruled that our representatives should be removed. At the same hearing in which my mother is trying to have me silenced, my representative is supposedly appealing this decision, but I have no information on any of this.
My son's "representative," at this hearing or a previous one, claimed she needed to stay on the case due to "secret information" she had received from the FBI. I cannot imagine what this information might be, but apparently the FBI not only gives out people's private information whenever others want it, so long as the information being sought is regarding Muslims, but they also are apparently in the business of making up stories and telling them to others to further whatever plots they might have against these Muslims.
+|Where Things Stand|+
I have had to leave out a lot of details, because of the incident report I just received regarding the prayer, but this is the gist of our story and how the government and my mother have taken away our child, largely on grounds that we were Muslims. It shows the double-standards of the government in that they will prosecute a Muslim for the most minor of offenses, but when somebody effectively admits to attempted murder and torture in court and their victim is a Muslim, they leave that person alone.
As far as the case is concerned, then we are appealing it, but both my wife and my representatives have been removed from the case, and I have not received any information as to what is going on or even whether or not the appeal still exists since this occurred. In fact, I was not even informed that there was going to be a hearing in this regard, period.
We are in great need of your prayers and your support as we go forward. Anyone interested in the story or in helping can find my wife's and my contact information through the prisoner websites.
Epilogue:
After I wrote this piece and sent it out, but before it was posted on the internet, the following events took place:
Shortly before Ramadan, the FBI came to ask me about a brother whom, for the purpose of this message, I will call "Abu Ayrow." I told them from the very beginning that if they were going to ask me about any people, other than perhaps my mother or her girlfriend, I was not going to tell them anything.
They proceeded to ask me some question about a computer program, and I answered that question. Then they asked me a question which was clearly designed to deal with Abu Ayrow. I told them I would not answer it.
They told me that this was the whole reason they flew out from Virginia to Illinois, and that they really needed information. They said that they were planning on arresting him, and that they already had everything they needed to indict him, and they just wanted my help verifying some things.
I told them that if they already had everything they needed, then they did not need my help.
They said that really they only had 90% of what they needed, and that even if I refused, they would still use things I said previously (this is the brother in Part 1, whom I said I thought I could harm by making an agreement with them). They said that if I agreed to help them and to be a witness at a grand jury hearing, then they would reduce my sentence significantly, perhaps even by fifteen years. They said they thought he was planning some attack, that he was "radicalizing" people, and they even tried saying that he was specifically "radicalizing white converts." I do not know why they thought I would particularly care what color of skin the people being "radicalized" had, but I guess if your organization is racist from top to bottom, you probably assume that everyone is like you in some way or another. Either way, it does not particularly bother me to begin with that the FBI considers someone to be "radicalized."
I told them that I would not even consider saying anything to them even if the told me they would release me that day unless they fixed the situation they caused with Talhah. I would not have considered it anyway, because I never agreed to cooperate with them for my own sake, and I have since learned that the Islamic ruling when someone is forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, one is not allowed to make a decision to save one's family over others, even if the evil being done to their family is greater than that being done to the other person. This is an exception to the general ruling, which I did not know at the time when I initially agreed to help them.
I kept pressing the issue of Talhah, because I wanted them to write some note somewhere that they should not violate their own laws in order to take Muslim kids from their parents. They did not disagree with me when I told them that either they broke the law by disclosing private information, or that my mother broke the law by lying in court. They claimed that they seriously doubted that my mother was telling the truth.
Due to my pressing the issue of Talhah, my lawyer even offered, if I cooperated, to put his team of investigators on the issue and to bring the conclusion to a prosecutor so that either the FBI agent involved be prosecuted or my mother be prosecuted for lying. This would basically have guarunteed a return of Talhah, but I was not going to agree to harm the brother Abu Ayrow, nor any other brother, no matter what was offered, so I told them I still refused.
After this meeting I sent off a letter to my prosecutor claiming that most if not all of everything I had said to them in previous interviews was probably false, that I said it under durress, and that my mind was not completely correct from the prolonged period I spent in isolation. I do not know if he ever received it, nor his reaction to it if he did.
After sending this, but prior to when the prosecutor would have received this, my lawyer sent me a letter saying that I was going to have to do my full sentence and that there was no chance of it being brought down. Al-hamdu Lillaah, this is Allaah's decree.
I do not think the prosecutor will want to reopen my case after receiving the letter from me, but it is always a possibility, and I ask Allaah for the best.
I sent this post out quite some time ago, but there were some safety concerns my wife raised with its original wording, so I had to wait until I got my e-mail back from the incident report for praying in order to make edits and have it posted. I lost e-mail, which is more or less my only way of effectively communicating with my family, for two months.
During this period my mother's attempt at securing a gag order failed, but she was able to kick my attorney off of the case completely, on grounds that he had also engaged in exposing the things she had done in this case. The court appointed me a new representative, but I do not know his name, address, or anything else about him, and he has yet to contact me.
She also re-filed to secure a gag order again, but I have not received any papers regarding anything with the court in almost five months now, much less the ones for this particular order. She is also filing to kick my wife off of the appeal, claiming that she does not have an address she can receive papers at, so she is not allowed to appeal the case. Allah knows best what will happen, but we ask for your prayers and assistance.
Please spread all three parts of this story around so people can know what happened. If there is any way to involve the Muslim governments, the true Muslim governments, please involve them.
All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of all that exists.
