sure786
19-02-2002, 19:41
Assalamu-alaikum:
A must read article, from one of the best sources of Islamic news www.ummahnews.com
Wa-salaam,
sure
---------------
In Al-Amin trial, both sides buoyed by evidence, or lack of it
Steve Visser for Atlanta Journal-Constitution
18 February 2002
He sassed President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. He made the FBI's Most Wanted List. He had a law named after him. He rose -- briefly -- to national notoriety largely on one aphorism, one sound bite and one riot.
And then the vitriolic H. Rap Brown vanished for most of America after he took on a new name, new religion and new persona. As the soft-spoken Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, he joined a branch of Sunni Islam that focuses on community building and converting new adherents, like Christian missionaries across the globe.
He became the imam -- prayer leader -- of his Community Masjid in West End and leader of about 30 mosques nation-wide and rose in national Muslim leadership ranks. He advocated Islam -- not rioting and looting -- as the path to a better life and a better state.
This week, testimony will begin in Fulton County Superior Court as Al-Amin faces trial on 13 charges surrounding the killing of a lawman. It's a death penalty case in which his believers say he could not possibly be guilty and in which law enforcement says he clearly is. Both sides cite the evidence -- or lack of -- and both cite his character and past as proof they're right.
The prosecution has what it would typically consider a solid case. In May 1999, Al-Amin was stopped by a Cobb County police officer and ended up charged with receiving stolen property, driving without proof of insurance and impersonating a police officer. On March 16, 2000, Fulton County sheriff's deputies Ricky Kinchen, 35, and Aldranon English, then 28, tried to arrest Al-Amin after he had missed his Cobb court date.
The officers were shot in front of Al-Amin's small grocery on Oak Street across from West End Park. Kinchen died. English, wounded in his legs, left arm and chest, identified the imam from a mug shot.
Four days later, Al-Amin was arrested in White Hall, Ala., where he had registered voters in the 1960s and had plans to build an Islamic community.
FBI agents said they found two weapons in the Alabama woods through which they said Al-Amin fled; a handgun was found the night of his arrest, and a rifle the next day.
They also found a bullet-riddled Mercedes-Benz in White Hall that matched English's description of the gunman's car. Ballistic tests later matched the weapons to the shooting, authorities said.
But the defense has plenty of evidence and issues in its corner. English positively described his assailant as having grey eyes and told police he had shot the gunman in the stomach. Al-Amin's eyes are brown and he was uninjured when arrested. Also, defense lawyers are expected to argue that the location of shell casings found at the scene don't match English's description of events.
As evidence the gunman was wounded, the defense will refer to police reports of blood at the scene -- blood that Atlanta police Sgt. Scott Bennett relied on when he swore out an affidavit to get a warrant to search Al-Amin's market for evidence of bloody clothing or "medical intervention." The police now say reports of blood at the scene were wrong.
In June 2000, another man confessed to the crime, claiming Al-Amin tried to stop him. But he recanted after speaking to FBI agents. The inconsistencies have led many of Al-Amin's supporters in Atlanta, around the country and on the Internet to believe the imam is being framed.
"The average person knows there was a conspiracy -- we just don't know how," says William Abdur-Rahim, an administrator for 25 mosques in metro Atlanta. "There has to be a conspiracy."
Al-Amin, 58, has claimed he is the victim of a government conspiracy since he first was sent to prison three decades ago. He was indicted for inciting a 1967 riot in Cambridge, Md., where two city blocks burned after Brown gave a 45-minute speech in which he exhorted listeners to take over white-owned stores. Later analysis blamed local authorities for the violence.
"I don't care if you have to burn them down and run him out," he said shortly before a sniper hit him with a shotgun pellet. "The streets are yours. Take them."
Congress passed what became known as the Rap Brown Law, which banned crossing state lines to spark disturbances. In 1970, he skipped his Maryland court date -- shortly after two of his allies died when a bomb exploded in their car in Cambridge -- and the FBI put him on its Most Wanted List. He was arrested 17 months later, after a shootout with police in New York.
Convicted of attempted robbery of a bar, he converted to Islam in 1971 and changed his name to Al-Amin, Arabic for "the trustworthy." In 1976, he moved to Atlanta, where he become known both as a cleric who fought drugs, prostitution and inequities in society and as someone to be feared.
Al-Amin has said authorities targeted him 30 years ago because he was a militant black voice. Today, he says the government targets him because it fears an Islamic voice spreading the religion and opposing the nation's policies abroad.
"They're trying to crush Islam before it realizes its own worth and strength," he told The New York Times, in violation of a court gag order in the case. "We're the biggest gang on the planet and when you hear them talk about a 'crusade,' you know what they are talking about."
In his sermons, speeches and writings, Al-Amin describes America as socially and morally impoverished and suggests the Constitution should be replaced with the Quran.
"Western democracy, as it is advocated and implemented and practiced is an enemy to Islam," Al-Amin says on a tape of one sermon. "Anytime you devise a system that separates the remembrance of Allah from the responsibility of secular duty, when you separate church and state -- you're wrong. So we have to be on guard as to our dealing and participation with this."
In 1994, he wrote, "When we begin to look critically at the Constitution of the United States, we see that in its main essence it is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded."
Mahdi Bray, public affairs director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, fears Al-Amin is being persecuted for those views. "He's saying there is nothing left to reform and for some people that can be chilling and that can be frightening," said Bray, who heads a support committee for Al-Amin. "His position is that America is bankrupt, and it's the purveyor of a lot of the ills we see in the Muslim world, and he's never pulled any punches about that."
Both Atlanta police and federal officers suspected Al-Amin was at best taking extreme measures to bring about his version of a better society. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI and Atlanta police investigated Al-Amin or his associates in connection with everything from domestic terrorism to gunrunning to 14 homicides of suspected drug dealers in Atlanta's West End, according to police investigators' reports, FBI documents and past interviews.
An Atlanta police intelligence report suspected Al-Amin was stockpiling weapons for a war against the government and another document suggested Al-Amin was trying to take over the neighborhood drug trade, not clean it out.
The FBI paid informants inside Al-Amin's Community Mosque. While two of Al-Amin's associates were convicted of manslaughter and two others were convicted of running guns to New York, Al-Amin was never charged.
Al-Amin entered Islam through the Dar-ul Islam movement, an orthodox Muslim organization, consisting mainly of blacks, founded in New York that focused on community activism and had roots in the black power movement.
While Dar-ul Islam emphasized military skills, some experts say there is little evidence the group received much training. "All they did basically was shoot at targets in the woods" said Vassar College professor Lawrence Maimya, who studies African-American Muslims. "If anybody attacked them, whether it was the police or other folks, they would be prepared to defend themselves."
Dar-ul Islam fractured around 1980 because some members began following a Pakistani sheikh, Mubarak Ali Jilani Hashmi, who preached a form of Sufism and formed a sect called the Fuqra, which authorities have suspected of assassinations and bombings of other Muslims. The sect has been the target of raids by law enforcement agents in the United States and Canada for nearly a decade.
Al-Amin rejected Fuqra and started the National Community. The group absorbed about 30 Dar-ul Islam mosques around the country and continued to press social activism, Maimya said. Al-Amin quickly rose in leadership ranks and became a founding member of the National Shura Council, which acts as an Islamic authority for many of America's estimated 3 million to 7 million Muslims.
"He was becoming one of the strong Muslim leaders in the United States," said Naeem Baig, secretary-general of the Islamic Circle of North America. "He is very popular among Muslim student associations. He comes out as a very strong person because of his past. Young people like somebody who can stand against powers."
Muslim organizations, however, have been careful in how they voice support for Al-Amin. Baig noted a fund-raiser largely for Al-Amin raised little money at his organization's convention in Cleveland in July.
Imams in Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio -- which have large Islamic centers -- say few of their thousands of members know much about the Atlanta imam or National Community, which is estimated to have several thousand members. "Maybe I heard about him but not too much," said Farooq Aboelzahab, imam of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.
Several leaders of Muslim organizations pointed to the past to support their belief that the police and federal authorities would frame Al-Amin. In 1995, Atlanta police charged Al-Amin with shooting a young drug dealer named William Miles. After Al-Amin and some Muslims visited him, Miles said police pressured him into misidentifying Al-Amin as the gunman. Miles later joined the West End mosque.
"I think it's interesting that in 1995 when they stopped him, they just happened to have a carload of anti-terrorism task force people," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "There is a lot of grudges and a lot of history, and we'll just have to see how things turn out."
Khalid Siddiq, a Pakistani physician and director of the large Al-Farooq Masjid mosque in Midtown, said Al-Amin was held in high esteem among Muslims because of his character. Siddiq said he never had known Al-Amin to advocate violence in his 25 years in Atlanta.
"Those of us who know him closely do not think he is the type of person who could have pulled the trigger," Siddiq said. "Whatever he was as H. Rap Brown before, he has disassociated himself from that and become a true practising Muslim. . . . Whenever we would want to express ourselves, he would always promote a non-violent way of expression. He would always tell us, 'Don't do anything that gives any opportunity for violence.' "
A must read article, from one of the best sources of Islamic news www.ummahnews.com
Wa-salaam,
sure
---------------
In Al-Amin trial, both sides buoyed by evidence, or lack of it
Steve Visser for Atlanta Journal-Constitution
18 February 2002
He sassed President Lyndon Johnson at the White House. He made the FBI's Most Wanted List. He had a law named after him. He rose -- briefly -- to national notoriety largely on one aphorism, one sound bite and one riot.
And then the vitriolic H. Rap Brown vanished for most of America after he took on a new name, new religion and new persona. As the soft-spoken Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, he joined a branch of Sunni Islam that focuses on community building and converting new adherents, like Christian missionaries across the globe.
He became the imam -- prayer leader -- of his Community Masjid in West End and leader of about 30 mosques nation-wide and rose in national Muslim leadership ranks. He advocated Islam -- not rioting and looting -- as the path to a better life and a better state.
This week, testimony will begin in Fulton County Superior Court as Al-Amin faces trial on 13 charges surrounding the killing of a lawman. It's a death penalty case in which his believers say he could not possibly be guilty and in which law enforcement says he clearly is. Both sides cite the evidence -- or lack of -- and both cite his character and past as proof they're right.
The prosecution has what it would typically consider a solid case. In May 1999, Al-Amin was stopped by a Cobb County police officer and ended up charged with receiving stolen property, driving without proof of insurance and impersonating a police officer. On March 16, 2000, Fulton County sheriff's deputies Ricky Kinchen, 35, and Aldranon English, then 28, tried to arrest Al-Amin after he had missed his Cobb court date.
The officers were shot in front of Al-Amin's small grocery on Oak Street across from West End Park. Kinchen died. English, wounded in his legs, left arm and chest, identified the imam from a mug shot.
Four days later, Al-Amin was arrested in White Hall, Ala., where he had registered voters in the 1960s and had plans to build an Islamic community.
FBI agents said they found two weapons in the Alabama woods through which they said Al-Amin fled; a handgun was found the night of his arrest, and a rifle the next day.
They also found a bullet-riddled Mercedes-Benz in White Hall that matched English's description of the gunman's car. Ballistic tests later matched the weapons to the shooting, authorities said.
But the defense has plenty of evidence and issues in its corner. English positively described his assailant as having grey eyes and told police he had shot the gunman in the stomach. Al-Amin's eyes are brown and he was uninjured when arrested. Also, defense lawyers are expected to argue that the location of shell casings found at the scene don't match English's description of events.
As evidence the gunman was wounded, the defense will refer to police reports of blood at the scene -- blood that Atlanta police Sgt. Scott Bennett relied on when he swore out an affidavit to get a warrant to search Al-Amin's market for evidence of bloody clothing or "medical intervention." The police now say reports of blood at the scene were wrong.
In June 2000, another man confessed to the crime, claiming Al-Amin tried to stop him. But he recanted after speaking to FBI agents. The inconsistencies have led many of Al-Amin's supporters in Atlanta, around the country and on the Internet to believe the imam is being framed.
"The average person knows there was a conspiracy -- we just don't know how," says William Abdur-Rahim, an administrator for 25 mosques in metro Atlanta. "There has to be a conspiracy."
Al-Amin, 58, has claimed he is the victim of a government conspiracy since he first was sent to prison three decades ago. He was indicted for inciting a 1967 riot in Cambridge, Md., where two city blocks burned after Brown gave a 45-minute speech in which he exhorted listeners to take over white-owned stores. Later analysis blamed local authorities for the violence.
"I don't care if you have to burn them down and run him out," he said shortly before a sniper hit him with a shotgun pellet. "The streets are yours. Take them."
Congress passed what became known as the Rap Brown Law, which banned crossing state lines to spark disturbances. In 1970, he skipped his Maryland court date -- shortly after two of his allies died when a bomb exploded in their car in Cambridge -- and the FBI put him on its Most Wanted List. He was arrested 17 months later, after a shootout with police in New York.
Convicted of attempted robbery of a bar, he converted to Islam in 1971 and changed his name to Al-Amin, Arabic for "the trustworthy." In 1976, he moved to Atlanta, where he become known both as a cleric who fought drugs, prostitution and inequities in society and as someone to be feared.
Al-Amin has said authorities targeted him 30 years ago because he was a militant black voice. Today, he says the government targets him because it fears an Islamic voice spreading the religion and opposing the nation's policies abroad.
"They're trying to crush Islam before it realizes its own worth and strength," he told The New York Times, in violation of a court gag order in the case. "We're the biggest gang on the planet and when you hear them talk about a 'crusade,' you know what they are talking about."
In his sermons, speeches and writings, Al-Amin describes America as socially and morally impoverished and suggests the Constitution should be replaced with the Quran.
"Western democracy, as it is advocated and implemented and practiced is an enemy to Islam," Al-Amin says on a tape of one sermon. "Anytime you devise a system that separates the remembrance of Allah from the responsibility of secular duty, when you separate church and state -- you're wrong. So we have to be on guard as to our dealing and participation with this."
In 1994, he wrote, "When we begin to look critically at the Constitution of the United States, we see that in its main essence it is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded."
Mahdi Bray, public affairs director for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, fears Al-Amin is being persecuted for those views. "He's saying there is nothing left to reform and for some people that can be chilling and that can be frightening," said Bray, who heads a support committee for Al-Amin. "His position is that America is bankrupt, and it's the purveyor of a lot of the ills we see in the Muslim world, and he's never pulled any punches about that."
Both Atlanta police and federal officers suspected Al-Amin was at best taking extreme measures to bring about his version of a better society. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI and Atlanta police investigated Al-Amin or his associates in connection with everything from domestic terrorism to gunrunning to 14 homicides of suspected drug dealers in Atlanta's West End, according to police investigators' reports, FBI documents and past interviews.
An Atlanta police intelligence report suspected Al-Amin was stockpiling weapons for a war against the government and another document suggested Al-Amin was trying to take over the neighborhood drug trade, not clean it out.
The FBI paid informants inside Al-Amin's Community Mosque. While two of Al-Amin's associates were convicted of manslaughter and two others were convicted of running guns to New York, Al-Amin was never charged.
Al-Amin entered Islam through the Dar-ul Islam movement, an orthodox Muslim organization, consisting mainly of blacks, founded in New York that focused on community activism and had roots in the black power movement.
While Dar-ul Islam emphasized military skills, some experts say there is little evidence the group received much training. "All they did basically was shoot at targets in the woods" said Vassar College professor Lawrence Maimya, who studies African-American Muslims. "If anybody attacked them, whether it was the police or other folks, they would be prepared to defend themselves."
Dar-ul Islam fractured around 1980 because some members began following a Pakistani sheikh, Mubarak Ali Jilani Hashmi, who preached a form of Sufism and formed a sect called the Fuqra, which authorities have suspected of assassinations and bombings of other Muslims. The sect has been the target of raids by law enforcement agents in the United States and Canada for nearly a decade.
Al-Amin rejected Fuqra and started the National Community. The group absorbed about 30 Dar-ul Islam mosques around the country and continued to press social activism, Maimya said. Al-Amin quickly rose in leadership ranks and became a founding member of the National Shura Council, which acts as an Islamic authority for many of America's estimated 3 million to 7 million Muslims.
"He was becoming one of the strong Muslim leaders in the United States," said Naeem Baig, secretary-general of the Islamic Circle of North America. "He is very popular among Muslim student associations. He comes out as a very strong person because of his past. Young people like somebody who can stand against powers."
Muslim organizations, however, have been careful in how they voice support for Al-Amin. Baig noted a fund-raiser largely for Al-Amin raised little money at his organization's convention in Cleveland in July.
Imams in Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio -- which have large Islamic centers -- say few of their thousands of members know much about the Atlanta imam or National Community, which is estimated to have several thousand members. "Maybe I heard about him but not too much," said Farooq Aboelzahab, imam of the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.
Several leaders of Muslim organizations pointed to the past to support their belief that the police and federal authorities would frame Al-Amin. In 1995, Atlanta police charged Al-Amin with shooting a young drug dealer named William Miles. After Al-Amin and some Muslims visited him, Miles said police pressured him into misidentifying Al-Amin as the gunman. Miles later joined the West End mosque.
"I think it's interesting that in 1995 when they stopped him, they just happened to have a carload of anti-terrorism task force people," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "There is a lot of grudges and a lot of history, and we'll just have to see how things turn out."
Khalid Siddiq, a Pakistani physician and director of the large Al-Farooq Masjid mosque in Midtown, said Al-Amin was held in high esteem among Muslims because of his character. Siddiq said he never had known Al-Amin to advocate violence in his 25 years in Atlanta.
"Those of us who know him closely do not think he is the type of person who could have pulled the trigger," Siddiq said. "Whatever he was as H. Rap Brown before, he has disassociated himself from that and become a true practising Muslim. . . . Whenever we would want to express ourselves, he would always promote a non-violent way of expression. He would always tell us, 'Don't do anything that gives any opportunity for violence.' "