President Barack Obama's new Islamic envoy, Rashad Hussain, changed course Friday – admitting he made sharply critical statements about a U.S. terror prosecution against a Muslim professor after initially saying he had no recollection of making such comments. “I made statements on that panel that I now recognize were ill-conceived or not well-formulated,' Hussain said, referring to a 2004 conference where he discussed the case. Hussain's reversal came after POLITICO obtained a recording of his presentation to a Muslim students' conference in Chicago, where he can be heard portraying the government's cases towards professor Sami Al-Arian, as well as other Muslim terrorism suspects, as “politically motivated persecutions.' Al-Arian later pled guilty to aiding terrorists. The comments touched off criticism from conservative commentators, who questioned whether someone who held those views should represent the United States in the Muslim world.
Initially, Hussain, 31, said through a White House spokesman that he didn't recall making the statements. Hussain also suggested that another speaker on the panel, Al-Arian's daughter Laila, made the comments about her father. But after POLITICO provided the quotes and others from the recording to the White House Friday, Hussain said in a statement: “As a law student six years ago, I spoke on the topic of civil liberties on a panel during which I responded to comments made about the al-Arian case by Laila al-Arian who was visibly saddened by charges against her father. I made clear at the time that I was not commenting on the allegations themselves. The judicial process has now concluded, and I have full faith in its outcome.'
The White House declined to say Friday whether the statements or the controversy affected Obama's confidence in Hussain.
Hussain also answered another question surrounding his comments – why they were removed from the website of a magazine on Middle East issues that published a brief account of the panel back in 2004, attributing the statement about “politically motivated persecutions' to Hussain. It was Hussain himself, he said Friday, who contacted the publication to complain about the story. “When I saw the article that attributed comments to me without context, leaving a misimpression, I contacted the publication to raise concerns about it. Eventually, of their own accord, they modified the article,' Hussain said of the article in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.
During the panel discussion on civil rights at a Muslim Students Association conference in Chicago, Hussain asserted that Al-Arian's prosecution involved significant abuses. “The case that Laila just reminded us of is truly a sad commentary on our legal system. It is a travesty of justice, not just from the perspective of the allegations that are made against Dr. Al-Arian. Without passing any comment on those specific allegations or the statements [that] have been made against him, the process that has been used has been atrocious,' Hussain said, according to the recording.
In his presentation, Hussain, then a student at Yale Law School, was careful to insist that he was not offering a view on Al-Arian's innocence or guilt on charges that he served as a top leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the U.S. But Hussain said the treatment of Al-Arian fit a “common pattern….of politically-motivated prosecutions where you have huge Justice Department press conferences announcing that a certain person is a grave threat to American security.'
In the recording, Hussain's indictment of the government's legal practices toward Muslims goes further than Al-Arian's case, leveling a detailed critique of more than a half-dozen prominent anti-terrorism cases and several key provisions of the Patriot Act. Hussain refers to some provisions of the Patriot Act as “horrible' and called “dangerous' an aspect of that law that allows intelligence-related surveillance to be used in criminal cases. Most lawmakers, including many Democrats critical of the Patriot Act, have said the provision has proven valuable, because it removed a wall that made it difficult for those pursuing investigations of international terror or spying operations to share information with criminal investigators. Hussain did express support for other aspects of the law, including a provision permitting so-called roving wiretaps.