It is unclear because al-Arian has lived in the United States since he was seventeen. He graduated with honors in 1978 with a major in Electrical Engineering, and completed his Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in computer engineering in 1980 and 1985 respectively, according to a Wikipedia write-up. “He was employed in 1986 as a professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He was chosen in 1993 as the best professor in the Faculty of Engineering, and as the best professor on the level of the entire university in 1994.”

Of course, none of this matters because al-Arian made the mistake of supporting the Palestinians against the criminal sate of Israel (a rogue nation that continually violates the Geneva Conventions and a flurry of United Nations resolutions). In America, if you are an Arab and support the Palestinians, you’re asking for trouble. Sami al-Arian also made the mistake of responding to reactionary loudmouth and Fox News host Bill “phone sex” O’Reilly and appearing on his “show,” a sort of pillory for masochists.

It appears Sami al-Arian’s crime was the instrumental role he played in establishing Arab and Islamic institutions, not assisting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement in terrorist activities, as the government claimed. “The jury’s decision, on the 13th day of deliberations and six months to the day after the trial started, marks a stunning defeat for federal prosecutors,” TBO reported last December. “This ranks as one of the most significant defeats for the U.S. government, for the Justice Department since 9/11,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, told TBO. “The case against Al-Arian was once hailed by authorities as a triumph of the anti-terror Patriot Act, which allowed secret wiretaps and other information gathered by intelligence agents to be used in criminal prosecutions,” the Associated Press reports. In other words, as the case demonstrates, the government is in the habit of using the Patriot Act and illegal wiretaps against people targeted for political reasons.

The Bush administration’s much heralded prosecutions of so-called terrorists are dismal failures, with the exception of Zacarias Moussaoui, revealed as a pathetic mental case and a victim of domestic violence. “Jan Vogelsang, a clinical social worker testifying for the defense, said Moussaoui was in and out of orphanages the first six years of his life. She said that based on her assessment, he also came from a broken home with physical violence and had a long history of mental illness in his family,” ABC News reports. “Vogelsang said Moussaoui’s mother was beaten throughout her pregnancies including six to whom she gave birth prior to Moussaoui and was hospitalized three weeks before Moussaoui’s birth.” Of course, none of this matters—Moussaoui will eventually have a date with lethal injection and will probably claim to his last breath to be a member of “al-Qaeda,” the CIA-ISI created terrorist organization.

It will be interesting to see where Sami al-Arian will be sent upon deportation. He was born in Kuwait and emigrated with his family to Egypt in 1966. “He has lived in the United States for 30 years and holds permanent residency status. His five children were born in the US and are all American citizens. His own bid to become a U.S. citizen was denied in 1996,” notes Democracy Now. Sami al-Arian’s “family went to Jordan and waited there for a week based on the government’s promise that he would be released. I mean, you know, this is psychological torture,” John Sugg, senior editor for Creative Loafing, an alternative weekly newspaper, told Amy Goodman.

In a way, al-Arian is lucky—at least he did not end up at Guantanamo Bay, where the torture is more than psychological. Speaking of Gitmo, the Supreme Court has “declined” to “consider whether a federal judge can free two Chinese Muslims who remain imprisoned unlawfully at Guantanamo Bay, despite being cleared as ‘enemy combatants,’” that it to say people kidnapped without any human rights whatsoever. “The high court rejected the appeal by the Uighurs [a Chinese ethnic group] without any comment or recorded dissent,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, thus demonstrating the reactionary stacked court can be counted on to support whatever the executive does, if silently.