While the Bush Administration has, from time to time, done things which are – ahem – ethically questionable, it has usually made at least a half-hearted attempt to cover them with a veneer of legality.
           Occasionally, however, it will throw aside any such pretensions. Take Sami Al-Arian, a man who should never have been imprisoned in the first place, who has spent the last five years in jail under conditions decried by Amnesty International as “gratuitously punitive,” whose prison term ended on April 11th, and who is nevertheless still being held behind bars.

The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
                                                                                                               – Joseph Heller, Catch-22

           After a failed trial whose verdict was declared by Time Magazine to be “one of the Justice Department’s most embarrassing legal setbacks since 9/11,” the American government has been resorting to legal ruses and an outright manipulation of the judicial system to keep the high-profile Palestinian-American professor Sami Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely. Now, after five years of imprisonment under conditions condemned by Amnesty International as “gratuitously punitive,” Dr. Al-Arian could be sentenced any day to at least five more years. His case has been powerfully presented in this gripping YouTube video.