A magazine that altered an article referring to President Barack Obama’s new envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Rashad Hussain, says it did so because he was misquoted, but the author of the article is standing by her story.
Hussain, now a deputy associate White House counsel, was quoted back in 2004 decrying the prosecution of a Florida professor accused of ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Sami Al-Arian. However, the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report noted Sunday that the article quoting Hussain, published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, was subsequently sanitized on the Web to remove the quotes and all other references to Hussain. The changes appear to have taken place in 2007 or later.
According to the original story, Hussain told a panel discussion at a Muslim Students Association conference in ’04 that the criminal case against Al-Arian was one of a series of “politically motivated persecutions.” Hussain also reportedly asserted that Al-Arian was being “used politically to squash dissent.”
Washington Report news editor Delinda Hanley said Tuesday that Hussain’s quotes were taken down because the quotes attributed to him actually came from Al-Arian’s daughter, Laila Al-Arian, who took part in the same panel discussion. “Laila Al-Arian said the things attributed to Rashad Hussain, and an intern who attended the event and wrote up the article made an error, which was corrected on our Web site by deleting the two quotes in their entirety,” Hanley wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO.
However, the author of the article, Shereen Kandil, said Tuesday that she stood by her original report.
“When I worked as a reporter, I understood how important it was to quote the right person, and accurately,” Kandil wrote in response to an e-mailed query from POLITICO asking about the possibility of a misquotation.
“I have never mixed my sources and wouldn’t have quoted Rashad Hussain if it came from Laila Al-Arian. If the editors from WRMEA felt they wanted to remove Rashad Hussain from the article, my assumption is that they did it for reasons other than what you’re saying,” said Kandil, who also works in the Obama administration as a program analyst for the Middle East in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International Affairs.
A White House spokesman, who asked not to be named, said Tuesday afternoon that Hussain “certainly doesn’t recall making that statement. He was on the panel to talk about his legal writing on civil liberties. Ms. Al-Arian spoke about her father.” The spokesman said he had no information about whether Hussain had requested the change to the story.
Reached by phone Monday night, Laila Al-Arian said she thought it was possible she made the statements ascribed to Hussain, but that no one from Washington Report called her to ask if the quotes did belong to her. “It’s kind of sad that a right-wing, pseudo-news website gets as much credence,” Al-Arian said, referring to an account about the episode on CNSNews.com. “I don’t remember Rashad being there. It’s possible that the quote could have been misattributed.”
It’s unclear what prompted Washington Report’s decision to change the article three years or more after it was published. In a brief phone interview Tuesday, Hanley said she believed the request to change the article came from Kandil. “I feel like the intern herself asked us to fix it; maybe he [Hussain] asked her to. ... I got it from the writer herself; I think she said she checked,” the editor said.
Told that Kandil denied any misquotation or involvement in any change to the story, Hanley said, “It happened many years ago. ... I remember she had approached us. I’m getting old, so maybe I didn’t remember correctly.” (See an update from Hanley below.)
A few thoughts to keep in mind while pondering the possibilities here:
— The original article did not contain any sentence-length quotes from Hussain or anybody else for that matter.
— Hussain was a student at Yale Law School at the time of the reported remarks. (He also served as editor of the Yale Law Journal.)
— At the time Hussain spoke in 2004, the government’s treatment of Sami Al-Arian was a cause celebre among Arab-American and Muslim activists, as well as many civil libertarians generally. While some evidence of Al-Arian’s connections to Palestinian Islamic Jihad has been public since 1995, the strongest proof of Al-Arian’s ties to PIJ emerged from surveillance that first became public during the trial that took place in 2005.
— At the end of that six-month trial, jurors acquitted Al-Arian on eight counts and could not reach a unanimous verdict on nine others. As the government geared up for a possible retrial, Al-Arian pleaded guilty to a single count of providing support to a terrorist group. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison by a judge who branded Al-Arian as a “liar” and a “master manipulator.” In a saga too lengthy to detail here, Al-Arian undertook a hunger strike over demands that he testify before a grand jury in Virginia and was eventually indicted again in a federal court in Virginia for his refusal to do so. He is in home detention awaiting trial on contempt-of-court charges.
— There’s no indication that if Hussain made the original comments, he repeated them after Al-Arian’s trial or guilty plea. Some have continued to argue that Al-Arian is the victim of anti-Muslim bias and political harassment.
The original WRMEA report appears after the jump. ...
UPDATE: Hanley sent over the following note Tuesday afternoon:
Our Web master thinks the change was made on Feb. 5, 2009, but that change could have been when our Web site began an ongoing redesign. We cannot find an e-mail paper trail and we have spent a long time checking on this. I probably asked for the change but I honestly can’t recall who asked me to make it. As I mentioned, I had assumed it was the author. You have taught me a lesson: make a paper trail. The other lesson is that our magazine often has the only reporter at an event and we’d better get our article absolutely right!
UPDATE 2: This post has been updated with the above comment from a White House spokesman.
UPDATE 3: This post has been updated to indicate that the first report on the removal of Hussain’s alleged quotation came from the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
November 30, 2004
MSA Conference’s Civil Rights Session
BYLINE: Kandil, Shereen
SECTION: Vol. XXIII; No. 9; Pg. 81
LENGTH: 488 words
A session on civil rights called “Get up, Stand up; Stand up for your
Rights: The State of Contemporary Civil Liberties” was held Sept. 5 at the
annual conference for the Muslim Students Association of the United States and
Canada, held alongside the Islamic Society of North America’s 41st annual
convention in Chicago.
Laila Al-Arian, daughter of civil and political rights activist and
Muslim leader Sami Al-Arian, opened the session with her father’s story. She
gave a heart-wrenching, emotional account of an innocent man targeted for
free-speech activities, whose rights were stripped thanks in part to the
PATRIOT Act. Al-Arian, who has not yet been to trial, has been held in a
federal penitentiary for over a year and a half.
Al-Arian’s situation is one of many “politically motivated persecutions,”
claimed Rashad Hussain, a Yale law student. Such persecution, he stated, must
be fought through hope, faith, and the Muslim vote.
Not only has the PATRIOT Act affected Al-Arian, but it also has caused
problems for students on many American college campuses. According to laws
passed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI now can
question students about their activities in different campus organizations, as
well as encourage campus police to spy on certain students. The FBI also has
targeted foreign students studying at U.S. institutions.
Younus Mirza helped found the Students for Freedom Organization, which
has passed student resolutions against the PATRIOT Act, and encouraged Muslim
students from campuses across the United States to start campaigns for civil
rights. The Georgetown University graduate student suggested that students
should hold rallies, which, he said, create powerful “visual images.” He
described a rally he and his classmates held at Georgetown last year, in which
a number of students stood handcuffed in a popular area of the campus, to
symbolize the post-Sept. 11 detentions of hundreds of Arabs and Muslims.
Mirza also urged students to send letters to express their concerns about
possible civil liberties violations on campus to the president of their
respective colleges or universities. He also suggested they launch a “Rock the
Vote” campaign. Finally, Mirza encouraged the mostly young audience to obtain a
“Know Your Rights” booklet "(available from the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, CAIR) in the event of FBI visits or interrogation.
Along with many others, said Yale’s Hussain, Dr. Sami Al-Arian has been
“used politically to squash dissent.” The Muslim community must speak out
against the injustices taking place in America, he emphasized. Otherwise,
everyone’s rights will be in jeopardy.
Articles may be reprinted with proper attribution, except for photos and
cartoons. Article copyright American Educational Trust.