18 Years Waiting for a Gavel to Fall

"Yes," Obeid said, those were the agent's "exact words."

He raised a flattened hand, as if to swat at the table where he sat.

"Flick you, like a fly."

*

They initially were kept in isolation cells and described ominously as national security threats. Trips to the federal courthouse in downtown L.A. were made in convoys of unmarked vans, driven at a pace that was, to these shackled terrorism suspects, truly terrifying.

"One hundred miles an hour," Hamide recalled, "like they are transporting the biggest Mafia head in Italy to court: 'You are going to kill us, man!' And there was no reason for it. They knew that.... The whole thing was a put-on."

That they were transported in shackles and not permitted to shave made them look more plausibly like international terrorists, even though the government eventually would acknowledge that they were not accused of any acts of terrorism.

Rather, they were to be deported for their ties to an "organization that causes to be written, circulated, distributed, published or displayed, written or printed matter advocating or teaching economic, international and governmental doctrines of world communism."

Arab American leaders condemned the arrests as a "witch hunt" and "old-fashioned Arab bashing." There were suggestions that the roundup represented a "crude response" by the Reagan administration to the taking of U.S. hostages in Beirut.

Another theory was that the government wanted a test case -- in the event war broke out in the increasingly volatile Middle East -- to establish a precedent for detaining large numbers of foreign nationals. Shortly after the arrests, a secret government document discussing just such a plan was leaked to the media.

The document, "Alien Terrorists and Undesirables: A Contingency Plan," appeared to plot a legal course not unlike that being followed in the L.A. 8 case: In the instance of war, immigrants from the Middle East, not liable for criminal prosecution but considered undesirable, would be arrested for immigration violations and detained at a camp in Oakdale, La.

Government officials sought to downplay the document's importance, saying it was merely a draft of a possible approach. Its airing, nonetheless, rallied support for the arrested Palestinians. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild, along with high-profile lawyers such as Leonard Weinglass, of Chicago Seven fame, came riding over the hill.