Where, BURLINGTON, Vt. Fletcher Free Library at 6:30pm

When, Wednesday. July 23rd

The daughter of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, professor at the University of South Florida who has been kept in a federal prison for more than five years under provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, will speak on Wednesday in Burlington.

Laila Al-Arian will give a talk at 6:30 p.m. in the Community Room at Fletcher Library. She plans to speak out against attacks on Arabs and Muslims in the United States, and to call on Senator Patrick Leahy to order an investigation into her father’s prolonged imprisonment.

Al-Arian, an activist for Palestinian rights, is a victim of the USA PATRIOT Act, his daughter Laila argues. With the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, she explained, her father’s years of organizing aid for family and friends struggling to live in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank became crimes.

In 2006, following a lengthy trial, a Florida jury acquitted Dr. Al-Arian on eight of the government’s most serious charges and deadlocked on the rest, with the jury favoring acquittal on all charges by a 10-2 margin. When still he was not released from prison, Dr. Al-Arian plead guilty to the least serious of the charges in an agreement that was to have resulted in his being released and reunited with his family. Instead, the federal government has had him transferred to a Virginia jail, refusing to offer any timetable for his release.