Youssef Megahed, meet Jack Bauer
April 9, 2009 at 7:37 am by David Warner
By David Warner, CL Editor and PoHo contributor
I’m an occasionally conflicted 24 fan. I’ve also been feeling a mix of outrage and doubt about the recent arrest of Youssef Megahed by U.S. immigration officials after he’d just been acquitted of criminal charges. So I tip my hat to Howard Troxler, whose column in today’s St. Pete Times tackles both Jack Bauer tactics and the confusions that surround the Megahed case.
The arrest felt petty, wrong, a matter of the feds subverting the criminal justice system — in other words, it felt like exactly the kind of thing we cheer on Jack for doing every week. But, as Troxler points out, the arrest is not a case of double jeopardy — Immigration is within its rights to open deportation proceedings, a separate matter from criminal prosecution.
And there’s something that just doesn’t seem right about the incident that got Megahed and his friend Ahmed Mohammed picked up in the first place: “As hard as I try,” Troxler writes, “I am not entirely comfortable that driving around South Carolina in the middle of the night with a trunk full of weird stuff with a buddy who likes blow-things-up videos was just fun and games.” (Add to that the fact that they were joy-riding near a military base.) If in fact the pair were up to no good, then we should be glad about the feds’ Jack tactics, no? He knows what’s right and he gets the bad guys, rules be damned.
But a jury who examined the evidence believed Megahed’s story — that he had no idea his pal was carrying around explosives in his trunk. And even 24 is beginning to pay lip service to the idea that Bauer-like methods can lead into some sticky legal and moral grey areas. (Writers have also moved on from demonizing Middle Easterns and switched to today’s bête noirs of choice, cruel African dictators and Blackwater-like private security outfits.)
Troxler ends with “Let an immigration judge decide.” It’s the only option at present, and maybe more evidence will come to light. But if Megahed has now been condemned to a long string of broken promises and trumped-up new charges à la Sami Al-Arian, then you’ve got to wonder if the system is operating more by the rules of 24 scripts than by the U.S. Constitution.
