Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
January 6, 2010
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In addition to Wallace, Chomsky, and Zinn, a number of other
luminaries including the filmmaker and author, Mr. David Mamet,
have publicly criticized Harvard and even some faculty members at
Harvard such as the law professor, Allan Dershowitz, and the
Kennedy School of Government professors Joseph Nye and Mathew
Bunn have also expressed their concerns about my situation --
unfortunately to no avail as the University has continued with its
flagrant pattern of abusive behavior toward me and has refused to
apologize for subjecting me, a former post-doctoral research scholar
at Harvard, to a retaliatory false arrest and incarceration, public
defamation, and systematic blacklisting not only at Harvard but also
elsewhere in the US academia through its vast network, e.g., a
Harvard-graduate-turned vice-president of the Middle East Institute,
Mr.David Mack, unilaterally withdrew my scholarship at the Institute
solely on the basis of his affiliation with Harvard. Both professors
Chomsky and Zinn and Mr. Wallace have written letters of concern
to the Middle East Institute in Washington, urging them to treat me
with respect, without ever receiving any response.
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At the time I dealt with him it was my understanding that he was a
post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, so I was brought up short
when I heard from Professor Roy Mottahedeh of Harvard that
Afrasiabi had never been a post-doctoral fellow at the university.
That assertion shook my confidence in Dr Afrasiabi and led me to
stop asking for his counsel on things Iranian. Only later did I learn
that Dr Afrasiabi had been in fact a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard.
Since that time he has kept me informed of his various scholarly
activities and it is apparent to me that scholars hold him in high
regard.
Respectfully
Yours, Mike Wallace
Correspondent, Co-Producer 60 Minutes, CBS”
Sadly, the evil done against me went much further than vilifying and
defaming me with the members of American media and the
academia, including Oxford University where I had applied for a
scholarship. Such vile behavior proved simply as a prelude for a
much more flagrant assault on my freedom and human dignity in
the form of a retaliatory false arrest by Harvard police shortly after
my complaint and lawful threat of a law suit through my attorney
mentioned above.
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Dear President Obama:
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at the first pre-trial hearing several months later and a judge stated
on record that “after due investigation, there is no evidence
connecting you to any of these charges.”
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conduct and, ultimately, to the US Supreme Court, that turned down
my appeal in a close vote in March 2003.
• Prior to the trial, my initial judge resigned from the case, precisely one hour
after a deadline he had given to Harvard to comply with my discovery requests
or face a verdict. After the defendants failed to comply, instead of displaying
the valor of equal justice, judge Tauro preferred to withdraw himself from the
case, citing a flimsy excuse that he had a conflict of interest with one of the
new attorneys that Harvard had brought on board. I ask: is that justice?
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Harvard, including one that covered the university’s Widener Library. It
happened that one of my key witnesses was a librarian by the name of John
Emerson, who in his deposition had admitted that professor Mottahedeh had
vilified me with members of a fellowship committee at Harvard. Due to his
extensive ties with Harvard and the clear conflicts of interest, judge Zobel
should have dismissed himself from the case, but the temptation to subvert
justice in the interest of the university was apparently too great. I borrowed to
place an announcement in the main section of New York Times regarding the
judge’s travesty of justice and the fact that I had lodged a complaint against
him to the Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct – that never
bothered to even entertain my complaint let alone responding, just as the
Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers refused to consider my formal
complaint against attorney Burnham, who had betrayed her client. I ask: Is
this justice? Or outrageous injustice?
• At the federal trial, my first witness was Harvard’s chief counsel at the time of
my arrest, attorney Margaret Marshall, who had by then been elevated to the
position of a justice of Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC). Yet,
despite a duly-served subpoena and the absence of any order by the court to
quash my subpoena, attorney Marshall failed to appear in court and the
federal judge refused to compel her testimony as required by law. Several
months after the trial, I testified against Marshall’s nomination as the chief
justice of SJC, at the Massachusetts State House, pointing out that she had
violated the law by defaulting a subpoena. Marshall defended herself by
falsely claiming that her motion to quash the subpoena had been allowed
when, in fact, that was a lie, which I proved with the assistance of court
records, to the members of local media, who reported it. I ask: Is this justice,
remotely in line with the spirit of American justice system that a material
witness was granted judicial immunity simply because she was a judge?
• However, the above were not even the most atrocious aspects of the
miscarriage of justice and there were other, more important ones: the federal
judge dismissed the charges against Mottahdeh’s patsy, Shobhana Rana, who
was a key defendant on trial and, yet, failed to appear in court. I had managed
to take her video deposition before she had fled the country and as a result of
discovery in litigating the case had proved to the court that the evidence
contradicting her statements seriously impeached her deposition testimony.
Case in point, whereas Rana as well as Harvard police had claimed that she
was an employee of the Harvard Middle East Center, the director of that
center, William Graham had under oath flatly denied that she had ever directly
or indirectly worked for that center. Not only that, Rana’s Harvard transcript
showed that her deposition statement that she had a master’s degree and had
written a thesis were false and that she had only a bachelor degree, or that her
written chronology of events of extortion were clearly contradicted by her
photos at BayBank furnished to me by defendants as proof of her
“victimization.” No fair and impartial court would ever dismiss the charges
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against a defendant who defaulted a subpoena and whose credibility had been
competently impeached.
• The judge had also dismissed the complaint against Mottahedeh, whose in-
court testimony was flatly contradicted by Mr. Wallace, who charcterized
Mottahedeh as “a schizophrenic, pathetic liar.” Whereas Mottahedeh had
testified that he had never called Wallace to speak about me, Wallace testified
that he remembered clearly talking to Mottahedeh, adding that “he had this
nasty and deprecating voice, trying to make me lose whatever respect I had for
Dr. Afrasiabi.” In dismissing the charges against Mottahedeh and other
defendants, they were in effect granted the luxury of extra-legal immunity.
• But, the final nail in the coffin of my ‘David and Goliath’ battle for justice was
delivered when on Day Eight of the federal trial, the judge reversed himself on
the key evidence that alone proved my complaint of a sinister, malicious, and
inhuman conspiracy. That evidence came in the form of a written finding by
two hand-writing experts that found the hand-writing of the Harvard detective
on trial matching the hand-writing of the purported criminal who had extorted
money. The official transcripts of the trial reflect that on Day Seven, the same
judge had stated, “this is so critical that it can win the case.” Sadly, unable or
unwilling to adjudicate the case fairly against the mighty Harvard, the
honorable federal judge chose the indignity of going down in history as the
judge who saved Harvard from a major public embarrassment, by making a
mockery of American justice, by excluding the experts’ finding as well as
their testimony. Not only that, the judge would give highly defective
instructions to the jurors on probable cause, that left the jurors thinking that
simply because the Harvard police had procured a warrant from a magistrate,
their action was lawful. The judge should have given the appropriate
instructions, based on a clear case laws and US Supreme Court precedents,
that a facially valid warrant can be deemed unlawful if procured by relying on
an untrustworthy crime story, fabricated evidence, and the like.
As someone who spent eight years of his life studying law, writing
hundreds of legal briefs, motions, counter-motions, defeating
several motions to dismiss, handling a complicated federal trial for
ten consecutive days, etc., I submit to you that the travesty of
justice mentioned above cannot be defended by any one, let alone
the enlightened ‘beacon on the hill’ that has acted so oppressively,
discriminatory, and illiberally toward me. The shameful behavior of
Harvard’s attorneys or Harvard spokespersons, in conveniently
ignoring the multiple manifestations of prejudice and favoritism in
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courts, and labeling the results as “fair” and “case closed,” has
continued until this day.