http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5glCgJHWa4m4ZEz5I5wKl7fF_apAwD91D45E80
Iranian widow faces terror charges in NYC
By TOM HAYS =96 1 day ago
NEW YORK (AP) =97 In March 2003, Zeinab Taleb-Jedi was a middle-aged
widow who found herself trapped in a cold, dusty bunker in Iraq as
invading U.S. forces began blowing up buildings and inflicting
casualties all around her.
"The noise was overwhelming and frightening," the Iran-born U.S.
citizen said in a statement recounting the air raids around Camp
Ashraf, a stronghold for Iranian exiles about 60 miles north of
Baghdad. "The attacks terrified me."
Taleb-Jedi, 52, escaped serious harm. But more than five years later,
she remains stuck in legal limbo in New York, facing federal terrorism
charges labeling her a leader of a militant group advocating the
violent overthrow of the Iranian government.
Her largely overlooked arrest and protracted prosecution have outraged
civil rights advocates, who accuse federal authorities of trampling
free speech by overzealously enforcing laws against providing material
sup****t to terrorist groups.
Defense attorney Justine Harris has questioned why "the government
would want to put this woman in jail for associating with a group
whose goal is regime change in Iran, arguably a central tenet of our
own foreign policy."
Taleb-Jedi has been linked to the People's Mujahedeen Organization of
Iran, a group designated a terrorist organization by the State
Department in 1997. Prosecutors say she became an English teacher in
1999 at the organization's Iraq headquarters, Camp Ashraf, and that
two informants have since identified her as a member of a leader****p
council.
In a pending motion to dismiss the case, Harris claims the government
has never specified how her client pur****tedly sup****ted terrorism,
"other than teaching English =97 itself an entirely innocuous act."
Prosecutors counter that "teaching English to other terrorists is not
protected First Amendment activity."
A federal judge in Brooklyn has said he will soon decide whether to
let the case go forward. If convicted, Taleb-Jedi faces up to 15 years
in prison.
Meanwhile, Taleb-Jedi is free on $500,000 bond and living in a
homeless shelter in Manhattan.
Originally a Marxist-Islamist group, the People's Mujahedeen formed in
the mid-1960s to oppose the U.S.-backed dictator****p of the late Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. During the 1970s, it killed U.S. citizens
working in Tehran, sup****ted the 1979 takeover of the American Embassy
there and participated in Iran's Islamic Revolution, according to the
State Department.
After a falling out with the ruling clerics, the group launched a
campaign of assassinations and bombings in an attempt to topple them.
The group moved to Iraq in the early 1980s to fight Iran's rulers from
there.
The group insists it no longer engages in armed struggle, and it won a
court decision last year in Britain removing it from that government's
terror list. It also won the sup****t of some U.S. lawmakers by
providing intelligence on Tehran's disputed nuclear program.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles, who sought the indictment against Taleb-
Jedi amid a broader investigation of the People's Mujahedeen, had no
comment.
A frail-looking Taleb-Jedi declined to talk about her case when she
left a recent court hearing.
"Life has been very difficult for her," her lawyer said.
FBI re****ts about interviews with Taleb-Jedi in 2004 =97 questioning her
lawyer claims was done under duress =97 and the widow's own sworn
statement tell a story more sorrowful than sinister.
Born in Tehran, Taleb-Jedi came to the United States on a student visa
in 1978 and earned a master's degree in political science. Around the
same time, her first marriage fell apart because her husband was "very
cruel" and "became a Khomeini sup****ter," FBI agents said she told
them.
She said she was granted political asylum in the mid-1980s, the FBI
said. She remarried and moved to New York City with her husband in
1983.
Her second husband left the U.S. a few years later to join the
People's Mujahedeen at Camp Ashraf. She stayed behind to work odd jobs
and raise the couple's son.
According to the FBI re****ts, Taleb-Jedi said she visited her husband
at Camp Ashraf in 1987. Records show that year she also became a
registered press officer for the group.
The FBI claims she told them she knew that the group had been
designated as a terrorist organization and considered the decision
"unconstitutional and unfair."
In 1996, Taleb-Jedi became a U.S. citizen. A year later, she learned
her husband had died in a bus bombing on a road between Camp Ashraf
and Baghdad.
Taleb-Jedi "described herself as being extremely distraught about her
husband's assassination," the FBI re****ts said. "Because she wanted to
be close to his grave, she decided to come to Camp Ashraf."
She told agents she taught English in the camp and believed in the
group's cause, but never became an official member.
U.S. officials say they seized tanks, anti-aircraft weapons, rocket-
propelled grenade launchers and more than 420,000 pounds of plastic
explosives at Camp Ashraf. Despite the stockpile, no one there was
expected to be charged, according to news accounts in 2004.
That changed for Taleb-Jedi in March 2006 when, after waiting for more
than a year to receive a renewed U.S. pass****t, she flew from Jordan
to New York to see her adult son and seek medical treatment for
malnutrition and other ailments, her lawyer said.
FBI agents who were waiting at John F. Kennedy International Air****t
arrested her.
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