FROM A CELL IN WAYNESBURG, Pa.�On April 19, 1995, a massive explosion tore through a federal building in Oklahoma City. The bombing sent American media and national police forces into a torrid frenzy of activity.

Initial media reports, more uninformed rumor than fact, speculated that perhaps the Black Muslims were responsible, and before nightfall, fear, xenophobia and hatred combined to propel agents of the state against Arabs and Muslims in the United States. Muslim places of worship were attacked and, in some cases, desecrated.

Arab-American citizens found themselves under attack, and some were scooped up in dragnets as "terrorist suspects." We may never know the full scope of anti-Arab harassment, intimidation, assault and injury. For such citizens, some of whom were first generation Arab or Indo-Asian Muslims, the tenuous nature of citizenship in the United States was laid bare.

Only the later revelation that the Oklahoma bombing could be traced to white, domestic terrorists, cooled the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim fever.

How did American political leaders respond to this public crisis? Did they act to calm it, or did they simply exploit it for political gain?

Former President William Clinton used the public hysteria unleashed by the Oklahoma City bombing to introduce, push for, and eventually pass a law called the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act."

The bill became law with Clinton�s signature almost a year to the day after the bombing, on April 24, 1996. Indeed, in his press statement issued that day, the then-President noted the "tragedy in Oklahoma City" as an important impetus to the law. The law signed by Clinton represented the most significant change in the law of habeas corpus since President Abraham Lincoln�s suspensions of the right at the time of the Civil War. When Lincoln suspended the writ, against those waging war against the U.S., Democratic newspapers and politicians called him a "despot," and his government a "tyranny." When Clinton signed a law that severely restricted habeas corpus rights, the silence was deafening.

Lincoln once said, "Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual means for the public good."

Let�s see how effective this "anti-terrorism" bill was against so-called "terrorists." (The writer rejects the terrorism label, for one man�s "terrorist," is the next person�s freedom fighter.)

In the space of less than a month, two Arab men were convicted in U.S. courts of participating in the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania back in 1998. The embassy bombings left 213 people dead and thousands injured by the blasts and flying debris.

Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-Owhali was convicted and the government sought the death penalty. On Tuesday, June 12, 2001, the jury returned with a 10-to-12 majority vote for life in prison.

Some time later, another Arab co-defendant, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, was convicted for his role in the bombing of the Tanzania embassy in East Africa.

On July 10, 2001, the jury came back with a life sentence for him.

In both cases, jurors said they didn�t want to turn the young men into "martyrs." In K.K. Mohamed�s case, defense lawyers argued that as he was a mere "foot soldier," and not a higher-up person, death was inappropriate.

Two young men, each charged and convicted of participating in a politically motivated bombing against the U.S. government that killed hundreds, and harmed thousands of men, women and children�and yet, two life sentences!

So much for the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act!

If ever there was needed proof of the arbitrary nature of the death penalty, of who received it and who did not, here it is. These cases prove that the law wasn�t against "terrorism," but used the term as a pretext to inflict repression and state terror on the poor and the working class here in the U.S.