The view from there

I remember seeing Norwegian filmmaker Line Halvorsen the first week of the Sami Al-Arian trial in 2006 at the back of the media pack that hounded anyone connected to the case as they entered the heavily fortified Sam Gibbons Federal Courthouse. Now Halvorsen has made an often-gripping film that has less to do with American justice than it has to do with one family paying the price for our so-called war on terror.

USA vs. Al-Arian falls short when it bypasses the complexities of the months-long terrorism case against former University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian; Halvorsen instead reports the jury's initial verdict (not guilty on some counts, undecided on nine others) as a complete and total victory for Al-Arian (which it was not). She also opted not to explore the complexities of Al-Arian himself (for years, he denied any association with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, until the trial made it clear he was intimately involved with the group). He was a man with a tragic flaw, in a tragic situation, but she doesn't probe deeply to get us behind Al-Arian's mask.

Instead, given seemingly total access to Al-Arian's wife and children, Halvorsen shows us the disintegration of an All-American family. Nahla is the spouse who must deal with the years of her husband's imprisonment and uncertain future; we see her unravel, at one point digging through bottles of pills after a stressful phone conversation with Sami in jail. The effect on Al-Arian's young son, Ali -- depressed and disconnected at a family meal toward the end of the trial -- is heartbreaking.

If Halvorsen's view is at all anti-American, the last third of her film shows why she (and other European observers) might have arrived at such a stance. The treatment of Al-Arian after the verdict, which cleared him of the most serious charges, is despicable by any standards. His family's hopes are dashed after federal Judge James Moody goes well beyond the plea agreement to sentence Al-Arian to the maximum and to call him a "master manipulator."

Al-Arian sits in a prison in Virginia on a hunger strike today. The film doesn't justify one protester's quote that "this is the major civil rights case of the 21st century." Nahla Al-Arian's assessment mid-film is closer to the truth: "This is just an impossible case."