Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, law enforcement agents detained more than 1,000 people, mostly Middle Eastern-born men. Some were held for weeks without an attorney. Some were virtually convicted in the press. But none have been implicated in terrorism.
Jun 19, 2002 | Sitting inside a federal courtroom in Memphis on the morning of Feb. 11, Brooklyn plumber Sakher Hammad knew his life was taking a dramatic turn for the worse.
Along with four friends, Hammad was scheduled to appear before a magistrate judge to hear misdemeanor charges that they'd tried to illegally obtain Tennessee driver's licenses. But that morning, the prosecutor unexpectedly cited "connections" to Sept. 11 and the World Trade Center, and raised the possibility that the Middle Eastern men, including Hammad's cousin Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad, might be involved in terrorism against the United States. In fact, the prosecutor announced, a local Department of Motor Vehicles employee accused of selling the fake licenses had been expected to testify, but she had been killed just hours earlier in a suspicious, fiery car crash.
With that, an audible gasp went up in the courtroom.
The judge, pronouncing the events "upsetting and disturbing," denied bail and ordered Hammad moved to a maximum-security prison where he was locked down in solitary confinement in a 5-by-7-foot cell, given no contact with the outside world and forced to wait 24 days to see his attorney.
The news media swarmed to the case. Fox News, the Associated Press, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and CBS Evening News all raised questions about the dramatic developments in Tennessee, including terrorist activities, late-night homicides and even al-Qaida connections.
There was just one problem: Hammad, a 24-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, and his friends aren't terrorists, and the evidence suggests the DMV worker committed suicide. For Hammad, who lost friends in the attack on the World Trade Center, the doomed road trip to Tennessee and his surreal, publicized run-in with the law have been devastating.
"My life is destroyed," he says. "I lost my business. I lost a lot of my friends. I lost my fiancie. My apartment. You can't really tell the story until you live it."
In the nine months since last year's terrorist attack on New York and Washington, government officials estimate that 1,100 people, mostly Middle Eastern-born men, have been arrested or detained. Independent observers, though, such as David Cole, professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown Law Center, suggest the number stands closer to 1,500 or 2,000.
The dragnet was intended to disrupt any other potential terrorist cells operating inside America. "The Department of Justice is waging a deliberate campaign of arrest and detention to protect American lives," Attorney General John Ashcroft announced last November. "We're removing suspected terrorists who violate the law from our streets to prevent further terrorist attack."
Yet only a single man, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged with being a Sept. 11 conspirator, and he was detained for immigration violations even before the dragnet began. In the meantime, hundreds have been deported for routine visa violations. The U.S. Justice Department, under court order, reported last week that 147 detainees remain in custody -- 74 on immigration-related charges and 73 on separate criminal charges.
"They essentially arrested people first and then investigated," complains Cole. "Virtually all of them were cleared of terrorist charges, which illustrates how little accurate intelligence the FBI had if it was willing to arrest a large number of people who were innocent of any links with terrorism."
A Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, yesterday stressed that the detentions were lawfully conducted and fell within law enforcement's mandate. "The information we have gained from our activities, whether it be the interviews we conducted or the people we detained, has been valuable to our investigation of 9/11 and to our preventive efforts," the official said.
The sweep has been shrouded in secrecy throughout. Cole charged that investigators used ethnic profiling to target young, Muslim and Middle Eastern men. Immigration hearings were immediately closed off even to family members -- a move that a federal appeals court this week ruled was unconstitutional -- while Ashcroft refused to release the names of those detained. The attorney general announced late last year that suspected members of al-Qaida were among those being detained. And he effectively squelched political criticism of the dragnet when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December and said "fear mongers" whipping up concern about civil rights were aiding terrorists.
However, among the 128 criminal charges that have been filed against the 1,000-plus detainees, none, according to a Justice Department official, have been for terrorist activity.
As the one-year anniversary of 9/11 approaches, detainees are still trickling out of jail, being deported or pleading guilty to relatively minor offenses, but they are doing so without the news coverage that accompanied their arrests.
It's unlikely that the public, politicians or the press will lose interest in high-profile cases such as that of American-born Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah Al Muhajir, the alleged "dirty bomb" conspirator, or Moussaoui's unfolding trial. But scores of other once-intriguing terrorism cases have proven to be little more than wild speculation and have been largely forgotten by the press and the public. The men targeted, though, are still paying a high price.
Two weeks ago, Mohammed Azmath, an Indian national, quietly pled guilty to credit-card fraud. That's a long way from last Sept. 12, when he and companion Syed Gul Mohammed Shah were taken into custody on an Amtrak train during a stop in Fort Worth, Texas. The men raised suspicion after they were found with $5,600 in cash, box cutters like those used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, and hair dye. The men had also flown out of the Newark, N.J., airport the morning of Sept. 11, just like the set of hijackers who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. According to the police report, both also appeared "extremely nervous" when confronted on the train.
The men, quickly deemed potential suspects, were held as material witnesses for two months in isolation with no access to attorneys. FBI agents raided Azmath and Shah's Jersey City, N.J., apartment, taking away boxes of evidence while a crowd gathered outside and chanted "USA! USA!"
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