The dragnet comes up empty

All of these cases involving foreign men with Arabic-sounding names caught up in questionable activity immediately drew suspicion and, given the events of last year, grave concern. That was certainly true in Memphis with Hammad.

"In the context of Sept. 11, you can see why we viewed that with great suspicion," says FBI agent George Bolds, a spokesman for the Memphis bureau. "That may not mean there's a connection to terrorism, but we have to take a close look at it."

Even Hammad's court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Jones, agrees that investigators were smart to examine the strange circumstances his Middle Eastern client found himself in. "Early on there was a point in time he and I could say, 'OK, given what's going on in the country after 9/11, there are certain amount of those dots to connect,'" Jones says. "But the lines between the dots broke down very quickly."

Hammad's trouble began when FBI agents received a tip that Katherine Smith, a local DMV employee, would be selling fraudulent driver's licenses to some Middle Eastern men who had driven there from New York. (Tennessee, which does not require applicants to provide Social Security numbers, has become a favorite destination for people in search of false IDs.) On Feb. 5, the agents swooped in on Hammad and his colleagues, who were in the process of applying for licenses at the Memphis testing station where Smith worked.

Virtually all of the government's suspicion about Hammad's possible terrorist links revolved around a single piece of paper found in his wallet: a visitor's pass for the World Trade Center dated Sept. 5. FBI agent Bolds says the finding was "startling." The New York Times called it "alarming." Again and again investigators and journalists used the pass to prop up the story, without ever explaining why the pass would be of any real importance. After all, tens of thousands of people worked at the World Trade Center, while thousands of visitors, including workmen, streamed into the complex every day.

"Show me one plumber in New York who doesn't have a World Trade Center pass," says Hammad, who says he was doing work on a twin tower sprinkler system on Sept. 5. "The FBI looked into that and it checked out completely," adds attorney Jones.

Considering that the deadly Sept. 11 attack was launched by airplanes dropping out of the sky and slamming into the towers, Jones wonders what would have been the advantage of having an al-Qaida operative inside the World Trade Center days in advance. "It's absurd, as if somebody needed to scout out the buildings," he says. "The whole thing doesn't make sense."

Six days after the arrest came the news of Smith's death, which catapulted the story to national prominence. At the hearing before the magistrate judge, FBI agent Suzanne Nash testified that Smith's car had been found just after midnight on a desolate stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, 25 miles south of Memphis. The 1992 Acura Legend had crashed into a utility pole and burst into flames, leaving Smith's body charred beyond recognition. According to witnesses, the car was moving slowly at the time of impact and investigators later determined the gas tank did not explode, yet a residue of gasoline was found on Smith's body.

All five men were behind bars the night of Smith's death, but that didn't stop commentators from trying to find a connection. On Fox News' "O'Reilly Report" Feb. 15, there was this exchange between the host and guest, terrorism analyst Steven Emerson:

O'Reilly: "Miss Smith was assassinated when someone set her on fire inside her car. It looks like a professional hit."

Emerson: "FBI officials and agents are definitely investigating whether this was a political assassination, meaning terrorists actually assassinate her. I think this is a very intriguing case."

O'Reilly: "Yes. I do believe that it's a bigger story than we think it is."

Jones insists that investigators could have stopped that type of wild speculation if they had wanted to. "We had stories in the press about this case for three consecutive weeks," he complains. "But within one week the FBI knew my client absolutely had no terrorist leanings. They were all over him, checking out his story, his family. They knew all of this. Yet there was no attempt to make a retraction or water it down. It was politically popular, what they were doing. You had a prosecutor who saw a chance to get some ride out of going after terrorists, or some suggestion of terrorists. And the press was anxious to jump on it."

Next Page: Was it suicide? "I think that's fair," concedes FBI agent

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