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Washington Post - June 12, 2005
US campaign produces few convictions on terrorism charges
Only 39 people and not 200, as officials have implied, were
convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security
By Dan Eggen and Julie Tate
On Thursday, President Bush stepped to a lectern at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy in Columbus to urge renewal of the USA Patriot Act and to boast of the government's success in prosecuting terrorists.
Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government's efforts against terrorism.
But the numbers are misleading at best.
An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.
Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here. Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States.
Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.
Just one in nine individuals on the list had an alleged connection to the al Qaeda terrorist network and only 14 people convicted of terrorism-related crimes -- including Faris and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui -- have clear links to the group. Many more cases involve Colombian drug cartels, supporters of the Palestinian cause, Rwandan war criminals or others with no apparent ties to al Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.
But a large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance -- through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck -- and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.
For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts for about 10 percent of individuals convicted -- even though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties to terrorism in 2001……
The Numbers
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department database has served as the key source of statistics on the status of terrorism investigations in the United States and has been cited frequently in official speeches and testimony to Congress. The list obtained by The Post includes 361 cases defined as terrorism investigations by the department's criminal division from Sept. 11, 2001, through late September 2004. Thirty-one entries could not be evaluated because they were sealed and blacked out. (The list does not include about 40 cases filed since then that account for Bush's total of about 400). The Post sought to update and correct data whenever possible, including noting convictions or sentences handed down within the past nine months.
The list of domestic prosecutions does not include terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison or at secret locations around the globe. Nor does it include many of the approximately 50 people the Justice Department has acknowledged detaining as "material witnesses," or three men held in a military prison in South Carolina, one of whom has been released.
The Post identified 180 cases in which no connection to al Qaeda or another terrorist group could be found in court records, official statements, the 9/11 commission report or news accounts. Even some of the terrorism-related cases featured early allegations of terrorist connections that were later dropped.
Of the 142 individuals on the list linked to terrorist groups, 39 were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. More than a dozen defendants were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, including three Moroccan men in Detroit whose convictions were tossed out in September after the Justice Department admitted prosecutorial misconduct…….
Only 14 of those convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security have clear links to bin Laden's network, most notably Moussaoui and Reid. Others include Faris, an admitted member of al Qaeda who sought to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge, and six Yemeni men from Lackawanna, N.Y., convicted of providing material support to terrorists by attending an al Qaeda training camp before Sept. 11.
In addition, Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, who is most closely associated with Afghanistan's deposed government, trained at an al Qaeda camp……
Using One Case to Build Another
In the end, most cases on the Justice Department list turned out to have no connection to terrorism at all.
They include Hassan Nasrallah, a Dearborn, Mich., man convicted of credit-card fraud who has the same name as the leader of Hezbollah, or Party of God. Abdul Farid of High Point, N.C., was arrested on a false tip that he was sending money to the Taliban and was deported after admitting he lied on a loan application. Moeen Islam Butt, a Pakistani jewelry-kiosk employee in Pennsylvania, spent eight months in jail before being deported on marriage-fraud and immigration charges.
And there is the case of Francois Guagni, a French national who made the mistake of illegally crossing the Canadian border on Sept. 14, 2001, with box cutters in his possession. It turned out that Guagni used the knives in his job as a drywall installer. He was deported in March 2003 after pleading guilty to unlawfully entering the country.
"His case had nothing to do with terrorism, as far as I've ever been told," said Guagni's attorney, Christopher D. Smith.
Some of the cases, however, remain murky. The question of involvement in terrorism lingers even after formal allegations of such ties have been dropped.
Consider the case of Enaam Arnaout, director of the Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation, who was indicted amid great fanfare in October 2002 for allegedly helping to funnel money and equipment to al Qaeda operatives on three continents. The charity was shut down.
Less than a year later, prosecutors dropped six of the seven charges against Arnaout, and he pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering for funding fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. During a sentencing hearing in August 2003, U.S. District Judge Suzanne B. Conlon told prosecutors they had "failed to connect the dots" and said there was no evidence that Arnaout "identified with or supported" terrorism…..
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100381.html
Washington Post - June 13, 2005
Immigration law as anti-terrorism tool
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Soul Khalil woke with a start. Her split-level home in Burke was shuddering, and the oppressive hum of a helicopter filled the room. Then she heard the pounding on the front door. "Police!" the voices yelled. She shook her husband. "Hassan! You hear that banging?" she later recalled saying.
Her husband, in his shorts, stumbled into the hallway. At the end of it was a masked agent, his gun drawn. "Get down!" he yelled, according to the husband's recollection. The Lebanese immigrant dropped onto his stomach, and the officers cuffed his hands behind his back.
The charge: lying on his immigration documents.
Authorities rarely go to such lengths to snare an immigrant accused of fraud. The dawn raid last month was carried out by Homeland Security and FBI agents from a local Joint Terrorism Task Force, working with a SWAT-style team -- dispatched because federal officials had information that Khalil, 36, had had weapons training.
Khalil's arrest is part of a broad anti-terrorism effort being waged with a seemingly innocuous weapon: immigration law. In the past two years, officials have filed immigration charges against more than 500 people who have come under scrutiny in national security investigations, according to previously undisclosed government figures. Some are ultimately found to have no terrorism ties, officials acknowledge.
Whereas terrorism charges can be difficult to prosecute, Homeland Security officials say immigration laws can provide a quick, easy way to detain people who could be planning attacks. Authorities have also used routine charges such as overstaying a visa to deport suspected supporters of terrorist groups.
"It's an incredibly important piece of the terrorism response," said Michael J. Garcia, who heads Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. And although immigration violations might seem humdrum, he said, "They're legitimate charges."
Muslim and civil liberties activists disagree. They argue that authorities are enforcing minor violations by Muslims and Arabs, while ignoring millions of other immigrants who flout the same laws.
They note that many of those charged are not shown to be involved in terrorism, including Khalil, a cellular-telephone technician who was freed by a judge pending his immigration trial and denies any connection to terrorism. Federal officials said they could not discuss any national security aspects of the case because it involves an ongoing investigation.
"The approach is basically to target the Muslim and Arab community with a kind of zero-tolerance immigration policy. No other community in the U.S. is treated to zero-tolerance enforcement," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and critic of the government's anti-terrorism policies.
Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, immigration agents were minor players in the world of counterterrorism. That changed during the investigation of the hijackings, when 768 suspects were secretly processed on immigration charges. Most were deported after being cleared of connections to terrorism.
Unlike that controversial roundup, most of the recent arrests have not involved secret proceedings. Still, they can be hard to track. A few cases have turned into high-profile criminal trials, but others have centered on little-known individuals processed in obscure immigration courts, with no mention of a terrorism investigation.
In some cases, the government ultimately concludes that a suspect, while perhaps guilty of an immigration violation, has no terrorism ties at all.
Authorities are often reluctant to disclose why an immigrant's name emerged in a national security investigation, because the information is classified or is part of a continuing probe. Homeland Security officials turned down a request by The Washington Post for the names of all those charged in the past two years, making it difficult to assess how effective their strategy has been at thwarting terrorism.
But a post-Sept. 11 aggressiveness is evident in dozens of immigration cases described by federal officials, defense lawyers and news accounts. For example, authorities have taken the unusual step of stripping some immigrants' U.S. citizenship. Officials are also using immigration charges to pressure people to provide information on Muslim organizations, several attorneys said.
This is an anti-terrorism effort fought largely behind the scenes, in the murky world of intelligence and informers, often barely visible in the court files of those charged.
Waheeda Tehseen’s case
Consider the case of Waheeda Tehseen.
Tehseen was a Pakistani graduate student when she immigrated in 1988 after spending a childhood in poverty near the Afghan border. Over the years, she acquired the trappings of a successful American life: a PhD in toxicology, a four-bedroom house in Fairfax Station and a $90,000-a-year job at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA even presented Tehseen its "Unsung Hero" award for her volunteer work overseas with Afghan refugees.
But on Feb. 2, 2004, her success story abruptly ended.
Tehseen, then 46, was arrested and accused of lying on her naturalization application in 2001. The violation centered on one question: Have you ever claimed to be a U.S. citizen? No, Tehseen had checked. In fact, in 1998, she had accepted a job in EPA's pesticide division -- a position she knew was open only to U.S. citizens.
"I just had to have the job for my children," a weeping Tehseen said in an interview last year, explaining that she had been supporting three daughters and a son. She considered it "the tiniest error"; she had been a legal resident, and would become a citizen in 2002.
Authorities considered it part of a pattern of deception. They noted that Tehseen had also listed a phony employer, instead of the EPA, on her application in an apparent effort to disguise the lie.
The violations would probably never have been caught, but Tehseen came under scrutiny in a terrorism-related investigation. She said the probe apparently involved an orphanage she opened in April 2003 on the Pakistani-Afghan border, using funds from a Missouri-based group, the Islamic American Relief Agency.
Tehseen said the group had seemed to be a legitimate charity. But last October, the Treasury Department accused the agency's overseas branches of helping fund Osama bin Laden.
Several of Tehseen's colleagues defended her assertion that she was interested in charity, not Islamic radicalism. Federal prosecutors, however, apparently believed Tehseen could provide information. She said federal agents questioned her about the Islamic charity, the Taliban and al Qaeda, and authorities offered to go easy on her immigration-fraud charge if she became an informant.
Federal officials declined to comment on that investigation, saying the information is classified. An official close to the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that a deal was discussed but provided no details.
Tehseen declined the offer because, she said, "I'm not an FBI person who can go and sneak in and find out who's right and wrong." She was deported last August and is working on environmental projects in Pakistan.
Muslim activists say cases such as Tehseen's show that the government is scouring the immigration papers of Arabs and Muslims it considers suspicious. "They see people they want to get, [and] they look in their records until they find something they can get them on," said Arsalan Iftikhar, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations….
Authorities say they sometimes turn to immigration charges rather than terrorism charges because a case might be based on classified information that they cannot reveal in court without damaging other investigations. Sometimes they face other legal barriers.
For example, ICE agents alleged in federal court in Alexandria that investor Soliman S. Biheiri had done business through the mid-1990s with a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which is on the U.S. terrorism list. But the statute of limitations had expired.
Prosecutors instead charged Biheiri with putting false information on his citizenship application. Biheiri, an Egyptian immigrant, has denied any improper dealings with Hamas. He was convicted and was sentenced to a year in jail, and is to be deported soon….
Soul Khalil case
Among those accused of immigration fraud are at least 10 naturalized Americans, according to a tally by The Post based on court records, ICE documents and news reports. Khalil is among them. According to the charges, he failed to acknowledge in his 1999 naturalization application that he had been arrested and ordered out of the United States eight years earlier for overstaying his student visa.
Khalil disputes the accusation. He said he obtained a document in the early 1990s shielding him from deportation because of the war raging in Lebanon. He married his wife, a U.S. citizen, in 1994 and became a legal resident.
But the case is about more than a 14-year-old deportation issue. Khalil said he was visited over a year ago by FBI agents who asked whether he knew of any threats to the United States and whether he had ties to Hezbollah, or Party of God, the armed Shiite Muslim movement that the U.S. government considers a terrorist group.
Khalil said he knew no members of Hezbollah in the United States but did in south Lebanon, where it is now a major political party. Agents asked him again during his arrest last month whether he knew of anyone intending harm to this country, he said.
"If I tell you I know nobody involved in Hezbollah, I'm a liar. It would be like saying I live in D.C. and never see a black person," Khalil said in an interview. He said he acknowledged to the agents that he had learned to use arms in Lebanon during the war, which he said was common.
Khalil added that he has been told several times in U.S. airports that his name is on a "no-fly" list, but that he has always been cleared to board.
Boyd, the ICE spokesman, said he could not comment on any national security aspects of the case. He said authorities used the helicopter and SWAT-style team because Khalil had had weapons and martial-arts training. "We have to be safe," he said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan released Khalil pending his trial, stating that the immigration charge appeared "rather weak."
Although Khalil was charged in criminal court, many others are tried in the immigration court system, which is part of the Justice Department. Immigration lawyers have raised concerns about using such courts in terrorism-related cases, because they provide fewer legal protections for the accused. For example, those charged do not have the right to an attorney, and they may be detained even after a judge has ordered them freed on bond. "There's no key to the jailhouse door when Immigration's got you," said Malea Kiblan, an immigration lawyer in Northern Virginia.
Saudi student’s case
That was the complaint of one of her clients, Ibrahim Abdullah, who was charged last year with violating his student visa by holding a job. The arrest was part of an investigation by the local terrorism task force.
Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they had a strong immigration case against Abdullah, a Saudi PhD student at George Mason University. They said he had received checks for thousands of dollars from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, or WAMY, whose Falls Church office was founded by a relative of bin Laden's. The group has been under scrutiny for possible terrorism ties, officials say, although there has been no allegation of a crime. The group denies any such link.
Abdullah said that the money was reimbursement for supplies he had bought, and that he was simply a volunteer. He insisted he had no need to work, because he had a scholarship and a $3,000-a-month stipend from the Saudi government.
Immigration prosecutors indicated they would oppose bond for Abdullah, Kiblan said. That meant he could spend months in jail, because even if an immigration judge ordered his release, a post-Sept. 11 regulation allows the government to stay such decisions during an appeal.
Abdullah decided to plead guilty to the immigration charge. "They scared me. I'm not used to the jail," Abdullah, 42, said in a telephone interview from Saudi Arabia, where he is a computer science professor. He was deported last July.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/12/AR2005061201441.html
Washington Post - June 12, 2005
The terrorism case that wasn't -- and still Is
By Jerry Markon
Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI learned that 18 Middle Eastern men had obtained licenses in Pennsylvania to haul hazardous materials across the nation's roadways.
Deeply concerned about another terrorist attack, prosecutors filed fraud charges against the men on Sept. 24, 2001. The next day, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft appeared before Congress. Invoking the threat of attacks with poisons from crop-dusting aircraft or other hazardous materials, he said some of the defendants "may have links to the hijackers."
Within two days, the FBI was backing off that allegation. Two months later, prosecutors in Pittsburgh, where the men -- mostly Iraqis -- were convicted, said they had no apparent terrorist ties. The U.S. attorney's office later learned that the men never intended to buy the hazardous-materials permits.
Robert Cindrich, a former U.S. district judge who heard the case, said that he would "not continue to characterize this as a successful prosecution of a terrorism case, because it was not."
Yet the case still makes up the largest single portion of the government's list of terrorism prosecutions.
Rena Zottola's husband, Kumeit Al-Saraf, was put on probation after pleading guilty to a conspiracy charge and remains unemployed. She said that "what Americans need to realize is that for the people in this case, their lives are ruined. His name is tainted now. That's it."
Ali Alubeidy lost his business in the Pittsburgh area after he was linked to the hazmat scam. His auto repair garage was destroyed in an unsolved arson fire. All he could save was a singed workbench.
He and his business partner, Mohammed Alibrahimi, have moved their garage to an Italian neighborhood 15 miles away. "I'm hiding," Alubeidy said. "I don't want any more trouble."
The case began in March 2000 as a state investigation of Pennsylvania driver's license examiner Robert A. Ferrari, a former trucker who has admitted to taking bribes. He pleaded guilty to five counts of unlawful production of an identification document -- commercial driver's licenses, many with hazardous-materials endorsements, that he issued to people who had not taken required tests.
A commercial license enables someone to drive a truck, and a hazardous-materials endorsement is required to transport cargo the government considers a potential risk. The scam was quickly uncovered, and Ferrari was fired in April 2000.
Nearly 18 months later, on Sept. 20, 2001, Pennsylvania officials contacted the FBI, said Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh. Four days later, 20 men from Pittsburgh and elsewhere faced federal charges of fraudulently obtaining commercial driver's licenses. Eighteen had hazardous-materials endorsements.
But by Sept. 27, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said the bureau had the "preliminary belief" that the Pittsburgh arrests "do not relate in any way" to the Sept. 11 attacks. In late November 2001, Buchanan's office said publicly that the men had not been linked to terrorism. The announcement came the same week that the Justice Department released the names of 93 people nationwide charged in the anti-terrorism investigation since Sept. 11.
The list included the men charged in Pittsburgh. Nearly all were Iraqi refugees from the Persian Gulf War who had fought Saddam Hussein in an uprising the United States encouraged. Forced to flee to camps in Saudi Arabia, they came to the United States with the aid of relief groups……
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100379.html
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