U.S. citizen on no-fly list discusses being stranded in Egypt and talks with FBI

Fairfax man finally returns to U.S. after being put on no-fly list in Cairo

After traveling to Yemen to find love and learn Arabic, Yahya Wehelie was stranded in Cairo for six weeks when the FBI put him on a no-fly list.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

By Ian Shapira

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 27, 2010; B01


Yahye Wehelie, 26, born and raised in Fairfax County, was supposed to have been home this spring, telling friends and family about his 18-month stay in Yemen: the technology classes, his quest for a Muslim bride, the wedding and reception that featured a DJ playing music by Michael Jackson and Celine Dion.

Instead, while on his way home in early May, Wehelie was stopped while changing planes in Cairo. It turns out he had been placed on the U.S. government's no-fly list. From that moment until last weekend, Wehelie, a graduate of Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, was stranded in Egypt, shuttling between a $16-a-night Cairo hotel room and a windowless room at the U.S. Embassy. There, he said, FBI special agents fed him Oreos and chips and told him he might never see Virginia again.

In his first extensive interview since his return home July 17, Wehelie said the FBI peppered him with questions about possible ties to terrorists. In about six exhausting sessions over his 11 weeks in Egypt, agents made Wehelie log his daily activities dating back several months. They asked whether he was a "devout" Muslim. They probed about connections he might have to Islamic radicals, including Sharif Mobley, an alleged al-Qaeda recruit from New Jersey whom Wehelie met on a street in Yemen.

And then their tone changed, morphing into entreaties to help protect his native land: Might Wehelie consider being a mole in the Muslim community when he got home?

"I've lived in Virginia my whole life," Wehelie said, dressed in loose jeans and a striped Ralph Lauren shirt. "I listen to rap. I play basketball. I watch football. I wasn't brought up the way these crazy people [terrorists] are brought up. I just want to live on with my life. I don't want to be an informant. I want to work for an IT company. I want to be a normal person."

Wehelie -- who says he was in Yemen because his mother sent him to learn Arabic and find a Muslim wife -- sees his experience as what could be described as a Kafkaesque ordeal in which he agonized for weeks over how to prove that he was no threat to his native land. But the government says it must maintain a tight watch over those who may have had contact with known terrorists, and Yemen has been a special point of concern in law enforcement circles of late.

Since Christmas, when a Nigerian man who had trained in Yemen tried to blow up an airplane landing in Detroit, about 30 Muslim Americans have been restricted from leaving, returning to or traveling within the United States, according to a log kept by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"Several recent high-profile attempted terror plots against U.S. targets, including the attempted Christmas Day attack and the Times Square incident, remind us of the need to remain vigilant and thoroughly investigate every lead to fend off any potential threats," said Paul Bresson, an FBI spokesman, who declined to address Wehelie's case specifically. "The American public correctly demands that of us."

Bresson said the "FBI is always careful to protect the civil rights and privacy concerns of all Americans. . . . We are very mindful of the fact that our success in enforcing the law depends on partnerships with the Muslim community and many other communities."

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria and the FBI are still investigating Wehelie, according to his attorney, Tom Echikson. The family met Thursday with government officials, but Echikson would not discuss the talks. He said he is trying to get Wehelie removed from the no-fly list.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the U.S attorney's office in Alexandria, said he could not confirm or deny any investigation into Wehelie's activities.

Wehelie's parents, Shamsa Noor and Abdirizak Wehelie -- Somali immigrants who studied at the University of the District of Columbia -- said they had been worried about the second-oldest of their six children, who they thought seemed adrift.

Yahye Wehelie had dropped out of Norfolk State University. By 2008, when he was working as a DHL delivery man, his parents urged him to learn Arabic so he could launch a more lucrative career and maybe find a Muslim wife.

Wehelie, who likes playing Xbox video games and reading Slam and Sports Illustrated magazines, pushed back.

"I was thinking, no, I didn't want to do it. . . . I didn't need to go to a foreign country to learn no foreign language," he said. "I was scared. I went on YouTube to see some clips of Yemen and didn't like what I had seen. I was like, man, this place is in the Stone Ages. I got mad. I actually got depressed.

"How could I match up with someone in Yemen?" Wehelie remembered complaining. "They won't understand American culture. I was going to have to man up."

In October 2008, Wehelie boarded a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Dulles and was soon ensconced in Yemeni society. He enrolled at Lebanese International University in Sanaa, the capital. He rented a one-bedroom apartment, played basketball and visited Internet cafes. Soon, he found a bride, a Somali refugee a few years his junior. Maryam was the sister of a friend of a friend -- a nurse.

He thought she was cute. They both liked spaghetti and walks in the park. More important, she made him curious about his Somali heritage.

"Other women who want to meet Americans are like, 'Oh, he'll bring me back to the States,' " he said. "She wasn't like that. . . . She wanted her Somali culture -- and I wanted to get back to that, too."

A year after Wehelie arrived in Yemen, the couple married. Some of his family showed up, including his youngest brother, Yusuf, who wound up staying long-term. Guests danced to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." The couple posed in their wedding attire -- Yahye in a dark suit, Maryam in a gown with flowing train -- for souvenir photographs emblazoned with the words "With Love."

Soon, Wehelie got homesick. He wanted to return to the United States to file for permission to bring his wife home. Early this May, he and his brother boarded an EgyptAir flight to Cairo, where they expected to switch to a flight to New York.

But at the Cairo airport, airline officials told the brothers they couldn't make the transfer. They were directed to the U.S. Embassy.

Mystified, the brothers jumped into a cab, thinking the detour would last half an hour and they'd still make their flight. But at the embassy, they were told to wait, go get some lunch. When the brothers got back from Hardee's, they were told that FBI agents from Washington were flying in to see them.

Wehelie borrowed a cellphone and called his mother to say he might be delayed by up to four days. The brothers shuffled off to the nearby Garden City House Hotel, paying with money the U.S. government lent them. The brothers were given coupons for fast-food restaurants and plenty of time to check out the Nile and the Pyramids. After a few days, Yusuf was cleared to go home, but Yahye had to stay.

Wehelie said he met with two FBI agents in a small room at the embassy. The agents -- a man and a woman -- asked a barrage of questions: Do you pray every day? Have you ever met the following people? He took a polygraph test. He handed over passwords to his e-mail and Facebook accounts.

"The FBI, you think they're smart, but these people . . . they'll ask you the stupidest questions that are so irrelevant," Wehelie said. "I am cool with them trying to make screenings safe for my country and all U.S. citizens. I just think in my case, it took a little longer."

Back home in Burke, where the walls are decorated with artwork featuring the Koran, Wehelie's mother said she "felt guilty. I would wake up at 3 a.m. and pray to God to help me. I sent him there to be a better person for this country."

But in Cairo, the FBI's questions seemed designed to examine her son's possible ties to people with very different loyalties. When they showed Wehelie photographs of radicals, one looked familiar, if only vaguely. It was Sharif Mobley, a U.S. citizen accused of killing a hospital guard in Yemen after Mobley was arrested in a sweep of suspected al-Qaeda militants.

Wehelie told The Washington Post that he met Mobley once at random in Sanaa on Hadda Street, a popular spot for foreigners, but knew nothing about his past.

"I don't consider myself knowing this guy," he said. "I met him outside on Hadda Street. He came up to me and said, 'Are you American?' I said, 'Yeah, I am.' 'Well, cool dude, where are you from?' It was small talk."

As his sessions with the FBI wound down, Wehelie said, agents asked whether he might attend mosque services in the Washington area and report back on potential terrorist plots or security threats.

"I was like, 'Man, I don't know,' " he said. "It was very weird. I don't think that's right."

Finally, on July 17, Wehelie was allowed to fly to New York, but because he's still on the no-fly list, he could not continue on to Washington, so his parents picked him up at John F. Kennedy International Airport and drove him home. By morning, he was back playing video games on his Xbox.

Now he wonders whether he'll see the female FBI agent again. In Egypt, she told him she'd like to take him out for a meal -- "for a chitchat"-- when he got home.

"I said, 'Cool, it depends on if I have free time,' " Wehelie recalled. "I didn't want to be rude. I am willing to talk if it coincides with my schedule."

CQ - Behind the Lines for Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Image by taiyofj via Flickr

By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly

Stockholm syndrome: "Maybe she's forgotten who she is -- or was," Arizona columnist muses of ex-governor Napolitano's reluctance to reinforce border . . . What's in a name: "The irony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's acronym has never been lost on anyone, including the agency itself" . . . Bad CEO, no doughnut: "Despite growing awareness of how devastating a cyber-attack could be, many businesses still haven't implemented security measures." These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.

---------------------------------

“Drug traffickers fighting to control northern Mexico have turned their guns and grenades on the Mexican army, in an apparent escalation of warfare that played out across multiple cities,” The Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson updates — and see The Washington Post’s William Booth on the rise of a prison-spawned, cross-border paramilitary killing machine. “Maybe she’s just taking orders from her boss, Barack Obama. Or maybe she’s forgotten who she is — or was,” Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts hazards as to why DHS’s Janet Napolitano hasn’t yet dispatched troops to the border. “How to account for this refusal to appreciate a primary security problem escalating along our 1,500-mile southern border?” Sol Sanders muses in The Washington Times.

Feds: Since the Southwest Border Security Initiative began a year ago, DHS has increased tactical support to border area law enforcers, The Brownsville (Texas) Herald’s Laura Tillman relatedly surveys. The Pakistani Taliban takes credit for yesterday’s multipronged suicide attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Peshawar, in which two non-U.S. defenders were killed, Al Jazeera reports — as the Post’s Joshua Partlow finds U.S. officials troubled by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s threat to join the Taliban before bowing to foreign interference. A year on, the FBI’s eGuardian system “has proven a robust tool for aggregating terrorist threat information,” reaping 3,400 suspicious activity reports generating 56 investigations, a bureau official tells Security Management’s Joseph Straw.

Thin ICE: A federal program that partners local police agencies with ICE has grown rapidly without ensuring that police follow federal priorities or respect civil rights, The Arizona Republic’s Daniel Gonzalez has a DHS IG report finding. “The irony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s acronym has never been lost on anyone, including the agency itself,” Mary Giovagnoli spotlights on AlterNet. “Setting quotas to deport more illegal immigrants would mean diverting resources from getting rid of some of the nation’s worst criminals,” a Post reader writes. From 1997 to 2007, ICE and its predecessor deported the lawful immigrant parents of nearly 88,000 citizen children, Homeland Security Newswire learns from a report — and see Tanya Golash-Boza in CounterPunch: “ICE on the Border: The Politics of Deportation.”

State and Local: At an April 17 event in Albany, military and federal experts will brief responders and the public on coping with natural disasters and terrorist attacks, the Times Union tells — while The Pueblo Chieftain has Gov. Bill Ritter naming four area law enforcers to the homeland-security-bolstering Colorado Interoperability Executive Council, and The Sioux Falls Argus Leader sees a Highway Patrol vet appointed director of South Dakota’s Office of Homeland Security. New CDC numbers show tiny Rhode Island boasting the highest rate of swine flu vaccinations, about 39 percent, three times higher than Mississippi, which has the weakest participation, The Jackson Clarion-Ledger relays — as The Austin American-Statesman sees Texas officials monitoring a rise in swine flu cases in the Southeast United States and encouraging inoculation.

Bid-ness: The reason DHS and other agencies struggle to hire expert cyberwarriors “is simple: The pool of truly skilled security professionals is a small one, and the government is only the latest suitor vying for their talents,” The San Francisco Chronicle spotlights. “Despite growing awareness of how devastating a cyber-attack could be, many businesses still haven’t implemented security measures,” The New New Internet has a recent report highlighting. A former Chicago Police superintendent and a retired Secret Service chief helm a fast-growing security consulting firm, the Sun-Times profiles. The deadliest terrorist attacks on Moscow since 2004 didn’t stop Russian stocks from climbing more than every market worldwide last week, Bloomberg relates.

Bugs ‘n Bombs: A “certified cleaning expert” briefs The Lansdale (Pa.) Reporter on sanitizing measures for situations ranging up to “weapons-grade pathogens and bioterrorism.” Speaking of the Keystone State, the Biosecurity and Vaccine Development Improvement Act would keep money moving to one of recently deceased Rep. Jack Murtha’s pet recipients of taxpayer dollars, BioPrepWatch relates. Years after a six-month deadline passed, dozens of nations, including uranium producers, ignore a U.N. mandate on controls to foil nuclear terrorism, The Associated Press reports — while the Post reports that in the nuclear posture statement due today, Obama appears to be backing off promises to take the nation’s nuclear weapons off “hair-trigger alert.”

Close Air Support: Four newspaper companies are progressing with a suit to force Raleigh-Durham International to allow post-security newspaper racks, which airport authorities describe as a terror risk, USA Today updates. The newly announced screening regime for incoming non-citizens “will treat all passengers flying into the United States in the same way, regardless of their faith or nationality,” Arab News applauds — while a North Star National op-ed claims the measures “will weaken our ability to screen out terrorists.” The suspected terrorist who drove a car onto a Nigerian airport’s tarmac and into a parked aircraft “may have targeted the five Americans and top politicians on board the aircraft,” The Sunday Punch reports — as The Toronto Star terms a cadre of Mounties serving as in-flight security officers “one of Canada’s secret weapons in the war on terror.”

Coming and Going: “The key to unbinding the Gordian knot of mass transit rail security is to accept risk,” an Antiwar.com op-ed asserts. “Like much of TSA’s efforts on aviation security, its mass transit and passenger rail efforts remain a work in progress,” Homeland Security Watch adds. “Perhaps the most overlooked mode of transportation is our nation’s system of pipelines. With few resources, the TSA must protect this mode, in addition to more obvious ones like aviation and rail,” The Boston Herald leads. “There’s also the possibility of Seaport Canaveral being an enticing target for terrorists,” Florida Today observes, referencing the port’s new 118 million gallon tank farm. “A security expert warns the technology is far from perfect as Canada prepares to join 60 other countries next year and begin issuing electronic passports,” Calgary’s 660 News notes.

Home Front: Senate homelander Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., warned Sunday that extreme partisan anger is increasing the risk of domestic terrorism in the United States, Voice of America’s Paula Wolfson relates. If the Hutaree militia “are scapegoats of the Obama Homeland Security machine, well, we may never know it. One thing I do know for certain is these people are the perfect target for Napolitano and her gang,” Gina Miller conspiracizes for Dakota Voice. The Michigan militia arrests “should serve as a wake-up call to those in political leadership roles who are inciting rage against the government,” James Zogby exhorts in The Huffington Post. “Violence with the stated goal of changing the internal workings of our democracy is terrorism, not patriotism,” The Marion (Ohio) Star adjures. “Words can be weapons, too. So after nearly every new report of political violence . . . there is a vocabulary debate: Should it be labeled ‘terrorism’?” The New York Times’ Scott Shane explores.

Talking Terror: Some leaders “call for an offshore strategy of counterterrorism to retaliate after an attack rather than an in-country strategy of counterinsurgency to prevent such attacks,” Henry R. Nau notes in Policy Review. “Terrorism is like jazz; it’s all about improvisation and variation. That’s why conventional forces are dead in the water against it; they’re all ‘by the book,’ with top-down command and control,” Doug Casey tells HoweStreet.com. “We are safer because, despite his rhetoric, Obama became Bush in matters of anti-terrorism,” Victor Davis Hanson asserts in The National Review. Female suicide bombers are more driven by abusive histories than nationalist yearnings, Haaretz has a new book published in Israel positing — and check IPT News on “The Growing Threat from Female Suicide Bombers.”

Courts and rights: A pregnant American charged in a global terror plot will plead not guilty at a hearing tomorrow in Pennsylvania, AP learns — as The Chicago Sun-Times relays word of a Chicago cabbie also pleading innocent yesterday to attempting to aid al Qaeda. Unlawful immigration status is insufficient cause to permit lawsuit plaintiffs to hide behind anonymity, The Arkansas News Bureau has that state’s Supreme Court ruling — while The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covers the conclusion of a case that at one time promised to involve international terror finance. “It’s not that we aren’t going to have the rule of law. It’s which rule of law,” The Huffington Post quotes Lieberman, again, promoting military trials for accused terrorists.

Over There: A stepped-up campaign of American drone strikes in the Af-Pak border region this year has cast a pall of fear over an area that was once a free zone for al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Times leads. The leader of an Islamist terror group widely considered to be a nationalist insurgent organization has invited Osama bin Laden to Somalia, The Long War Journal relates. Salafi-Jihadi activities in Mauritania have increased significantly in the last couple of years, indicating that al-Qaeda-affiliated groups are becoming more effective in that country, Terrorism Monitor mentions.

Do You Solemnly Swear: “Things are slowly returning to normal today at the White House in the wake of the recent F-Bomb scare,” Unconfirmed Sources confirms. “All offices of the White House are back in operation after a tense afternoon following the evacuation of the entire facility during the signing ceremony for the bill to reform the American health care system. The evacuation was ordered when a Secret Service agent who was monitoring the bill signing determined that an F-Bomb had been dropped near the president. He was spirited away to a secure facility and the White House staff was also evacuated. The White House F-Bomb squad was called in and secured the building. The team of F-Bomb experts searched the building and recovered the remains of the F-Bomb, nobody was injured during the operation . . . Lawmakers, fresh from their success in passing Health Care Reform, have already vowed to address the F-Bomb crisis.”

Source: CQ Homeland Security

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Naji Hamdan's Nightmare

By Anna Louie Sussman

This article appeared in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation.

March 4, 2010

CAITLIN DOVER

Beirut, Lebanon

At only one point in his story did Naji Hamdan cry. Sitting in an office chair as he recounted how he was arrested, tortured and ultimately convicted of terrorism charges in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), his voice barely wavered. Only when he described how Emirati interrogators threatened to rape his wife in front of him if he did not confess to charges of supporting Al Qaeda did he lose control, pausing to accept a fistful of Kleenex before he continued his story.

"For two weeks I could not stand on my feet. I had to use the help of a Nepali guard to drag me to the bathroom," he said of a period following a particularly brutal beating, around three weeks into his two-month detention.

Hamdan, 43, was born in Lebanon and moved to the United States in 1984. He studied aerospace engineering, worked at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) as an aircraft mechanic, then for Northrop Grumman, and eventually opened his own auto parts business, HondAcura Palace. In his downtime, he played soccer, camped and hiked, and as of 1992 began raising his son, Khaled. A few years later he became a naturalized citizen. A devout Sunni Muslim, he was active in the Muslim community and helped to found the Islamic Center of Hawthorne, in Southern California.

In 1999 the Federal Bureau of Investigation visited him at home, inquiring about a possible millennial terrorist attack. The bureau also interrogated others in the local Muslim community, asking whether they knew of any imminent plots.

"They asked if I knew any terrorists, would I go and tell them," said Hamdan. "Of course I would. My kids were going to school there. I have businesses there."

Hamdan's brother Hossam, who goes by the name Sam, got a visit too. At the time, he recalled, "We were like, What the hell are they talking about?"

The FBI kept Hamdan on its radar for the next ten years, contacting him, he estimates, on six occasions. Officials asked about his business, his political beliefs and whether he knew Osama bin Laden (he knew bin Laden as well as anyone else did at the time, "from the media," as he put it). During this time, air travel became increasingly difficult for him; he was often stopped and questioned for hours, on one occasion missing a flight out of LAX.

Hamdan moved his family to Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates in 2006, where he hoped to expose his children to Islamic culture and the Arabic language, as well as the American culture of business and entrepreneurship. There, he thought, they could have "the best of both worlds." He had heard it was "more modern and developed" than the rest of the region.

"And peaceful," added his wife, a look of pained irony on her face.

Even after relocating, he continued to face harassment at airports and particularly on trips back to the United States, where he and Sam continued to operate the auto parts business. On one visit in March 2007, he says, he was interrogated at LAX for more than four hours, followed by SUVs with tinted windows and repeatedly photographed. He cut his trip short.

"They were kind of pushing me out of the country as if I'm not an American citizen anymore," he said. "And that is sad."

That treatment was gentle compared with the reception he got from the government of the United Arab Emirates. At noon on August 26, 2008, six weeks after FBI agents had summoned him for about four hours of interrogation at the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi, he got a call saying his car, parked downstairs from his apartment, had been in an accident. The sun shining, he went downstairs in shorts and a T-shirt (he had been napping) to check his vehicle. Emirati officials arrived on the scene, handcuffed and blindfolded him, and drove away in custom-made SUVs with tinted windows.

Held incommunicado for one month and twenty-three days, Hamdan says he was subject to near-daily beatings and torture for the first few weeks, after which the beatings slowed to every few days. In between he was left in total isolation.

"I don't know if it's a tactic or not," he said, "but it was painful also to leave me without even the guard talking to me."

The beatings were intended to elicit a confession of in-
volvement with a rotating cast of terrorist groups that would change from one day to the next. Initially, Hamdan protested his innocence. But the threat against his wife was too much, and he broke down.

"The interrogator said, You're going to sign a confession that you're with Al Qaeda and put your fingerprint on it," Hamdan remembers. But a few days later, he was taken from his cell to another interrogator, who said he'd received information "from a friendly country" that Hamdan was supporting the Gaza-based Palestinian group Hamas.

"He said, You have to change your confession," said Hamdan. Still fearing for his wife, he told them, "Listen, I'll do whatever you want."

Hamdan quickly came to believe that his Emirati interrogators were acting at the behest of the United States; at one point they questioned him about his recent interview with the FBI at the embassy, asking him why he was tense during their meeting.

"I didn't think of it when I first got detained, but when the beatings started, I knew right away," he said.

During one interrogation, Hamdan said, he believed an American interrogator was present in the room. He identified the man by his accent and his dress, which differed from the rest of the interrogators, who were wearing either white robes, a traditional men's dress in the Gulf, or the uniform that high-ranking military officers wear.

"From underneath my blindfold, I could see feet. He had on gray suit pants and black dress shoes," said Hamdan, "and he had a pure American accent. I encountered the FBI several times before. I have no doubt he was FBI."

As UAE agents introduced him to their full spectrum of torture techniques (a freezing cold isolation room, an electric chair they sat him in and threatened to turn on, kicks and punches to his already frail liver), his family searched in vain to discover his whereabouts. His wife says she went to the State Security offices and was told they'd never heard of her husband. She also says she called the US Embassy and the State Department, where staff claimed they were unaware of his case. Hamdan's brother Sam said he called Joshua Stone, an FBI agent who had interviewed Hamdan in Abu Dhabi.

"They weren't interested in talking about him," Sam recalled. "If he really didn't know what was happening to Naji, he would have been more interested. He'd want to know more," he concluded. At one point, he suggested to Stone that perhaps Naji was suspected of stealing cars, since he dealt in used automobiles.

"The guy laughed and said, 'Criminally? It's not that,'" Sam said.

The Hamdan family reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a habeas corpus suit in a Washington, DC, district court in November 2008. Although the judge dismissed the case in August 2009, finding a lack of jurisdiction, the suit shone light on Hamdan's predicament for the first time and highlighted the responsibility of the US government to attend to the detention of one of its citizens.

"One month and twenty-three days," said Hamdan incredulously of the time he was held incommunicado. "Normally if [Abu Dhabi authorities] detain a US citizen, they should report it to the embassy right away. But they did not."

After that period, Hamdan met with Sean Cooper, the consular chief for the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi. Three days before they met, his captors took his measurements, and on the day of the meeting gave him a brand-new outfit--shoes, pants, a shirt, underwear and socks--and a warning: "You better behave, because if you tell them anything, you're coming back to us, and you know what's going to happen." Looking spiffy, he arrived to find three Emirati officials, who would be present throughout the interview. He tried to use body language to indicate to Cooper that all was not well.

"He asked if I was being mistreated," remembered Hamdan, "and as I said no, I would turn my face to the side. Later, when I saw him, he said he had no idea something was wrong."

After their meeting, the beatings stopped, although another month passed before Hamdan was transferred to criminal custody. According to his lawyer, Jennie Pasquarella of ACLU Southern California, instead of helping the Hamdans secure Naji's release, the US government put up "major roadblocks at every turn." She and her colleagues were unable to persuade lawmakers to take up Hamdan's case publicly (she imagines they were "skittish" about "championing the case of someone labeled a terrorist") and got "the runaround" both in Washington and the Emitates.

"Even Congress has had little success at obtaining information about people the US has asked other countries to detain. Although our government is responsible for their detention, there is a black hole of information about those cases," she said.

In April 2009 Pasquarella and her colleagues obtained a nugget of information about a prior case that shed light on the possible circumstances of Hamdan's arrest and detention. A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the British House of Commons All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition turned up an e-mail from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that read, "At this time [redacted] is the only one we can get to. He is currently being held by the UAE pending our ability to do a Extraordinary Rendition." This e-mail, and America's historically warm economic and diplomatic relationship with the UAE, suggests that collusion in the field of counterterrorism would not be unheard of. Hamdan, who was not being held by the US, could not have been subject to extraordinary rendition--in which suspects are transferred from US to foreign custody--but his arrest fits the profile of a "proxy detention," in which the United States requests that someone be taken into custody in a foreign country.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs in Washington, the United Arab Emirates office of the State Department, the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi and an Abu Dhabi government spokesman all declined to comment on the case. Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said that the bureau does not confirm or deny investigating Hamdan, but she added that the US government did not request a proxy detention in Hamdan's case.

With Hamdan's trial approaching in Abu Dhabi Federal Supreme Court last year, the FBI continued to investigate his businesses in America. It subpoenaed Daniel Sieu, 49, a former customer of Hamdan's who is the executive director of the Los Angeles-based Asian Pacific Revolving Loan Fund. Sieu had made several small loans to Hamdan as he expanded his business and bought small parcels of real estate. In January 2009 the FBI asked Sieu for everything in his files on Hamdan, which he says consisted of "a few basic loan applications." He was never called in for questioning and has not gotten back any of the material he submitted.

"Naji is a very nice guy," he said. "I consider him a friend."

The FBI also pursued another friend of Naji's, Jehad Suliman, beginning in 2002 with interrogations at HondAcura Palace, where Suliman is the manager. In July 2009, as Hamdan's case was playing out in Abu Dhabi, Suliman estimates that roughly a dozen agents entered his home with a search warrant relating to MediCal fraud. They seized a number of possessions, including documents unrelated to MediCal that referred to Hamdan and HondAcura Palace.

On January 29 of this year, Pasquarella filed a FOIA request for further information on the government's activities related to the Hamdan brothers and Suliman, but she expects it will take substantial litigation before anything comes to light.

Ultimately, after five hearings in front of Abu Dhabi's Federal Supreme Court, Hamdan was convicted of support for and spreading of terrorism. The prosecutor's case relied on Hamdan's signed confessions and a transcript of a chat-room conversation from a jihadi website in which Hamdan says he was not even a participant. According to Hamdan, in the course of the trial, he was accused of membership in six different terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam of Iraq and Fatah al-Islam.

Sitting in their living room in his eighth-floor apartment in Mar Elias, a busy commercial neighborhood in Beirut, and discussing his verdict, Hamdan and his wife still have trouble accepting it. "How could he have had the time" to be involved with all of these groups, his wife wondered aloud, while running an international auto parts business?

"They're six different organizations that are against each other," pointed out Hamdan.

Pasquarella, who was barred from attending one of the sessions on the pretext that the trial chamber's air-conditioning was broken, called the trial "a facade for political processes." A respected human rights lawyer in the UAE, who did not wish to be identified because of previous government harassment, said that while the UAE Supreme Court is generally independent, on national security issues it toes the government line.

According to Hamdan, the prosecutor had sought four counts of the death penalty and four counts of life imprisonment, which he was eligible for under the UAE 2004 anti-terrorism legislation. Instead, the court gave him an eighteen-month time-served sentence, essentially setting him free despite a finding of guilt.

"I knew I was not going to be acquitted, because it would show their guilt, but I was still hoping they would go back to their conscience and acquit me," he said resignedly. "I wasn't relieved at the sentence, though, because now I'm considered a terrorist."

After nine days and a bit of paperwork, he was deported to Lebanon.

Now he mostly spends his days with his wife, mother
and son, relaxing and looking after his health. His father died in October 2008; Hamdan said he died of a heart attack upon hearing of his son's detention. Recently his brother Sam received a notice addressed to Naji that his aircraft mechanic's license was being rescinded by the Transportation Security Administration. Hamdan still suffers pains in his wrists, neck and shoulders from the beatings, and he is taking medication for his liver and kidneys. But it is the mental scars that most stubbornly refuse to heal.

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, just thinking about it," he said. "What bothers me the most is the unfairness of it all.... I got beaten, tortured and forced to sign something I didn't even read. I left all my wealth over there in that country, and I'm here, empty-handed, with these memories that are eating me alive."

About Anna Louie Sussman

Anna Louie Sussman is a freelance writer based in Beirut and New York.

Civil rights-era killings yield secrets to FBI probe

By Carrie Johnson
Sunday, February 28, 2010; A01

Three years after the FBI pledged to investigate more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings, the agency is ready to close all but a handful. Investigators say they have solved most of the mysteries behind the cases, but few will result in indictments, given the passage of decades, the deaths of prime suspects and the challenge of gathering evidence.

"There's maybe five to seven cases where we don't know who did it," said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau's effort. "Some we know; others we know but can't prove. For every other case, we got it."

Even without taking cases to court, the project has filled in broad gaps in the stories of the murdered, many of whom were forgotten victims from a brutal chapter of American history.

Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody -- one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack -- the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.

Investigators have walked through rural cemeteries looking for clues, searched yellowed documents in government archives and interviewed witnesses, some so shattered by their experiences that they still refused to talk. Along the way, officials discovered a more complex story than they had imagined.

In nearly one-fifth of the 108 cases, they learned that the deaths had no connection to the racial unrest pulsing through the South at the height of the civil rights struggle.

In at least one case, the victim had been killed by a relative, but the family blamed the Ku Klux Klan. In other cases, a victim drowned or was fatally knifed in a bar fight. Two black women registering voters in the hot Mississippi summer died in a car accident. One man died under his mistress -- a bedroom secret kept for more than four decades until the bureau came calling.

The FBI's project, which at its peak involved more than 40 agents working in cities across the South and along the Eastern Seaboard, was the agency's most focused campaign to find out what happened in the deaths. For some families, hopes of a legal reckoning have been dashed, but the investigation has produced a different kind of accounting.

"These racially motivated murders are some of the greatest blemishes on our nation's history," said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights. "We owe it to people who were all a part of this struggle to be persistent. . . . If we can solve a number of these cases, that's fantastic. But if we can bring to closure all of these cases, I think this will be well worth the effort."

At the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., where the names of victims are etched on the walls of the organization's civil rights memorial, President Richard Cohen added, "Justice in a few of those cases is going to have to serve as a symbolic victory in all of them."

Long-lost evidence

From a conference room on the third floor of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in the District, the civil rights struggle continues. But four decades or longer after the deaths, nearly every aspect of the trail has gone cold.

Special Agent James Hosty, a former police officer from Kansas who joined the FBI after helping capture the notorious "BTK" serial killer, has spent three years hunting down leads in a case near Atlanta.

In 1946, four black sharecroppers were killed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, prompting President Harry S. Truman to order the FBI to work round-the-clock to bring the shooters to justice. As many as two dozen people, some of them prominent members of the community, might have been involved in the deaths, investigators say.

But no charges were filed -- and volumes of case files sat untouched in FBI archives in Silver Spring for decades until the investigation was reopened by Howard Hatfield, who is an assistant special agent in charge at the Atlanta office, and an agent was assigned full time to the case.

"It basically took six to eight months to get through those records and determine who was alive or dead," Hosty said.

Some of those Hosty thinks witnessed or were involved in the killings had neither a Social Security number nor any other identifier that would allow him to determine whether they are alive and could be questioned or prosecuted.

The case remains unsolved, but new evidence allowed investigators to secure a search warrant in 2008, 62 years after the deadly encounter. FBI agents in Atlanta said they continue to work leads, hoping for a breakthrough from witnesses who at the time feared talking to authorities but since might have changed their minds.

In many of the unsolved cases, family members or victims' rights advocates have complained about how long it has taken for the federal government to investigate and about what they say is the lack of results. But more reasonable expectations are called for by Alvin Sykes, who was part of a successful effort to have the government reopen the investigation into the 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Mississippi case that helped launch the civil rights movement.

"From the beginning, our focus was not just to prosecute cases but to find the truth," Sykes said. "We're not disappointed, but we do expect to find a significant number of more cases through the outreach effort, a criminal manhunt to find these people, and go from there."

Few legal tools

"Welcome to my headache," said Deitle, who was handpicked by the current FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, to lead the re-energized civil rights effort.

The government has scant legal tools at its disposal in prosecuting the decades-old deaths because it can use just three federal statutes on the books before 1968, when Congress passed an expansive statute governing civil rights prosecutions.

The pre-1968 statutes apply in homicides only if a victim was killed on federal land; a victim was kidnapped and killed; or if an explosive device was transported across state lines with the intent to injure, according to Paige Fitzgerald, a Justice Department lawyer who played a central role in two of the cold cases that went to trial in recent years.

The FBI looks for room to maneuver within the old statutes. In a Florida killing, for example, an agent was dispatched to secure Global Positioning System coordinates to determine whether the killing occurred on land once belonging to a Native American tribe.

One case has drawn the agency's focused attention because it might be connected to other interstate Ku Klux Klan attacks.

On Dec. 10, 1964, Frank Morris, a shoe store owner in Ferriday, La., woke to the sound of tinkling glass. He emerged from a cot at the back of the burning building with third-degree burns covering his body. Morris survived four days in a hospital, but he wasn't able to name the attackers before he died.

At the time, FBI investigators found a charred finger near the crime scene that did not belong to Morris. Over the years, the finger was lost. But an agent had recorded a fingerprint, which remains in the FBI's files.

"So," Deitle asked one morning last month, "who's missing a finger in Ferriday?"

An undercover agent has been canvassing the town for a fingerless man, and the FBI lab is searching for fingerprint matches. But in the meantime, the case remains unsolved.

In an FBI office in Jackson, Miss., Jenny Williams, a supervisory special agent, has instructed 11 agents working on nearly four dozen cold cases to take nothing for granted -- even reports of the demise of the prime suspects, especially when death certificates are not available.

"We definitely don't take someone's word for it," Williams said. "We'll send people out to a cemetery. We have evidence that's a picture of a tombstone in a cemetery, old small-town family cemeteries."

Special Agent Jeromy Turner walked a 300-headstone cemetery in Yazoo City, Miss., four times looking for a dead man. Relatives insisted that the man was buried in a plot there, but "I never could find him," Turner said. "Finally, I was able to locate a funeral home owner who had the death certificate that showed he was buried in that cemetery, but the family had disowned him." There was no headstone marking his grave.

Among the most promising cases are those in which accomplices have not been prosecuted. That is a central focus in the killing of Louis Allen, a logger and member of the NAACP in Amite County, Miss., who was ambushed in January 1964 after years of threats.

Allen's son Henry and other family members have plastered the community with posters thanking God "for anyone willing to come forward to solve this heinous crime. Anonymity promised." They are offering a $20,000 reward for information.

Deitle, who helped investigate the New York Police Department shooting of immigrant Amadou Diallo 11 years ago, said the FBI effort is one of the last opportunities to investigate the dark alleys of the segregated past.

"If we don't correct history, then who's going to go back through this? Who's going to fix history to make it accurate?" she asked.

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches

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By John Solomon and Carrie Johnson
Special to The Washington Post and Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 19, 2010; A01

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

The records seen by The Post do not reveal the identities of the people whose phone call records were gathered, but FBI officials said they thought that nearly all of the requests involved terrorism investigations.

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FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.

"We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said. The after-the-fact approvals were a "good-hearted but not well-thought-out" solution to put phone carriers at ease, she said. In true emergencies, Caproni said, agents always had the legal right to get phone records, and lawyers have now concluded there was no need for the after-the-fact approval process. "What this turned out to be was a self-inflicted wound," she said.

Caproni said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III did not know about the problems until late 2006 or early 2007, after the inspector general's probe began.

Documents show that senior FBI managers up to the assistant director level approved the procedures for emergency requests of phone records and that headquarters officials often made the requests, which persisted for two years after bureau lawyers raised concerns and an FBI official began pressing for changes.

"We have to make sure we are not taking advantage of this system, and that we are following the letter of the law without jeopardizing national security," FBI lawyer Patrice Kopistansky wrote in one of a series of early 2005 e-mails asking superiors to address the problem.

The FBI acknowledged in 2007 that one unit in the agency had improperly gathered some phone records, and a Justice Department audit at the time cited 22 inappropriate requests to phone companies for searches and hundreds of questionable requests. But the latest revelations show that the improper requests were much more numerous under the procedures approved by the top level of the FBI.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.

FBI officials said they are confident that the safeguards enacted in 2007 have ended the problems. Caproni said the bureau will use the inspector general's findings to determine whether discipline is warranted.

The internal memos were obtained from a government employee outside the FBI, who gained access to them during the investigations of the searches. The employee spoke on the condition of anonymity because the release was unauthorized.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the need to get information quickly and connect the dots was considered paramount throughout the federal government. The failure to obtain timely and actionable information has been a recurrent theme in the U.S. counterterrorism effort, up to and including the recent shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

Before 9/11, FBI agents ordinarily gathered records of phone calls through the use of grand jury subpoenas or through an instrument know as a national security letter, issued for terrorism and espionage cases. Such letters, signed by senior headquarters officials, carry the weight of subpoenas with the firms that receive them.

The USA Patriot Act expanded the use of national security letters by letting lower-level officials outside Washington approve them and allowing them in wider circumstances. But the letters still required the FBI to link a request to an open terrorism case before records could be sought.

Shortly after the Patriot Act was passed in October 2001, FBI senior managers devised their own system for gathering records in terrorism emergencies.

A new device called an "exigent circumstances letter" was authorized. It allowed a supervisor to declare an emergency and get the records, then issue a national security letter after the fact.

The procedure was based on a system used in the FBI's New York office in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, officials said.

On Jan. 6, 2003, then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Larry Mefford issued a bureau-wide communique authorizing the new tactic, saying the bureau's telephone analysis unit was permitted in "exigent circumstances . . . to obtain specialized toll records information for international and domestic numbers which are linked to subjects of pending terrorism investigations."

The e-mail called this new method of gathering phone records "imperative to the continuing efforts by the FBI to protect our nation against future attacks," even as it acknowledged the phone records of many people not connected to a terrorism investigation were likely to be scooped up.

The 2003 memo stated that the new method "has the potential of generating an enormous amount of data in short order, much of which may not actually be related to the terrorism activity under investigation."

Within a few years, hundreds of emergency requests were completed and a few thousand phone records gathered. But many lacked the follow-up: the required national security letters.

Two individuals began raising concerns.

Special Agent Bassem Youssef, the new supervisor of the communications analysis unit that gathered the records, began to receive complaints from phone companies that they had not received documentation to show the searches were legal.

Youssef, a longtime counterterrorism investigator, had earlier fallen out of favor with FBI management as he pursued a whistleblower claim that he had been wrongly retaliated against and denied promotion because of his ethnicity.

He raised questions in spring 2005 with his superiors and the FBI general counsel's office about the failure to get national security letters. E-mails show he pressed FBI managers, trying to "force their hand" to implement a solution.

Youssef's attorney, Stephen Kohn, said Monday that he could not discuss the specifics of the investigation except to confirm that his client cooperated with the inspector general. FBI officials said they could not discuss the conduct of individual employees.

Separately, Kopistansky in the FBI general counsel's office learned in mid-December 2004 that toll records were being requested without national security letters. She handled a request that originated from then-Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald, who had "passed information regarding numbers related to a terrorist organization with ties to the US" and obtained toll records, the memos show.

The communications analysis unit asked Kopistansky to "draw up an NSL" to cover the search, but she was unable to get superiors to tell her which open terrorism case it involved. The request "has to specify why the numbers are relevant to an authorized investigation," she said.

An employee in the communications analysis unit wrote back that most of the emergency requests he received "come from upper mgmt. I don't always receive documentation or know all the facts related to the number, which is a problem for me when I try to get the NSL."

Kopistansky persisted, demanding an open terrorism case file for the legal rationale. "I am sure you know it is true and Gary Bald knows it's true, but it needs to be reflected on a piece of paper," she wrote.

Two months later, Kopistansky was still unable to issue a national security letter to comply with the FBI rules.

She took note of the overall problem. The issuance of a national security letter after exigent searches "rarely happens," Kopistansky warned in a March 11, 2005, e-mail seeking the help of the FBI's top national security lawyer and the deputy counsel.

By March 2005, Kopistansky and Youssef were discussing a worsening "backlog" of other cases where no national security letters had been issued and growing concerned that exigent letters were being abused, e-mails show.

"I also understand that some of these are being done as emergencies when they aren't necessarily emergencies," Kopistansky wrote in an April 26, 2005, e-mail to Youssef.

Kopistansky and the other FBI lawyers discussed a strategy to handle the past emergency searches and to allow the practice to continue.

The e-mails show that they conceived the idea to open half a dozen "generic" or "broad" preliminary investigative (PI) case files to which all unauthorized emergency requests could be charged so a national security letter could be issued after the fact.

The generic files were to cover such broad topics as "threats against transportation facilities," "threats against individuals" and "threats against special events," the e-mails show.

Eventually, FBI officials shifted to a second strategy of crafting a "blanket" national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases.

A November 2006 e-mail chain indicates that then-FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Joseph Billy signed the blanket national security letter. But when FBI lawyers raised concerns about it, he wrote back that he did not remember signing.

"I have no recollection of signing anything blanket. NSLs are individual as far as I always knew," Billy wrote Caproni on Nov. 7, 2006.

Billy did not immediately respond to a message left at his office on Monday. Kopistansky and Bald, reached by phone Friday, said they could not comment without FBI approval. Mefford did not return calls.

In all, FBI managers signed 11 "blanket" national security letters addressing past searches, officials told The Post.

Although concerns about their legality first arose in December 2004, exigent searches continued for two more years. Youssef's unit began limiting the number of exigent letters it signed between summer 2005 and spring 2006, seeking more assurances the requests could be covered by a national security letter, the memos show.

Phone record searches covered by exigent letters ended in November 2006 as the Justice Department inspector general began investigating.

Among those whose phone records were searched improperly were journalists for The Washington Post and the New York Times, according to interviews with government officials.

The searches became public when Mueller, the FBI director, contacted top editors at the two newspapers in August 2008 and apologized for the breach of reporters' phone records. The reporters were Ellen Nakashima of The Post, who had been based in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez of the Times, who had also been working in Jakarta.

Solomon, a former Post reporter and Washington Times editor, is a freelance journalist. Johnson is a Post staff writer.

1,600 are suggested daily for FBI's list - washingtonpost.com

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By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 1, 2009

Newly released FBI data offer evidence of the broad scope and complexity of the nation's terrorist watch list, documenting a daily flood of names nominated for inclusion to the controversial list.

During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the U.S. intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a "reasonable suspicion," according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week.

FBI officials cautioned that each nomination "does not necessarily represent a new individual, but may instead involve an alias or name variant for a previously watchlisted person."

The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government's "no fly" list.

This information, and more about the FBI's wide-ranging effort against terrorists, came in answers from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to Senate Judiciary Committee members' questions. The answers were first made public last week in Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News.

Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), who has shown concern over some of the FBI's relatively new investigative techniques assessing possible terrorist, criminal or foreign intelligence activities, drew new information from the agency. Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI needed initial information that a person or group was engaged in wrongdoing before it could open a preliminary investigation.

Under current practice, no such information is needed. That led Feingold to ask how many "assessments" had been initiated and how many had led to investigations since new guidelines were put into effect in December 2008. The FBI said the answer was "sensitive" and would be provided only in classified form.

Feingold was given brief descriptions of the types of assessments that can be undertaken: The inquiries can be opened by individual agents "proactively," meaning on his or her own or in response to a lead about a threat. Other assessments are undertaken to identify or gather information about potential targets or terrorists, to gather information to aid intelligence gathering and related to matters of foreign intelligence interest.

Feingold pointed to a November 2008 Justice Department inspector general audit showing that in 2006, approximately 219,000 tips from the public led to the FBI's determination that there were 2,800 counterterrorism threats and suspicious incidents that year. "Regardless of the reporting source, FBI policy requires that each threat or suspicious incident should receive some level of review and assessment to determine the potential nexus to terrorism," the audit said.

In a different vein, the FBI was asked why it is losing new recruits as special agents and support personnel at a time when terrorist investigations are increasing. The FBI responded that failed polygraph tests rather than other factors, such as the length of time for getting security clearances, are the main reason recruits are ending their efforts to join the bureau. In the past year, polygraphs were the cause of roughly 40 percent of special-agent applicants dropping out, the records showed.