Isolation, Secrecy Veil Most Jailed in Roundup

The day after the terrorist attacks, Tarek Fayad was taken from his home in Colton and whisked from Southern California to a detention center in Brooklyn.

There he remains, a 34-year-old Egyptian accused of overstaying his visa, jailed with 60 other Arab Muslims in a special unit. His jailers told him he could make one phone call a month, and it took his Los Angeles lawyer that long to find him.

“He last talked to the FBI weeks ago, and they told him everything was fine,” said the lawyer, Valerie Curtis Diop. “Yet still he sits there.”

Fayad is one of the 1,147 individuals--almost all of them immigrants from the Middle East and Central Asia--who have been detained and held mostly in secret as part of what has become the United States’ largest criminal roundup of immigrants since it detained thousands of Cuban refugees in the early 1980s.

No one has been charged with conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks. Nearly eight weeks into this country’s largest criminal investigation, most of those detained remain in federal prisons, county jails and Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers. Most of them also remain anonymous, their status and whereabouts unknown to lawyers, families and their home governments.

The Times has studied the cases of 132 detainees, interviewing defense lawyers, diplomatic officials and some of the released detainees, and reviewing court records and other documents.

The analysis reveals a broad pattern in which federal agents are using the full extent of their law enforcement authority to sweep up individuals, question them and hold them for long periods. In many cases, when individuals are found to have no connection to terrorism, they are turned over to immigration authorities, where they often are held indefinitely.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has repeatedly denied that detainees’ constitutional rights are being violated, and Justice Department officials reiterated that position last week.

Mindy Tucker, chief Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to say how many of the 1,147 people have been released but said “a majority” of them are still being held. She said that most are being held on federal, state and local criminal charges unrelated to Sept. 11; that 185 are being held by the INS; and that authorities have “a small number of material witnesses” related to the terrorism.

Officials also have emphasized the dual role of their investigation: to arrest those responsible for planning and carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and to find any others who may be preparing strikes.

An FBI affidavit, obtained by The Times, is being used as a standard court document to persuade judges to keep detainees in custody. It argues that individuals should not be released prematurely because, first, “to protect the public, the FBI must exhaust all avenues” of its investigation.

But because of the lack of information, immigration law experts say they cannot determine whether the government is following the law or ignoring it.

“The big problem is the veil of secrecy they have drawn,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the Immigrants Rights Project for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Everyone understands the need for an aggressive investigation. This [Sept. 11 attack] was a horrific act. But they need to put out more basic information on the large number of people who have been jailed. That would give the public assurance that the investigation is being conducted in line with our basic principles.”

Immigration Officials Had Broad Power

Even before Sept. 11, the government’s legal authority in this area was substantial. The INS has the power to arrest and detain foreign nationals who may have violated the terms of their entry into this country.

In normal times, officials charge the arrested immigrants with an offense within 24 hours. They may then be held for days or weeks while the INS decides whether they should be deported. If deportation is ordered, a legal process that can last for years gets underway. In the interim, the immigrants are usually released on bond.

In special situations, however, the INS can move to hold immigrants in custody if they are deemed dangerous or likely to flee.

After Sept. 11, the government gave itself even more authority to cope with the terrorism threat. An interim regulation issued Sept. 17 said that, because of “extraordinary circumstances,” the INS was free to hold detained immigrants for a “reasonable period of time” without charging them with specific offenses.

The regulation left it to Ashcroft, who oversees the INS, to decide what is an “extraordinary circumstance” and a “reasonable period” for filing charges.

However, the anti-terrorism law passed by Congress on Oct. 26 requires the government to file charges against detained immigrants within seven days.

Justice Department officials have refused repeatedly to comment on specific cases or the troubling stories that are emerging from inside the nation’s jails. It is that secrecy, along with the government’s expanded powers, that concerns many immigrant advocates and defense lawyers.

“We believe, we suspect, all these people [in detention] have been charged with something, but we don’t know for sure,” said Liz Vladeck of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in Washington.

In examining the 132 cases, The Times has learned that:

* Eleven individuals may have had some connection to the 19 hijackers who crashed the four planes on Sept. 11. Some had been roommates of the hijackers; the names of others were found among the hijackers’ personal effects.

Another, Mustafa Abujdai, a Palestinian living in Emory, Texas, was jailed after he went to authorities to tell them he had briefly met one of the hijackers.

* Fourteen detainees were scooped up because they had received flight training, were found with flight manuals or had worked at airports.

They range from Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who wanted to learn to fly but not take off or land, to Mohamed Dahmane, an immigrant from Mauritania who worked at a McDonald’s restaurant at the Cincinnati airport.

* Thirty-seven individuals did not appear to have retained attorneys.

* Five detainees have complained of being assaulted or harassed by jail guards or fellow inmates. In a New York courtroom, Osama “Sam” Wadallah, a Jordanian attending college in San Diego County, showed a judge bruises on his face, neck and arms.

In addition to these 132 cases The Times has analyzed, it has received from the embassies of Pakistan and Yemen the names of 50 other detainees, about whom little is known.

The roundups of detainees have been swift and comprehensive. In some instances, whole groups of people were taken into custody, including 40 Mauritanians in Kentucky, eight Egyptians in Indiana and five Israelis in New York.

Once behind bars, detainees have suffered numerous hardships.

Two detainees, one in Florida and the other in Texas, said through their attorneys that federal agents agreed to drop immigration charges against them if they would work as undercover FBI informants and infiltrate suspected terrorist groups. Both men refused; both remain in custody.

Many detainees, held for weeks, have lost jobs. For others, educations have been delayed and visits from their pregnant wives have been denied. In some cases, detainees’ families in the United States have been singled out for harassment.

Ghassan Dahduli, a 41-year-old Palestinian living in Richardson, Texas, learned recently that his wife was leaving the country with their five U.S.-born children. “It’s been horrible for the family,” said his attorney, Karen Pennington.

Many detainees said they are not given food that complies with Muslim dietary restrictions. Some complain they are held in solitary confinement, in chains or waist irons, and are not receiving such basic amenities as blankets.

One Saudi Arabian detainee is awaiting a kidney transplant, and a Pakistani suffered an apparent heart attack and died in a New Jersey jail.

In the communities where detainees once lived, relatives, friends and neighbors worry that they might be picked up next. They are reluctant to help authorities in any way and are afraid to show up at jails or courthouses lest they too be arrested.

A friend of Tarek Fayad was detained briefly when he went to authorities to post Fayad’s $2,500 bond. Officials abruptly rescinded the bond and then took the friend, an Egyptian visiting the country on a valid tourist visa, into custody. They held the friend for eight hours, Fayad’s lawyer said, questioning him about the Sept. 11 attacks and how he felt about the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

“People don’t want to talk,” said Ahsanullah Khan, a community activist from the Queens borough of New York City, where Muhammed Rafiq Butt had lived and worked at a restaurant before he died of an apparent heart attack in jail.

“He was an innocent guy. There were no arrests in his life. They kept him for six weeks, and now he’s dead,” Khan said.

Despite numerous allegations of abuse, Tucker said, the Justice Department has received only one formal complaint. She declined to comment on the nature of the complaint, citing privacy concerns. “There seems to be a lot of discussion but no specifics” about alleged abuse, she said.

Tucker said Washington will investigate any allegations of mistreatment. And she said it was routine for investigators to ask detainees to become informants. “It doesn’t sound abnormal to me.”

The FBI, in the affidavit it has used to keep detainees in custody, argues that “the business of counter-terrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic.”

The affidavit added: “At this stage in the investigation, the FBI is gathering and processing thousands of bits and pieces of information that may seem innocuous at first glance. We must analyze all that information, however, to see if it can be fit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates.”

Reasonable Suspicion Seen in Many Cases

Indeed, many of the arrests appear to have been based on reasonable suspicions.

Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, for example, were arrested Sept. 12 at the Amtrak station in Fort Worth after they were found to be carrying box cutters and more than $5,000 in cash. A police report also described the men’s curious behavior.

“Azmath was extremely nervous,” the report noted. “The carotid pulse in his neck was visibly pulsating rapidly and Azmath broke out into a sweat above his brow.”

The men, natives of India, are being held in Manhattan.

But it is also clear that the FBI does not consider the majority of detainees to be terrorists and has turned them over to the INS and state and local authorities for processing.

Nbil Bassyoni, 29, and Akram Sirsawi, 27, Egyptian immigrants in Neptune, N.J., were questioned several times before their lawyer, Clairmont Chung, found out about it.

They lost their jobs at a pizzeria when they were taken to jail in New Jersey. They have had two hearings, and two requests for bond have been denied.

“The judge cited the ongoing investigation, and therefore he couldn’t give a bond,” Chung said. “But there is no evidence against them, and no bond for them.”

The hearings were held in an 11th-floor courtroom in Newark, N.J., the doors closed, the room packed with security guards and no public, press or relatives allowed inside.

Some people have tried to cooperate with authorities--at their own risk.

Attorney Karen Pennington said her client, Abujdai, 28, recognized a photo of one of the dead hijackers as a man he had spoken to last February about a job in Dallas.

She said he went to the FBI to give them this information and found himself arrested for overstaying his visa, with a bond hearing put off indefinitely.

“The other inmates curse him. They curse Allah and curse his mother,” Pennington said. “He’s had intermittent fevers and swollen tonsils. He’s unbelievably stressed out.”

Attorney Dorothy Harper said her client, Osama Al Far of St. Louis, was in a jail where the inmates and guards were “calling him names like ‘terrorist,’ and they had him on 24/7 lock-down, and he didn’t know the time of day or when to pray.”

She has since gotten the 29-year-old Egyptian moved to a jail in southeast Missouri, where he is treated with respect.

She said he was originally questioned because of his work as a mechanic for a small commuter airline and then was sent to the INS for overstaying his visa. She said he agreed to let authorities search his home and also voluntarily turned over his computer and other personal items for FBI review.

“And still he’s been denied bond because they are claiming he’s a risk to national security,” Harper said.

*

Times staff writers David G. Savage in Washington and H.G. Reza in Orange County and researcher Robert Patrick in Washington contributed to this report.