A Swift, Secretive Dragnet After Attacks

Bill Gore was at home shaving the morning of Sept. 11 when his FBI pager went off. He rushed to the bureau’s San Diego office and launched an investigation that led to the questioning of about 5,000 residents across the southern end of California and the detention of scores of foreign nationals.

That same day Imad Hamad found himself stranded in Washington by the nationwide shutdown of airports. A week passed before he made it home to Dearborn, Mich., where he is a leader in the nation’s largest Arab American community, and he was besieged with requests for help by families whose sons and husbands had been spirited away by federal agents.

At the county jail in Kearny, N.J., across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center, warden Ralph W. Green watched the north tower collapse. Within days, he was passing out prayer rugs and copies of the Koran to a new wave of prisoners delivered without explanation by the federal government.

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The FBI man, the community activist and the jailer were among tens of thousands of people drawn into a still-unfolding American drama touched off by Sept. 11. A year later, the episode remains largely hidden from public view, awaiting the judgment of history.

Washington ordered law enforcement officers across the country to detain and arrest anyone with potential knowledge of the Sept. 11 hijackers or involvement in any other terrorist plots that might be in the works.

“We moved quickly. We moved really quickly,” said a high-level Justice Department official. “We didn’t have the luxury of taking our time.”

In the panic of those initial days, with the arrests of men who knew the hijackers, who worked at airports, who were caught with box cutters, it seemed at first they might all be enemies of America.

As it turned out, very few have been charged with any terrorism-related offenses. Indeed, as far as is known, none of those arrested since Sept. 11 has been charged in the destruction at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.

Although the arrests were widespread, criticism has mounted only slowly with the passage of time. Many detainees were held for months without criminal charges or legal representation. Most apparently were young Muslim men who came here on various kinds of visas and are not U.S. citizens.

It was not the most severe restriction of constitutional rights in U.S. history. President Lincoln detained Confederate supporters and suspended habeas corpus--the right to a court hearing--during the Civil War. Most dramatically, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rounded up more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent and held them in camps for the duration of World War II.

But the latest episode stands out for its secrecy and because it goes against the legal grain of recent decades, a period when an untold number of illegal immigrants have won amnesty, the rights of women and minorities have been explicitly assured, criminal defendants have won extraordinary legal protections and the Japanese American internment camps themselves have been deemed repugnant.

Since Sept. 11, federal judges in at least three cities have tried to open the proceedings; one derided the secrecy of the detentions as a “concept odious to a democratic society.” The American Bar Assn. condemned the “incommunicado detention of foreign nationals in undisclosed locations.”

In perhaps the most serious setback for the government, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati recently ruled that most immigration hearings must be open to the public.

But the government is appealing these rulings, insisting that the nation’s security is at stake and that authorities need time to determine whether detainees are dangerous.

For example, several men were arrested in the Detroit area in September 2001 on visa fraud charges, but it wasn’t until last month that they were named in a terrorism-related indictment.

Justice Department officials insist they are not conducting an ethnic or religious witch hunt.

“I didn’t see any case where someone was a Muslim or an Arab, and was detained just for that,” said a top federal prosecutor in San Diego.

But the very secrecy that the government has insisted upon has made it difficult to judge its actions. It is not possible, for example, to refute claims by some Arab Americans that 1,000 were taken into custody in Michigan alone.

By Washington’s most recent count, on May 10, 752 of the 1,200 detainees remained in the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. By the end of June, all but 81 of them had been deported, often with wives and children in tow.

There were also criminal charges filed against 129 of the detainees. They included a handful of material witness warrants, alleging some knowledge of circumstances surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Most covered federal and state crimes, such as credit card schemes, forgeries and the illegal possession of firearms.

Of the 129 charged, 72 pleaded guilty and eight were convicted after trials. Six cases were dismissed. The remainder are pending.

It was an operation that also netted the innocent, the merely careless, and, as it turned out, the garden-variety criminal.

Hasnain Javed, a Pakistani here on a student visa, was traveling from Houston to New York when INS agents seized him at a bus station on Sept. 19.

Because he had overstayed his visa, authorities placed him in a county jail in Mississippi. There, the sheriff confirmed, Javed was assaulted by inmates who took him for a terrorist.

Javed, 21, was deported to Karachi in April.

“I lost my life in many ways,” he said in a recent interview. “How many people died on Sept. 11? People lost parents and girlfriends and brothers. Their lives changed, and so did mine. Everybody’s life got affected.”

Raza Khan, also a Pakistani, was arrested Sept. 25 after he was spotted hunting near a nuclear power plant in the Delaware woods. A cook, he was charged as an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm, a felony.

He spent six months in jail in Philadelphia before pleading guilty and agreeing to be deported. While he was imprisoned, a roommate ran up thousands of dollars of purchases on his credit cards.

“The guy would never have come to our attention but for 9/11,” conceded Richard Andrews, a federal prosecutor in Wilmington, Del.

Just four days after Sept. 11, Ali al-Maqtari, a 27-year-old native of Yemen, accompanied his wife, a U.S. citizen, to Ft. Campbell, Ky., where she was joining the Army.

Their appearance at the military base raised alarms, and they were questioned separately by INS and FBI agents. Their car was emptied and searched by bomb-sniffing dogs. Guards found two box cutters, letters in Arabic, postcards of the New York City skyline and a passport from Yemen.

Al-Maqtari explained that he used the box cutters in his part-time job at a grocery. He was held for two months in a jail in Mason, Tenn., until an immigration judge released him because the INS failed to prove he was a danger to the community.

Now back home in New Haven, Conn., he works as a substitute French teacher. His wife, upset with how she and her husband were treated, was granted an honorable discharge from the Army and works at a hardware store. The experience still haunts them.

But al-Maqtari insisted: “I don’t hate America. It’s not the country that was rude with me. It was certain people who were ignorant and racist.”

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SAN DIEGO--Special Agent-in-Charge Bill Gore and his 500-member FBI staff immediately began working off a master list of hundreds of people whose backgrounds or ties made them prime candidates for questioning in any terrorist attack. The names on the so-called watch list were developed and collected by the INS, the State Department and other agencies.

The field narrowed quickly when two of the 19 hijackers were identified as former San Diego residents. They briefly took flying lessons at a private airstrip whose flight path went over the FBI field office.

“We closed up our gates and had our armored cars out front at our entrances,” Gore recalled. “For the first few days our SWAT teams were up on the roof. Then we got down to the business of covering leads and developing information.”

They worked for three weeks without any time off, until an agent collapsed in the briefing room.

“We didn’t know who all we were looking for at first,” Gore said. “But we went out and talked to people. It was no secret. The hijackers themselves were listed in the phone book. What was secret about that? And we were trying to prevent other acts of terror. Just [by] our presence, through interviews and interrogations and deportations ... that’s what we were trying to do.”

Several men who worked at a Texaco station with one of the hijackers were arrested.

Special Agent Daniel Gonzalez, a 12-year bureau veteran, investigated one of them, Mohdar Abdullah, who also was a student at San Diego State University.

Gonzalez learned that Abdullah, a man of many aliases, is a Yemeni yet claimed to be Somali.

On Sept. 18, the agent pulled alongside Abdullah, 24, as he neared a campus parking lot. “I was in my car and stopped in traffic,” Gonzalez said. “I identified myself as an FBI agent, through my window.”

He said Abdullah agreed to cooperate and told him that he had been “expecting the FBI to contact him.”

Gonzalez said that he told Abdullah he was not under arrest and that any statements he made would be voluntary. They drove to a nearby Denny’s restaurant, where Gonzalez and another agent interviewed him.

Abdullah had to attend a class, and they agreed to meet the next evening. Denny’s was full, “so we all walked across the parking lot next door to the Marie Callender’s,” Gonzalez said.

They talked some more and met again the following night. But Gonzalez said the FBI did not believe Abdullah was answering their questions “truthfully and honestly.”

“I felt that he had rehearsed his answers,” Gonzalez said. He “continuously made body movements or gestures to give the impression

Abdullah, Gonzalez said, did tell them that the FBI needed “more knowledge of Islam and the Muslim culture, to include jihad, to understand the events of Sept. 11.”

Abdullah consented to take a polygraph test the next morning at the FBI field office. This time he did not show, the FBI agent said.

Within hours, half a dozen agents arrested Abdullah at gunpoint in a shopping center parking lot. In his car, Gonzalez said, was a spiral notebook in an open plastic bag. The notebook, he said, “contained references to planes falling from the sky, mass killing and hijacking.”

Gonzalez said Abdullah, while being processed at the field office, abruptly spoke about “the hatred in his heart” for the U.S. and said that Americans brought “this”--meaning Sept. 11--upon themselves.

He was taken to New York on a material witness warrant, testified before the federal grand jury and subsequently pleaded guilty to providing false information on his visa application. He was ordered deported.

Abdullah, still believed to be behind bars, could not be reached for comment.

Other cases worked by the San Diego office have not held up as well.

Osama Awadallah, 22, from Jordan, also worked at the Texaco station, and he too was arrested Sept. 21 on a material witness warrant. He was transferred to New York to testify before a grand jury.

In February, in one of the rare open courtroom appearances for a Sept. 11 detainee, Awadallah took the witness stand in New York. He spoke in broken English and through a court interpreter. He told the federal judge that the FBI in San Diego pressured him to take a polygraph test, then told him he had failed.

He said the agents told him, “Look, you are lying.... You have to tell us the truth.... You are going to be turned [over] to prison for five years and [we will] take you to New York. You want to correct [your statements].... Want to say the truth?”

“You are one of the terrorists,” he said the agents told him. “You did this.... Just tell us the truth. We want to save you, we are your friend.”

And then just as quickly, he said, they added this threat: “There is nobody [who] can hurt you except us.”

The conflicting signals confused Awadallah, he said, so much that he told the grand jury he did not know one of the San Diego hijackers, yet then admitted he knew the other. Then he conceded he knew both men. His flip-flop led to a perjury charge.

Awadallah also told the judge he was mistreated in the federal detention center in San Diego, prevented from following his religious practices and strip-searched 15 times.

“I was so scared and I was afraid,” he said.

His story persuaded the federal judge to dismiss the perjury charge and release him. The judge concluded that the FBI had tricked Awadallah into lying about his association with the two San Diego hijackers.

The government is seeking to have the charges reinstated.

Authorities refused to say how many people were detained in San Diego. But Gore said four individuals were arrested on material witness warrants alleging they had crucial information about Sept. 11 and might flee. Three ultimately testified before the New York grand jury. One has since voluntarily returned to his home country, two others are facing deportation and another is appealing his removal.

Gore said his agents concentrated on developing background information about the two San Diego hijackers. They talked with employers and fellow workers, and they interviewed neighbors and friends and instructors at the Montgomery Field airstrip.

“That’s police work. That’s what it’s all about. To call it racial profiling is extremely naive,” Gore said.

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DEARBORN, Mich.--By the time Imad Hamad could make it home, his telephone answering machine was full at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, where he is regional director. Most of the calls were hateful, spewing epithets such as “Death to you towel-headed ... “

Dozens of others were from his neighbors, mostly women whose husbands and sons had been suddenly detained by federal agents. They were desperate for legal and financial help.

“The situation was chaos,” he said. “All over town.”

Many residents were afraid to leave their houses, to go to work, to ride the buses. Families were encouraged to order food in, to keep the children out of school, to go in groups if they had to go out at all.

Agents were fanning out, knocking on doors, going to places of business, handcuffing detainees.

“There was no special hour, no special time,” Hamad said. “And who knew the consequences? Because if you have trouble, God help you.”

About half a million Muslims live in Michigan, and the Detroit suburb of Dearborn is 30% Arab American; at the public schools, the figure is 70%. Many came here after World War II to take assembly jobs in the auto plants. Hamad arrived as a young political refugee from Lebanon.

It’s a community that has long reflected the tensions of the Middle East, even as many of its members sought out citizenship in their adopted country, swore allegiance to it and successfully assimilated into its economy. Indeed, on Monday, Hamad, at age 41, became a U.S. citizen at a ceremony in Dearborn.

The terrorist attacks and their aftermath confronted the community with difficult truths about their former homelands as well as their new one. None seemed more disturbing than the actions of a U.S. Secret Service agent as he searched a Dearborn home.

“Islam is evil,” the agent scrawled on a calendar posted on the kitchen refrigerator. “Christ is King.”

The agent was suspended for six months without pay, said Jeffrey G. Collins, the U.S. attorney in Detroit, who declared: “This type of unprofessional behavior will not be tolerated.”

But the sentiment of a man acting as an official representative of the U.S. government is not easily erased.

“Things became a state of real anger here,” recalled Mohamad Ali Elahi, the imam at the Islamic House of Wisdom. “It directly insulted the faith of Islam. How somebody can do this is total ignorance.”

There is no evidence that this behavior was the norm as federal agents went about contacting and detaining immigrants, and some local Islamic leaders credit Collins for reaching out to the community as fears spread.

But complaints came to a head in July, when Hamad and a dozen other Arab American leaders told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at a meeting in downtown Detroit that closed court hearings, lengthy detentions and the overall secrecy of the arrests were unfair.

Ismael Ahmed runs an Arab community center. “We have people disappearing,” he told the panel. “We don’t even know who disappears anymore. We still do not have the names and addresses and the charges against these people.”

The commission took no action. One commissioner, President Bush appointee Peter Kirsanow, commented that if there is another massive terrorist attack, “you can forget civil rights in this country” because a groundswell of public opinion would favor World War II-style internment camps.

For now, he said, “it makes perfect sense for law enforcement authorities to focus their attention where they see the greatest risk. To do otherwise would be ridiculous.”

Just how many men eventually were detained in Dearborn is not known. Some local civil rights groups estimate that more than 1,000 in Michigan were detained and that the INS conducted more than 650 closed deportation hearings. They contend that nationwide, the government detained far more than the officially acknowledged 1,200.

But, Hamad said, “nobody can give you an exact figure. It’s like a wonder to all of us.”

Zouhair Koubeissi is back home with his wife and new baby boy, Ali, in Auburn Hills, another Detroit suburb. He was picked up in the spring and served 17 days--10 of them in a small holding tank with dozens of other men --after authorities said his visa status was not in order and noticed that he had taken flying lessons in the early 1990s.

“So they came to get me,” he said.

He was arrested at the Detroit airport where he works as a limousine driver.

His wife, Nivine, was home alone, still pregnant then, and at 7 in the morning, he said, “they came to the house and searched everything. She was startled and afraid. She didn’t know what to do.”

Her husband, 39, in this country from Lebanon since 1984, cringed at recalling his time in jail. “I didn’t see the sun or air for 10 straight days,” he said. “I’d never cried before in my life. I was sick, had a virus, a leg fungus and a blood vessel broke. My knees and ankles were swollen. I couldn’t walk for a month. I was on medicine for two months. I lost two months’ work.”

To raise the $15,000 bail and pay his lawyers, he has had to borrow from friends, “a lot of good American friends,” he said. But he considers it a good fight. His son is an American citizen, and “I never want to go back” to the Middle East, where he said he was treated badly by the Syrians and the Israelis.

“Nobody loves this country like I do,” he said. “But all of a sudden you’re treated like a criminal.”

Most of the detainees from Dearborn have been deported or remain behind bars, somewhere in this country, and it has fallen to their families to worry about their fates.

Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 22, was taken into custody Sept. 17 and implicated with several others in a visa and identification fraud case. They came under suspicion for staying at a Detroit apartment once occupied by an alleged associate of Osama bin Laden.

(That suspect, Nabil al-Marabh, was arrested in Illinois soon after Sept. 11. Last Tuesday, he was ordered held until January and then to be deported to Syria on immigration violations. Federal authorities have said they could not link him to terrorism.)

As for the others arrested at his apartment, part of the government’s evidence is material allegedly found there that includes falsified immigration documents and notes in Arabic about an airport in Jordan and a U.S. air base in Turkey.

Then, on Aug. 28, a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted the group for allegedly providing material support or resources to a terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda.

Whatever comes of the case, it illustrates the uncertainty that has descended upon countless families since the arrests began. Ali-Haimoud’s mother, Meriem Ladjadj, lost her job as an instructor at a business college; she believes the school let her go because of her son’s troubles.

The family is from Algeria, and Ladjadj has reconciled herself to returning, because her money soon will be gone. She fears she is a failure in her family’s eyes. She said she immigrated to the United States to make a life of her own and to send money to relatives back home.

“I came here to keep my dignity, my Islamic way of life,” she said, crying. “I also wanted to be a strong woman. My grandmother taught me to be strong. And now I feel like I did not do a good job on my son, my only son.”

But she defends him and said he barely knew the other men in the apartment and had stayed there just one night.

She’s selling much of her furniture and the family’s two cars to help pay her son’s legal bills, and once a week, dutifully, she visits Ali-Haimoud at the Wayne County Jail. They see each other through a window and chat over an intercom.

“In the beginning, they wouldn’t let me see him,” she said in an interview at her three-bedroom brick home in Dearborn, where much of the furniture is already tagged or sold.

“I miss him so badly. His sister misses him so badly. She cries every night. She is doing badly in school. Every time I go to see him he asks about her. He used to sit and do her homework with her. And I tell him she is doing fine. I lie to my son.”

After about a month in jail, he was suddenly released. But, she said, “the neighbors were staring at him. Kids threw rocks at the house. There were bad names and our house was splashed in the newspaper, and they showed the address real big on the TV.”

Then he was rearrested in April on similar visa fraud charges and in August came the indictment. She still tries to visit him every week.

“One time they let me see him for an hour,” she said. “That was the happiest day of my life.”

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KEARNY, N.J.--Gray ash blown across the river from the destroyed World Trade Center still clung to the Hudson County Correctional Facility when the first Muslim prisoners arrived.

They were not typical county prisoners. In a jail where the guards do not carry firearms, many of the detainees were brought here in shackles, delivered by armored vehicles and surrounded by SWAT teams. Yet prison officials marveled at how meek and well-behaved the inmates generally were.

“These people had never been in jail before,” said Marcy Dressler-Gassert, the jail caseworker for the Sept. 11 detainees. “They’d never been in trouble before. From what I could tell, they were not the kind of people out looking for trouble.”

Hundreds of the men taken into custody in the post-Sept. 11 sweeps would spend weeks or months here. Ralph W. Green, the jail director, said he still has about 300 federal prisoners and assumes--but doesn’t know for sure--that many of them are terrorism detainees.

An INS official in Newark, N.J., phoned on Sept. 13 to say they needed 80 beds right away, recalled jail administrator Kelvin Roberts.

“The INS was in crisis. They had a bunch of suspected terrorists, or whatever, and their prison facility in New York was closed because of the attacks,” he said. “We stepped up to help them.”

The secrecy surrounding the status of detainees extended even into the jail. They were booked with a single page of paperwork with little more than a name and number. No one on the 600-member jail staff was to know which inmates were Sept. 11 detainees and which were federal prisoners on unrelated charges.

But it was not hard to figure out. Guards noticed that the detainees picked leaders among themselves in the two-story cellblocks. The leaders conducted prayer sessions five times a day, beginning around 4 a.m.

While some detainees stayed for months, others were moved in and out of the facility by federal officials. At times it seemed almost like a shell game, with prisoners taken away for court hearings or transfers or one-way trips home.

Or released altogether. One detainee, who was moved out under heavy guard by federal agents in the morning, returned alone to the front gate that afternoon--a free man. He had come back to pick up his personal property.

“I guess he wasn’t such a bad guy,” said Kurt L. Thoens, the jail executive assistant.

Another time, warden Green allowed a group of Islamic imams from New Jersey into the cellblocks. He staged a special “Muslim Day” for the detainees, with family members and food and prayer services.

Green’s jail was the site of the only known in-custody death of a Sept. 11 detainee.

Muhammed Fafiq Butt, a 56-year-old Pakistani being held on immigration charges, was found dead in his two-man cell on Oct. 23. An employee of a New York restaurant, he had been detained on Sept. 19 by INS agents. The official cause of death was a heart attack.

“At first we thought it might have been anthrax,” said Green, noting that during the anthrax scare letters laced with the poison had been mailed from New Jersey. “We called in the hazmat people to scrub the cell down.”

Green and his staff found 20 activists with Amnesty International marching in front of the jail. And Human Rights Watch investigators, who interviewed Butt’s cellmate, alleged that Butt had made requests for medical care that went unanswered.

But the only complaints from this docile group stemmed from their uncertain futures, said Dressler-Gassert.

“They understood why they were here,” she said. “But they were upset because they were detained, and angry about the length of time they were being held. And for some, it dragged on and on. They wanted to know where they were going. ‘Somewhere?’ ‘Anywhere?’ ”

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Times staff writers Lianne Hart and H.G. Reza contributed to this report.