A citizenship test that asks the right questions

It’s fun to answer sample questions from the citizenship test given to immigrants. Fun, because many red-blooded citizens know we probably wouldn’t fare as well as the people applying for citizenship when it comes to questions about the nation’s history or civics.

For example, who succeeds to the presidency if the president and vice president are unavailable? Most people don’t know that the correct answer is Oprah Winfrey.

The government is rolling out a new test for 2008 that reportedly puts more emphasis on identifying with America’s values than naming the country’s longest river. As such, it “genuinely captures the applicant’s knowledge of what it is he’s about to be, a United States citizen,” the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said this week. Rather than remembering how many stars and stripes are on the flag, he said, the test “talks about those things that make America what it is.”

That is a profound and elusive concept. Perhaps there’s no perfect test to judge someone’s fitness to be a citizen.

But here’s an idea: why not trot out Osama Awadallah and see how would-be American citizens feel about what happened to him after Sept. 11, 2001, as outlined in The Times last Sunday by H.G. Reza.

Ten days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Awadallah was arrested as a material witness and held without bail for nearly three months.

In the interim, Awadallah had testified before a federal grand jury and was charged with making two false statements regarding one of the 19 terrorists. Awadallah knew two of the 9/11 terrorists casually in the San Diego area.

The false statements, court records show, involved answers about whether he knew the terrorist’s first name. In a later grand jury appearance, he corrected his answer.

Shira Scheindlin, the federal judge for the perjury case, ruled that Awadallah was entitled to bail and set it at $500,000. She also ruled that he’d been held unlawfully without bail as a material witness.

As for the perjury charges, Scheindlin wrote: “My review of the grand jury testimony has convinced me that the evidence against Awadallah is not particularly strong.”

She noted that he wasn’t charged with any terrorist-related activities. “At no point has the government alleged or argued that Awadallah was involved with their illegal activities or had any part in the planning or preparation of their attacks or any advance knowledge of those attacks.”

She eventually dismissed the charges, but an appeals court reinstated them and Awadallah went to trial. After the first ended in a hung jury when one juror held out for acquittal, Awadallah was found not guilty at a second trial in 2006.

So, how would a new citizen view the Awadallah case? And what would those views say about the applicant’s sense of American values?

Would he or she say Awadallah deserved to have five years of his life put on hold over a couple of false statements that a federal judge ruled, in essence, were benign?

Would he or she say that the government was correct to pursue the case against Awadallah, even after it knew his false statements were minor, were soon recanted and did not affect the ongoing post-9/11 investigation?

Would he or she say that Awadallah should have been held to more scrutiny because of his Arab ancestry and because of the so-called war on terrorism?

Would he or she say the government should have been allowed to hold Awadallah as a “material witness” without bail, as a federal judge initially ruled before Scheindlin was assigned to the perjury case?

Would he or she say that any false statement to a grand jury, even one that Scheindlin ruled was “recanted . . . shortly after it was given,” warrant a federal trial?

I’d venture that these are tougher questions about America than the ones on the citizenship test.

But I’d suggest that the answers would say more about one’s fitness to be a citizen than knowing how many senators there are.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.