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Terror case raises fears of sleeper cells

By Shaun Waterman

June 8, 2005

Washington, DC, Jun. 8 (UPI) -- The arrest of two Pakistani-Americans on charges that they lied to federal agents about undergoing terror training in Pakistan has highlighted the threat posed by "second generation" Islamic militants and the persistent presence of terrorist bases in a country that says it is an ally in the U.S. war on terror.

An FBI affidavit says that Hamid Hayat, 22, told agents he had spent six months in 2003-2004 at a camp near Rawalpindi in Pakistan, where he received paramilitary training and anti-American religious indoctrination.

"Hamid further stated," the affidavit goes on, "that he and others at the camp were being trained on how to kill Americans."

Hayat and his father Umer Hayat, 47, both from Lodi near Sacramento, Calif., face charges of lying to federal agents about the training.

The admissions allegedly made by the Hayats will undoubtedly raise questions about the status of Pakistan as a U.S. ally in the war on terror, especially given the location of the camp -- just a few miles from the capital, Islamabad.

"That's a bit like having a terrorist training camp on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.," said Richard Clarke, former White House counter-terror czar.

"The closer to the capital (these facilities are) the more obvious it is that the (Pakistani) authorities are turning a blind eye," Hassan Abbas, a former senior Pakistani law enforcement official told United Press International.

According to the affidavit, "hundreds of attendees from various parts of the world" were trained at the camp and then sent to "carry out their jihadi mission" to countries "including the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq, (and) Kashmir."

U.S. authorities have long been aware of the danger posed by these camps, and of the possibility that U.S. citizens might be trained in them.

In June 2004, a special alert from the Customs and Border Protection division of the Department of Homeland security warned of the danger posed by "individuals traveling to train at terrorist camps in Pakistan."

The bulletin -- obtained by journalist Paul Sperry and reported in his book "Infiltration" -- enjoined agents at several airports to "increase scrutiny of passengers who are naturalized citizens or legal permanent residents of Pakistani descent," especially those who had made "trips to regions of Pakistan not normally associated with business activity or tourism," or who might have rope burns or other unusual bruising or injuries resulting from paramilitary training.

So-called second generation jihadis -- the grown children of Muslim immigrants who turn to extremism or follow their parents into it -- have been identified as a threat by authorities in Europe and Canada, but U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have not hitherto publicly warned about the phenomenon.

"This is the first time that a second generation Muslim-American in the post-Sept. 11 era has been accused of receiving this kind of training," said terrorism expert and analyst Peter Bergen.

In spring 2003, six Yemeni-Americans from the town of Lackawanna in upstate New York pleaded guilty to having visited an al-Qaida camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, but that visit happened months before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Second generation jihadis "represent a clear and present danger to Canada and its allies," according to a recently declassified report from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, "and are a particularly valuable resource for the international Islamic terrorist community in view of their language skills and familiarity with Western culture and infrastructure."

Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish investigating magistrate who heads that country's effort to prosecute Islamic terrorists, told a conference in Florence, Italy, last month that second generation extremists, some of them as young as 16, pose a serious threat in Europe.

The Hayats, according to the complaint, were related by marriage to an Islamic religious leader and notorious militant Qazi Saeed Ur Rehman. According to the affidavit, Rehman ran an Islamic school, or madrasa, that funneled would-be jihadis to the training camp.

The declassified Canadian report notes that Islamic culture places a premium on "obedience to parental figures," adding that, "The duty to obey also explains why some youth have agreed to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan for terrorist training."

Noting that Hayat might well be a Pashto name from Pakistan's lawless North-West Frontier Province, Abbas told UPI, "The nature of the family structure in that part of the world is so close-knit... that it is very likely that, if a father or other older relative is involved (in Islamic extremism) the younger generation will be, too."

The situation is complicated -- and made more dangerous -- by the fact that the training camp attended by Hayat was apparently overseen by a Pakistani militant leader long associated with the activities of jihadi groups in Kashmir -- the Muslim-majority region divided and disputed between Pakistan and majority-Hindu India.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil is leader of the jihadi group once known as Harkat-ul-Mujahedin -- set up with the support of Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus to wage a low-intensity war against the Indian authorities in their part of Kashmir.

According to Abbas, who profiled the militant leader in his recent book "Pakistan's Drift into Extremism," Khalil "has been closely aligned to Pakistan's intelligence services."

Abbas said that despite several requests from the United States very little action was ever taken against him. He was briefly detained and questioned last year and has been under house arrest, but was released earlier this year and has now vanished.

"He still has acquiescence (in his activities) and sympathy, if not outright support, from the intelligence agencies," said Abbas.

Talat Waseem, spokeswoman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington, told UPI that she had "never heard of" Khalil and couldn't answer any questions about him. "There are no terrorist training camps in Pakistan," she asserted.

Khalil was the only prominent Pakistani jihadist to sign al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa, urging Muslims everywhere to kill Israelis and Americans. Later that year, when the United States retaliated for the al-Qaida truck bomb attacks on its East African embassies with cruise missile strikes against the group's camps in Afghanistan, Khalil denounced the move, and pledged revenge against America.

According to Abbas, "many security people I've spoken to in Pakistan say he is exactly the kind of person who should have been in (the U.S. detention center in) Guantanamo Bay."

More worryingly still, according to Roger Cressey, the former deputy White House counter-terrorism adviser, "You have a network of people here in the United States who are at least sympathetic to -- and perhaps actually supportive of -- the Kashmiri jihadists."

As recently as the late 1990's there was an active network in many U.S. Muslim communities raising money for the Kashmir cause, according to one expert who has studied the global jihadist movement. "There are still elements in some mosques that are supportive," said the expert, who asked for anonymity.

The vision of a U.S.-based support network for Islamic terrorists is the nightmare that haunts counter-terrorism specialists. "It's one of the things that still keeps me awake at nights," Sept. 11 Commission member Tim Roemer told UPI, explaining that he believed law enforcement agencies had never entirely settled the question of whether the 19 suicide hijackers had witting help from other Muslims in the United States.

The arrest of the Hayats and two other Lodi Muslims -- being held by immigration authorities for allegedly violating the terms of their religious worker visas -- are part of an "ongoing, long-term inquiry," according to Dean Boyd of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Although some law enforcement officials have been anonymously hinting that more arrests might be in the pipeline, Boyd was non-committal. "It's ongoing, that's all I can say," he said.

Bergen is skeptical that the investigation will reveal any kind of extensive Fifth Column. "I doubt that this will be the tip of an iceberg," he said. "I don't think that suddenly there will be dozens of other people in the Sacramento area who turn out to be involved in this conspiracy."

Former CIA and State Department counter-terror chief Cofer Black agreed, telling UPI the arrests were "not so much the tip of an iceberg we can't see, but rather a measure of the increasing capability of our law enforcement agencies to conduct effective counterterrorism and to utilize intelligence to identify and arrest terrorists."

Nonetheless, the case is likely to re-ignite fears of a network of Islamic sleeper cells in the United States.

"Assuming these allegations (against the Hayats) are all true," said Cressey, "this is a very disturbing picture... You have an al-Qaida (training) infrastructure in Pakistan into which recruits are funneled from all over the world, and you have al-Qaida operatives then able to come to the United States to prepare."

Although Cressey said that as far as he knew the Kashmiri jihadis had "never looked at the United States as a target."

There is a significant degree of cross-over between those groups and al-Qaida, according to Husain Haqqani, a former senior Pakistani government official, now based in Washington.

Haqqani, who examines the issue in his forthcoming book "Pakistan: Between the Mosque and the Military," says that represents a serious problem for the United States because Pakistan has never been able to sever the link between its military and intelligence apparatus and the militant jihadists that they supported in both Kashmir and Afghanistan.

"That relationship is so deep-rooted that it is not easy to break ... people don't change their beliefs, their ideology overnight," Haqqani said.

He added that one of the reasons the link was so hard to break is that "the military-intelligence apparatus has never admitted that ... the creation of these irregular armies imbued with the spirit of jihad was a mistake." Even Pakistan's military leader and enthusiastic U.S. ally Gen. Pervez Musharraf still defends Pakistan's support to the Taliban, says Haqqani.

"There may be a short term impact from these arrests," he said, "but then it'll be back to business as usual. The government is in a state of denial about this."

Source Link: http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20050608-105315-9659r.htm