Violins frantically playing for this one...Terrorism is tough on everyone. We should also remain on guard for similar anecdotal stories that the aclu and other bleeding heart groups will no doubt put forward soon.
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Material witness in a terrorism case says his life is ruined
Adam Liptak NYT
Friday, August 20, 2004
LAS VEGAS Abdullah al Kidd was on his way to Saudi Arabia to work on his doctorate in Islamic studies in March 2003 when he was arrested as a material witness in a terrorism investigation. An FBI agent marched him across Dulles Airport in Washington in handcuffs.
"It was the most horrible, disgraceful, degrading moment in my life," said Kidd, an American citizen who was known as Lavoni Kidd when he led his college football team, the Vandals of the University of Idaho, in 1995.
The two weeks that followed his arrest, he said, were terrifying. "I was made to sit in a small cell for hours and hours and hours buck naked," he said. "I was treated worse than murderers."
After that, a federal judge ordered him to move in with his in-laws in Las Vegas, where his wife was to stay until she joined him in Saudi Arabia.
Kidd, who described himself as "anti-bin Laden, anti-Taliban, anti-suicide bombing, anti-terrorism," was never charged with a crime and never asked to testify as a witness. In June, 16 months after his arrest, the court said he was free to resume his life.
But at the kitchen table of his dumpy little bachelor apartment in Las Vegas, Kidd said the experience had cost him dearly. He lost his scholarship, he now moves furniture for a living, and his marriage has fallen apart. About 60 other men have been held in terrorism investigations under the federal material witness law since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a coming report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Such laws, meant to ensure that people with important information do not disappear before testifying, have been used to hold people briefly since the early days of the republic.
But scholars and critics say that in recent years the government has radically reinterpreted what it means to be a material witness.
These days, people held as material witnesses in terrorism investigations are often not called to testify against others; instead, frequently, they are charged with crimes themselves. They lack constitutional protections like the requirement that criminal suspects in custody be informed of their Miranda rights, beginning with the familiar refrain, "You have the right to remain silent." Moreover, they are often held for long periods of time in the same harsh conditions as those suspected of serious crimes.
Mary Jo White, who supervised several major terrorism investigations as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan until 2002, said the frequent and aggressive use of the material witness law in terrorism investigations was a recent development.
"It was really my idea to use the material witness warrant statute in appropriate cases to detain for reasonable periods of time people who might not appear for a grand jury with information related to the 9/11 attacks," she said. The law is, she said, an important tool, but one that must be used judiciously.
"Some of the criticism that has been leveled at it is not wholly unjustified," said White, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. "Was enough done to clear the status of the person? Did you hold the person longer than you needed to? Does it really sort out to being in one sense preventive detention? Yes, it does, but with safeguards."
Ronald Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia and an expert on the material witness law, said White's account understates the magnitude of the change.
"The law was designed to hold Mr. A, the material witness, to testify about a crime committed by Mr. B, the suspect," he said.
"Now they are locking up Mr. A as a material witness to the crime of Mr. A. The notion is, 'We'll hold him until we develop probable cause to arrest him for a crime.'"
A senior Justice Department official, who declined to be quoted by name, citing the sensitivity of terrorism investigations, dismissed that analysis. "You would be really hard pressed," he said, "if you were able to lift the veil of secrecy on this - and you can't - to find that we've used a material witness warrant to get a solo actor for something he's done on his own."
The official acknowledged, though, that witnesses are frequently charged with crimes.
"If someone has material information," he said, and will not testify, "it tends not to be a nun who walks out of a monastery."
Defense lawyers said that many people willing to testify voluntarily had nonetheless been detained.
"Now everyone who has any conceivable Middle Eastern tie is considered to be a flight risk," said Randall Hamud, a lawyer who has represented three material witnesses.
"That's never been the case before. It's become a very popular device for rounding people up. It's a systemic weapon used against an ethnically identifiable group. It's a holding device."
The distinction between criminal charges and material-witness detentions have blurred, critics say, and sometimes disappear entirely.
Two weeks after Kidd's arrest, Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, briefed Congress on the government's recent counterterrorism successes.
"Let me give you a few recent examples," he said. The first was the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Mueller called him "the mastermind of the Sept. 11th attack."
The second was the arrest of Kidd. Mueller did not mention that Kidd had not been charged with a crime.
"My reputation is destroyed," Kidd said recently. "I keep getting 'no's' from jobs as if I'm an ex-felon."
In defending the use of material-witness warrants in a letter to a congressional committee last year, Jamie Brown, a Justice Department official, described the safeguards established to prevent injustices.
"Every single person detained as a material witness as part of the Sept. 11 investigation," Brown wrote, "has been represented by counsel" and "was found by a federal judge to have information material to the grand jury's investigation."
Witnesses are free to speak about a case, Brown continued, though, "The fact that few have elected to do so suggests they wish their detentions to remain nonpublic."
Jamie Fellner, the director of the U.S. programs for Human Rights Watch, said some detainees faced the worst of two worlds. "Material witnesses have, ironically, fewer protections than people charged with a crime," Fellner said, using the examples of the omission of a Miranda warning and sometimes less-than-prompt access to lawyers.
Kidd, the former football star, was held in the case of Sami Omar al-Hussayen, tried in June in federal court in Idaho on charges of using his computer skills to support terrorists. The jury found Hussayen not guilty of the more serious charges and deadlocked on others. The restrictions on Kidd's travel were lifted and his passport returned.
Kidd, who converted to Islam in college, was held for three days at a Virginia detention center, in a cell known as the fishbowl. Its previous occupants included, he was told, Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, who is serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban.
Of his marriage, he said: "This ordeal has dissolved our relationship. I lost a good wife. I'm not with my daughter anymore. How painful is that?"
The New York Times
Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
http://www.iht.com/articles/534885.html
In the beginning
The 9/11 terrorist outrage started with a group of al-Qaida plotters holed up together in a German flat. Peter Bergen reports on a new film that attempts to understand their motives
Peter Bergen
Friday August 20, 2004
The Guardian
We all know how the tragic story of Hamburg Cell will end, but the question that Channel 4's new film tries to answer is: how did the 9/11 plot first take shape? Hamburg Cell focuses on a group of young Middle Easterners who arrived in Germany during the 1990s, and their unlikely transformation from nondescript students to key players in the 9/11 conspiracy. As the final report of the 9/11 commission pointed out last month, Osama bin Laden initially conceived of using more established members of al-Qaida to execute the attacks on Washington and New York, but decided instead to use the "Hamburg group [who] added the enormous advantages of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the west" - attributes that were necessary to learn how to fly at technically demanding American flight schools, and for the meticulous planning of the 9/11 operation.
Two of the 9/11 pilots are the central focus here: the lead hijacker, Egyptian Muhammad Atta, and Zaid Jarrah, a gregarious Lebanese party boy who would go on to crash United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. In an implicit recognition that efforts to describe a typical "terrorist personality" are inherently futile, Hamburg Cell shows that Atta and Jarrah could not have been more different. Atta is portrayed as a priggish, prickly fanatic, whose misogyny extended to instructions in his will that no women should visit his grave.
How Atta developed this persona is something of a mystery, although the film-makers suggest one possibility: on his return to his native Cairo after years of study in Germany, Atta is confronted by his father, an unyielding martinet, who coldly demands that he continue his studies in Hamburg. Atta's rigid personality may simply have been a family trait.
Jarrah is a complete contrast: the good-looking scion of a wealthy Lebanese family, the one person in the Hamburg cell who was most likely to abandon a life of jihadist terrorism for a conventional existence, Jarrah even has a lover, Aysel Senguen, the attractive daughter of Turkish immigrants, for whom he cooks elaborate, alcohol-fuelled meals. The story of Hamburg Cell largely traces Jarrah's metamorphosis from a wine-quaffing medical student to an Islamist zealot intent on mass murder. The film nicely captures how Jarrah, newly arrived in a relentlessly grey, rainy Germany, naturally gravitated to the local mosque, where he could find companionship. Jarrah tells the imam of the mosque that his family isn't religious, to which the cleric replies, "Here, we are your brothers. We can help you."
Over time Jarrah becomes more observant, attending the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, which would become a hub for the 9/11 plotters. Jarrah grows a beard and his relationship with his girlfriend Aysel becomes increasingly contentious. At one point Aysel asks him: "What is more important to you - jihad or marrying me? Why would I marry a man who will be dead in two years?" While such conversations appear to be the reconstruction of the filmmakers, they have the ring of truth as Aysel would testify in a later terrorism trial that she progressively lost Jarrah to the influence of his jihadist friends.
We also see that discussions at the mosque were as much political as religious. In one scene, a bearded elder tells Jarrah and his fellow worshippers that the Serbs instigated a Muslim holocaust in Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, a holocaust that is being repeated in places like Chechnya, Indonesia and Kashmir, and that they must therefore "train for jihad". And so, in 1999 Atta and Jarrah resolved to go to fight jihad in Chechnya.
What would take them instead to Afghanistan were not contacts in the al-Quds mosque, but a chance encounter on a German train with an Islamic radical who provided them with introductions to al-Qaida. This episode is not recounted in the film, as it only became public in July. This encounter changes much of our understanding of the Hamburg cell who, it turns out, had no intention of attacking the US until they had travelled to Afghanistan, a trip that hinged on a simple quirk of fate. Of such contingencies history is made.
In Afghanistan Atta and Jarrah train to become members of al-Qaida in a sequence that exactly mirrors an actual al-Qaida training tape. Atta and Jarrah are then approached by al-Qaida's military commander Khalid Sheik Mohammed who tasks them with the plan to attack the US using planes. (In reality, according to the 9/11 commission, Atta met with bin Laden himself to discuss "a preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the US Capitol".) On his return to Germany, Jarrah is contacted by members of his worried family who tell him that he must abandon his obsession with jihad. Jarrah placates his family and Aysel, by now his wife, by saying that he is going to leave Hamburg for Florida to learn how to become a pilot, far from the influence of his jihadist buddies.
In fact, it is in Florida where the key 9/11 plotters would all meet up. And yet, even as the planning for the operations against Washington and New York is in its final stages, still Jarrah feels the pull of the temptations of the west, downing a beer at a barbecue. When Atta later smells the alcohol on Jarrah's breath he denounces him. Indeed, according to the 9/11 commission, simmering tensions between Atta and Jarrah were a concern to al-Qaida's leaders, because they threatened to sabotage the entire plan.
As the 9/11 plot moves into high gear, Aysel visits her beloved husband in Florida for what is, unbeknown to her, their final carefree moment together. Jarrah even takes her to one of his flying lessons, a chilling scene that takes place inside a passenger jet flight simulator. At the controls of the simulator Jarrah turns to Aysel saying: "Soon I'll be doing this for real." Of course, the only time Jarrah will fly a passenger jet for real will be his first, and only, flight.
The film ends, as it begins, with Jarrah in the departure lounge at Newark airport before he boards his flight to Los Angeles placing a final call to Aysel leaving her a message of love. That love will not stop Jarrah from killing himself and 43 others on the plane that he will soon crash into a field in Pennsylvania. As Osama bin Laden has said about members of al-Qaida: "We love death more than you love life." Ultimately, why that should be the case is not something that Hamburg Cell can adequately explain, probably because the explication of such beliefs lies more in the realm of theology than film-making.
· Hamburg Cell is screened at the Edinburgh film festival on August 25 and 26, and will be shown on Channel 4 in September. Peter Bergen is the author of Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1286324,00.html