Terror Investigation Focuses on Portland, Oregon and Other Cities

PORTLAND - ABC News reports the FBI is investigating possible al Qaeda terror cells in several major U.S. cities, including Portland.

Agents are reportedly focusing on New York, Boston, Minneapolis, Houston, Detroit, Miami, Buffalo, Seattle and Portland.

The FBI is particularly interested in several dozen U.S. citizens believed to have trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan during the late 90s. The news has piqued interest in Oregon as questions arise about certain members of a mosque in southwest Portland.

First there was the arrest last week of Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye, a leader of the mosque the Islamic Center of Portland.

Authorities said Kariye was discovered at Portland International Airport with a one way ticket, several thousand dollars in cash and a suitcase with traces of TNT inside. His fellow mosque members say there is no way he is a terrorist or even someone with terrorist ties.

However, a court document shows that in 1992, Kariye was one of five board of directors for a charity called the Global Relief Foundation. He is listed as Muhamed Abdirahman, a variation of one the several names he's used in the past.

Last December, the charity was shut down by federal authorities, and it's being investigated for possibly funding al Qaeda's terrorist activities.

There is also Fareed Adlouni, another Portland resident and a member of the same southwest Portland mosque.

A 1996 fax from Osama bin Laden's personal secretary, Wadih el Hage, asks Adlouni and other brothers at the Islamic Center of Portland for donations to an organization called "Help Africa People."

Earlier that year, el Hage sent a fax to a friend in Texas, asking him to transfer $1,000 to Adlouni's U.S. Bank account in Beaverton.

El Hage is serving a life sentence for his role in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa that killed over 250 people.

A Lake Oswego Rotary group invited Adlouni and other members of his mosque to speak at one of their meetings last year to share their views on the September 11 attacks.

“The first thing that annoyed people was his refusal to stand and salute the flag,” Rotary member Phil Engstrom said. “We begin our meetings with a flag salute and that tipped people off to what they might expect.”

Engstrom says after a brief introduction about Islam, Adlouni went on to point out there was no direct proof Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks.

Engstrom says Adlouni also criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East, blaming American sanctions for the lack of food and death of a million children in Iraq.

“It was indeed shocking to the whole club, I think,” Engstrom said. “The reaction was quite uniform in one respect--that we didn't like what we heard.”

Minnesota leads in Somali residents
Lourdes Medrano Leslie
Star Tribune

Published Sep 18, 2002

Just a decade ago, Somalis didn't figure into the Minnesota landscape. There were no Somali malls, no Somali restaurants, and there was no camel meat for sale at ethnic food markets.

"When I first came to Minnesota in '92, there were maybe two Somali families here," said Abdi Samatar, a geography professor who had come to teach at the University of Minnesota.

After a one-year absence from the state, Samatar said, he returned in the fall of 1994 to find that the Somali community had grown considerably to about 3,000 residents.

By 2000 their numbers totaled 11,164 in Minnesota, according to census data released this week. Of the 40 states whose data are available, Minnesota has the largest number of Somalis, and most of them -- 8,933 -- live in the Twin Cities metro area.

"The Twin Cities are some of the most peaceful urban centers in the country, and Somalis are attracted to that," Samatar said.

A devastating civil war in the early 1990s drove tens of thousands of Somalis from their homeland and into the refugee camps of neighboring Kenya in the horn of Africa. There, many waited until they received refugee status from the United States and other countries.

Refugee resettlement agencies in Minnesota sponsored the first Somali refugees in the state in 1993, although word about Minnesota's plentiful jobs already had lured a few Somalis from other U.S. cities -- a trend that continued into the late '90s. Besides the Twin Cities, Rochester has a significant number of Somalis. Others live in smaller towns such as Marshall, drawn by meat-processing work.

And it would seem that Somalis are in Minnesota to stay. Many have set up shop along what used to be run-down business corridors in Minneapolis, opening clothing stores, restaurants and community organizations that serve the Somali population. More recently, Somali entrepreneurs have opened businesses in St. Paul.

Samatar and others said Wednesday that they have known for years that Minnesota is the choice state for many Somalis who want to take advantage of good jobs, educational opportunities and a strong social service network in their adopted country. "The late '90s are when we saw the big jump," said the professor, who like other Somalis deemed the census count as too low.

He figures that the Somali population is at least twice the census count, but not as much as the estimates of up to 50,000 that some Somali leaders frequently cite based on their work in the community.

Samatar said he sees the increasing Somali presence at religious observations, at social gatherings and on campus. Forty Somali students enrolled as freshmen this year at the university, the highest he's ever seen. "In previous years we had two, five, 10 coming in," he said.

Mahamoud Wardere, who has worked extensively with Somali students in Minneapolis public schools, said he simply doesn't believe that the census data reflect reality. "I don't know what went wrong, but I think something went wrong with the statistics."

The census numbers are from the so-called long form, which contains hard numbers on dozens of ethnic groups. But Wardere said many Somalis may not have filled out the form, either because they don't speak English fluently, or because they didn't trust that their responses would be kept confidential.

Amal Yusuf, director of the Somalian Women's Association, also was skeptical of the census. If the public school numbers are any indication, she reasoned, then the number of Somalis who call Minnesota home should be much higher. She came to the state in 1997.

In the 2001-02 school year, there were 5,123 students who reported speaking Somali at home, according to the Minnesota Department of Children, Families and Learning. The census data include both foreign-born and U.S.-born Somalis.

Social worker Ahmed Yusuf, who frequently deals with Somali clients, said he finds it hard to believe that the crowds that frequently turn out at Twin Cities events amount to about 9,000. He thinks it's three times more, given the dramatic surge in population of the late '90s. He moved to the Twin Cities in '97 from Connecticut to be with other Somalis.

"There is some kind of an acceptance here (of minorities)," said Yusuf, who is not related to the association's director. "I think the majority of Minnesotans are pretty open-minded people, more tolerant."

-- Lourdes Medrano Leslie is at lleslie@startribune.com.

© Copyright 2002 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

And again

FBI monitoring suspected Al-Qaida cells in Minneapolis
Greg Gordon and Randy Furst
Star Tribune

Published Sep 18, 2002

The FBI is monitoring suspected terror cells in Minneapolis, New York and several other U.S. cities, based partly on U.S. intelligence and information from Al-Qaida members in custody, a terrorism expert said Tuesday.

"They're clearly monitoring a whole variety of suspected cells in the United States," said Neil Livingstone, a Washington-based security consultant with close ties to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Livingstone confirmed portions of a report by ABC-TV News, which said several dozen of the suspected cell members are U.S. citizens who underwent terrorist training at Al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

ABC reported that, in addition to Minneapolis and New York, FBI agents are focusing on Boston, Portland, Ore., Houston, Seattle, Miami and two cities where they recently arrested groups of men believed tied to Osama bin Laden's global network: Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y.

Livingstone said he would add Dearborn, Mich., to the list.

ABC said documents found in Afghanistan mentioned the U.S. cities where cells are believed to be located.

Minnesota law enforcement officials were mum Tuesday about a pending terrorist investigation in the Twin Cities, the scene last year of the arrest of alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and the shutdown of several money transfer operations with alleged terrorist links.

The FBI's local Joint Terrorism Task Force "continues to investigate numerous counter-terrorism matters, and we do not comment on the specifics of those cases or specifics of any operations," said spokesman Paul McCabe.

State Public Safety Commissioner Charlie Weaver said that he is aware that "there may be an investigation into a possible terrorism cell" in Minnesota, but that he knew none of the specifics.

Hennepin County Sheriff Patrick McGowan knows nothing about the alleged surveillance, although he has helped to coordinate the task force, said spokeswoman Roseann Campagnoli.

Under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a secret, 11-judge court authorizes wiretaps, searches and other surveillance of suspected terrorists.

"I am wondering how it is leaking because FISA is an extremely confidential collection process that is utilized through sealed documents unavailable to the public," said William Michael Jr., a former terrorism and national security coordinator for the U.S. attorney's office in Minneapolis.

"Very few people in this state . . . would have direct knowledge of whether [such monitoring] is occurring."

Tracing cell members' phone calls can be difficult even with a FISA warrant. Livingstone said U.S. intelligence agencies have nonetheless been able to intercept some of the calls by identifying Al-Qaida phone numbers overseas.

Cell members, many of whom blend into society and wait years for instructions, have been found to make overseas calls on public telephones with prepaid phone cards that require no identification. They often use coded language.

Livingstone noted the big advantages cell members gain by attaining citizenship; he pointed out that Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged paymaster of the Sept. 11 hijackers who was arrested last week, was refused a visa to enter the United States four times before the attacks. "These guys [with citizenship] don't have to worry about getting a visa."

FBI Director Robert Mueller said recently that about 100 suspected terrorists across the country have been subjected to round-the-clock surveillance. ABC said hundreds of others are being investigated.

The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies began selecting cities where cells might be operating about five months ago, he said. They have been aided by information from several alleged Al-Qaida members who have been arrested, including John Walker Lindh, an American who was seized during the war in Afghanistan.

One law enforcement official said a delegation from the Twin Cities flew to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to join in the interrogation of hundreds of Al-Qaida members being detained there.

Livingstone said FBI agents have used hidden cameras to acquire photos of the suspects -- photos that can be shown to jailed Al-Qaida members willing to cooperate in return for a lighter penalty. Many of these "nonentities . . . are picking out pictures for us right now," he said.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress relaxed the FISA law so that investigators no longer must declare intelligence gathering as the primary purpose for obtaining a warrant; it must only be a "significant" purpose. For a terrorism-related warrant to be approved, the court must find it more likely than not that the person being monitored is an agent of a terrorist organization.

The surveillance is stirring anxiety among Arab-Americans and in the Twin Cities' Somali community.

Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, reacted to the report of Minneapolis surveillance by saying at a news conference Tuesday that the government is unfairly targeting the Muslim community, and in particular Somalis.

"It's installing a fear in the hearts of these people," he said. "We are not terrorists. The Somali community are not terrorists. The immigrants are not terrorists."

But in answer to a question, he said he did not know if there were terrorist cells in Minneapolis. Still, he said, the report "has the effect of creating a continuation of the witch-hunt atmosphere" in Minneapolis.

Jamal spoke on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis in front of a building that housed two firms used by Somalians to wire money home. The two firms were raided and closed by federal agents in November, but were cleared last month of any links to Al-Qaida. Three other Minneapolis firms remain closed.

"The community has been calling us, frightened, shocked, thinking that their phone is wired, paranoid, completely fearful," Jamal said.

-- Staff writer Chris Graves contributed to this report.

-- Greg Gordon is at ggordon@mcclatchydc.comand Randy Furst is at rfurst@startribune.com.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.