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| Lodi is the site of the latest US terror prosecution |
| 2006-03-23 |
| Naseem Khan blended right into the Pakistani community when he moved to this quiet farming area south of Sacramento. An immigrant who spoke Pashto and Urdu, he had lived there briefly once before, made friends easily and attended the local mosque. Today, Khan's anonymity is long gone. The convenience store clerk-turned-FBI informant is the star prosecution witness in the trial of Umer and Hamid Hayat, a father and son accused, respectively, of supporting terrorism and lying about it to the government. Hamid Hayat, 23, faces charges of providing material support to terrorists for allegedly attending an al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, as well as for lying to investigators during an interrogation. In a joint trial, Umer Hayat, 48, an ice cream vendor, is accused of making false statements to the FBI to protect his son. Hamid Hayat faces as much as 39 years in prison; his father, 16. The case is built on Khan's infiltration of Lodi's small Pakistani community from 2002 to 2005. Earlier this month, prosecutors put Khan, 32, on the stand, where he told jurors that Hamid Hayat had talked about attending a training camp. Jurors also saw videotapes of both defendants first denying and then admitting to investigators that Hamid Hayat had attended the camp. But last week, Khan shocked observers of the trial by asserting that al-Qaeda's second-in-command had passed through Lodi in 1998 or 1999, raising doubts about his credibility that the defense has begun to exploit. The Lodi case is the latest in a string of prosecutions brought since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks under a law that criminalizes providing "material support" to terrorists. The government's success with the previously obscure statute has been mixed. It has won convictions in high-profile cases in Northern Virginia, in Lackawanna, N.Y., and in the New York City trial of radical lawyer Lynne Stewart. It has lost prosecutions in Detroit, Idaho and Tampa. The Lodi case provides a rare, detailed look at how one FBI informant functioned and raises questions about the effectiveness of the government's strategy of infiltrating the community with an outsider. Defense lawyers say their clients' arrests were made in desperation because there wasn't any real terrorist activity to find in Lodi. They contend that Hamid Hayat was given to grandiose exaggerations. At trial, they played hours of the videotaped FBI interrogation, which appears to show the two men, whose English was limited, agreeing with FBI agents instead of offering information. "They were after big fish," Umer Hayat's attorney, Johnny L. Griffin III, said of investigators. "They couldn't get the big fish, and they had to get someone." Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Ferris declined to comment. The FBI paid Khan more than $200,000 to move to Lodi, a city of 56,000, according to court testimony. He took an apartment near the Lodi Muslim Mosque and befriended Hamid Hayat, a lean young man with a black goatee, imperfect English skills and few friends. Hayat had a sixth-grade education and followed Pakistani politics, including the movements of radicals, court testimony has shown. Khan visited the Hayat home at least a dozen times and had lengthy phone conversations with Hamid Hayat, which he secretly recorded. Transcripts of those calls reveal that Khan talked with Hayat about girls, cricket and, over time, politics and terrorism. Khan feigned a radical streak and an interest in jihad. In 2003, Hamid Hayat went to Pakistan but kept in touch with Khan. In transcripts of their phone calls, he told Khan that he planned to attend a militant training camp but sheepishly admitted he had not yet done so. Khan encouraged him, saying, "Be a man" and "You're wasting time." "I was just making conversation with him," Khan told Hamid Hayat's lawyer at the trial this month. Under further questioning, Khan acknowledged that Hayat never told him he had attended the camp -- only that he would go in the future. Under FBI interrogation, Hayat first denied, then acknowledged, that he had spent months at a training camp near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, that he said was run by al-Qaeda. In June 2005, Hayat returned to the United States and was brought in for questioning. His father accompanied him, and both were arrested. They have been in jail ever since. While Hamid Hayat was in Pakistan, Khan befriended two imams of the Lodi mosque, according to court testimony. They soon became suspicious and warned others to avoid him. Several days after the Hayats were arrested, the two imams and one of their sons were detained on immigration violations. They were deported but not criminally charged. One of the imams had been in conflict with another over the construction of a Muslim religious school. Some in Lodi suspect that political opponents reported the imams to the FBI. Across the street from the Lodi mosque on a recent afternoon, children played basketball while men in traditional Pakistani dress watched over them or milled around the entrance to the mosque, a low-slung yellow building in a ramshackle neighborhood of single-family houses. Taj Khan, a local activist and a 25-year resident of Lodi, said the investigation and prosecutions have wreaked havoc on the community. "People are scared. People are having nightmares, I'm being told," said Khan, who is not related to the FBI informant. Taj Khan was part of a cross-cultural effort that sought to build bridges between Christians, Jews and Muslims in a town in which the Pakistani community dates to the 1930s. "This event has put a big lid on all that," he said. "This thing has set us back quite a few years." Naseem Khan's credibility suffered a blow last week when he maintained he had seen al-Qaeda's second-ranking leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, at the mosque in 1998 or 1999 -- a statement that Brian Jenkins, an authority on terrorism at Rand Corp., calls "far-fetched." FBI documents released last week show that Khan first made the assertion when agents approached him in 2001. At that time, Khan also told the FBI that he had seen Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed al-Nasser, a suspect in a 1996 Saudi Arabia bombing, in Lodi, and Ahmed Mohammed Hamed Ali, a suspect in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in Stockton, Calif., in 1999. Terrorism experts believe that none of those suspects was in the United States at that time, though al-Zawahiri is known to have passed through the country on a fundraising trip in 1993. The misstep for the prosecution shows one of the possible pitfalls of using confidential informants in terrorism cases, said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. "The FBI has been correctly critiqued for not having agents from these communities," he said. "Since they don't have them, they're going to informants . . . and with informants you often have credibility problems." Chesney cautioned that "having an unexpected but clearly wrong thing being said doesn't help, but it's not dispositive, either." The videotaped confessions are still strong evidence, he said. "I'm not a betting man, but if I was, I certainly wouldn't bet on the jury discounting confessions unless they've got some fairly specific facts that show their wills were overcome," he said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 Several days after the Hayats were arrested, the two imams and one of their sons were detained on immigration violations. They were deported but not criminally charged. NB: The "immigration violations" were failure to list their connections to terrorist organizations. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2006-03-23 07:52 |
| #1 Arrest warrant based on this affidavit: http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/hayat.pdf Comprehensive background of "Lodi Five" case: http://www.milnet.com/Lodi-Five.html |
| Posted by: Listen to Dogs 2006-03-23 05:57 |