I'll start:
Lawmakers Ask Ashcroft Why Suspect Freed
1 hour, 50 minutes ago
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike are demanding to know why the Bush administration chose to release to Syria a terror suspect when several prosecutors and FBI agents had collected evidence for a possible criminal case.
The circumstances surrounding Nabil al-Marabh's release, detailed in a recent Associated Press story, are "of deep concern and appear to be a departure from an aggressive, proactive approach to the war on terrorism," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote Tuesday in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"Al-Marabh was at one time No. 27 on the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) list of Most Wanted Terrorists," wrote Grassley, who leads the committee that controls federal spending and also is a member of the Judiciary Committee that oversees the Justice Department. "He appears to have links to a number of terrorists and suspected terrorists in several U.S. cities."
The Iowa Republican repeatedly cited the AP story and demanded that Ashcroft answer 19 questions about al-Marabh's case, including why the Justice Department didn't prosecute the man they had in custody for nearly two years either in a military tribunal or through a secret court proceeding that could protect intelligence information.
Grassley also asked Justice to detail what has happened to other terror suspects that appeared on the same post-Sept. 11 terrorism list as al-Marabh.
Aides to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have also made some preliminary inquiries into the case.
One of Ashcroft's top deputies, Chris Wray, recently told Congress that he was concerned some terror suspects rounded up after Sept. 11, 2001, were now being deported because prosecutors were having a hard time making terrorism cases or couldn't expose sensitive intelligence information during court proceedings.
Justice officials told AP that despite concerns about al-Marabh's possible ties to terrorism, deportation was "determined to be the best option available under the law to protect our national security," including intelligence sources and methods.
Separately, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also has asked Ashcroft to answer questions about issues raised in the AP story but has yet to receive answers.
"The odd handling of this case raises questions that deserve answers from the Justice Department," Leahy, of Vermont, said Tuesday. "Why was a suspected terrorist returned to a country that sponsors terrorism? We need to know that the safety of the American people and our strategic goals in countering terrorism are paramount factors when decisions like this are made."
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., another Judiciary Committee member, said Tuesday the Justice Department's explanation that al-Marabh's deportation was the best option does not make sense. "It seems that pursuing a military tribunal, a classified criminal trial or continued immigration proceedings would have made more sense than merely deporting a suspected terrorist."
AP reported June 2 that the Bush administration earlier this year set al-Marabh free to Syria, a country regarded as a state sponsor of terrorism, even though prosecutors in several cities sought to bring criminal cases against him and judges openly expressed concerns about al-Marabh's possible terrorist ties.
The U.S. attorney in Chicago at one point even drafted an indictment against al-Marabh and interviewed a jailhouse informant who alleged al-Marabh admitted he had been plotting to blow up a gas truck inside a New York City tunnel, according to documents reviewed by AP.
FBI and Customs agents gathered evidence al-Marabh had trained in Afghanistan's militant camps, sent money to a roommate convicted in a foiled plot to bomb a hotel and was tied to overseas financial transactions that raised red flags even before Sept. 11.
Al-Marabh "intended to martyr himself in an attack against the United States," an FBI agent wrote in a December 2002 report. A footnote in al-Marabh's deportation ruling last year added, "The FBI has been unable to rule out the possibility that al-Marabh has engaged in terrorist activity or will do so if he is not removed from the United States."
― hstencil (hstencil), Wednesday, 30 June 2004 14:16 (twenty-one years ago)
June 30, 2004
In F.B.I., Innocent Detainee Found Unlikely Ally
By NINA BERNSTEIN
It took no more than a week for James P. Wynne, a veteran F.B.I. investigator, to confirm the harmless truth that only now, more than two years later, he is ready to talk about. The small foreign man he helped arrest for videotaping outside an office building in Queens on Oct. 25, 2001, was no terrorist.
He was a Buddhist from Nepal planning to return there after five years of odd jobs at places like a Queens pizzeria and a Manhattan flower shop. He was taping New York street scenes to take back to his wife and sons in Katmandu. And he had no clue that the tall building that had drifted into his viewfinder happened to include an office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Yet by the time Mr. Wynne filed his F.B.I. report a few days later, the Nepalese man, who spoke almost no English, had been placed in solitary confinement at a federal detention center in Brooklyn just because of his videotaping. He was swallowed up in the government's new maximum security system of secret detention and secret hearings, and his only friend was the same F.B.I. agent who had helped decide to put him there.
Except for the videotape — "a tourist kind of thing," in Mr. Wynne's estimation — no shred of suspicion attached to the man, Purna Raj Bajracharya, 47, who came from Nepal in 1996. His one offense — staying to work on a long-expired tourist visa — was an immigration violation punishable by deportation, not jail. But he wound up spending three months in solitary confinement before he was sent back to Katmandu in January 2002, and to release him from his shackles, even Mr. Wynne needed help.
The clearance process had become so byzantine that the officer who had set the procedure in motion could not hasten it. Unable to procure a release that officially required signatures from top antiterrorism officials in Washington, Mr. Wynne took an uncommon step for an F.B.I. agent: he called the Legal Aid Society for a lawyer to help the jailed man.
Now, for the first time, the F.B.I. agent and the Legal Aid lawyer, Olivia Cassin, have agreed to talk about the case and their unlikely alliance. Their documented accounts offer a rare, first-hand window into the workings of a secret world.
Within 10 days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department instructed immigration judges that all cases designated as "special interest" were to be handled in separate closed courtrooms, without visitors, family or reporters, and without confirming whether a case was on the docket. The secrecy left detainees with little access to lawyers.
Visa violators would be held indefinitely, until the F.B.I. was sure the person was not involved in terrorism. As a visa violator under suspicion, Mr. Bajracharya was among hundreds placed in the special interest category, and his case was wiped from the public record.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that though he was unfamiliar with the case, the system of secrecy Mr. Bajracharya encountered is lawful and necessary. "The idea that someone who has violated our immigration laws may be of interest on a national security level as well is an unfortunate reality, post-9/11," he said. Closed hearings are legal as long as due process is provided, he said, and all abuses will be dealt with.
But Ms. Cassin, of Legal Aid, argues that under this secret practice, there is no way to know whether other noncitizens are even now being unfairly detained. "By its very nature," she said, "it can happen again without our knowing about it."
Mr. Bajracharya was finally returned to Nepal on Jan. 13, 2002. By then he had spent almost three months in a 6-by-9-foot cell kept lighted 24 hours a day. The unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was kept has become notorious for the abuses documented there by the Justice Department's own inspector general, who found a pattern of physical and mental mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees. Videotapes showed officers slamming detainees into walls, mocking them during unnecessary strip-searches, and secretly taping their conversations with lawyers.
Mr. Wynne would not comment on detention policies, and said that he should not be "held out as the one lone person who did the right thing." But during an extended interview approved by his F.B.I. superiors, he read aloud from phone logs documenting desperate messages from the man's family in Katmandu, his efforts to reassure the weeping detainee, and his own dawning recognition that no resolution was in sight.
"I told Purna that I would try to help him, that I wouldn't forget about him," Mr. Wynne explained. "I felt some - not responsibility, but I felt that there was no one else."
By telephone from Katmandu, Mr. Bajracharya recalled the fear, humiliation and despair he had experienced in prison. "I had nothing but tears in my eyes," he said through a translator. "The only thing I knew, I was innocent, but I didn't know what was happening."
He said he was stripped naked in the federal jail. "I was manhandled and treated badly," he said, becoming agitated. "I was very, very embarrassed even to look around, because I was naked."
The ordeal began when his videotaping aroused the suspicions of two detectives from the Queens district attorney's office, which has space in the same 12-story building where the F.B.I. occupies three floors. After taking him inside for questioning, they called upstairs to the F.B.I., and Mr. Wynne was dispatched to take over the interrogation. With no translator, Mr. Bajracharya tried to explain himself to half a dozen law enforcement officers, including two federal agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service who verified his illegal immigration status.
It was Mr. Wynne, as the lead F.B.I. agent, who sent him to the federal detention center in Brooklyn pending a thorough investigation. The F.B.I. agent, now 50, describes himself as a lifelong New Yorker who does not take illegal immigration lightly. His specialty is international art fraud, not terrorism. But at a time of heightened anxiety about another terrorist attack, he maintained, it was reasonable to suspect the worst until he could check the man's history, discrepancies in his identity documents and questions about money wired to Nepal.
The questions were resolved within days. The Nepalese man did not show up in any terrorist databanks, and Mr. Wynne soon confirmed his explanation for a $37,000 wire transfer to Nepal. The money was from a recent legal settlement for injuries suffered when he was hit by a car in 1999. His records, roommates and former employees all vouched for the detainee's honesty.
On Nov. 1, 2001, the day Mr. Wynne wrote his report clearing Mr. Bajracharya, he told him through a translator that it would take about a week to get the matter resolved.
Over the weekend, pleading messages arrived from the detainee's sons in Katmandu: "Please help his father; he's not that kind of person - meaning a terrorist, I suppose," the F.B.I. agent said. On Nov. 5, he discussed the case with the head of counterterrorism in the United States attorney's office, and on Nov. 7 and 8, with a lawyer at the immigration agency.
"Because he was willing to leave - he wanted to leave - it didn't seem to me that it was a big hurdle to move him out of there," Mr. Wynne said.
But the weeks dragged on. Learning that a secret immigration hearing was scheduled for Nov. 19, Mr. Wynne thought a resolution was at hand. Instead, in a second conference call to the detainee after the hearing, he found him confused and distraught. It turned out that official F.B.I. clearance from Washington had not yet come through, and the matter had been adjourned to another secret hearing on Dec. 6.
At this point, the agent said, he realized he had been too optimistic. "You have to understand one thing: I'm in the Queens office; in Manhattan they were running this whole initiative, and there was a whole procedure set up for the clearances," he said. "I wasn't aware that there were so many levels that needed to sign off on this thing, frankly, when I filed my report."
The Monday after Thanksgiving, the F.B.I. agent called in Legal Aid. "This guy needed some help - it's as simple as that," Mr. Wynne said, insisting that anyone would have done the same thing. Ms. Cassin says she knows of no other F.B.I. investigator who has.
But by the time she spoke with the detainee, through a thick plexiglass barrier and under the eye of a prison video camera, she said, he was weeping all the time.
On Dec. 6, in a secret hearing room in the prison, she said, she watched him carried in by three burly officers of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, shackled so completely that he could not move. "He's tiny," she said. "His feet didn't even touch the floor."
She said government immigration lawyers agreed that since her client had been cleared by the F.B.I., he would be permitted a "voluntary departure." She was instructed to buy him an airplane ticket to Katmandu through a deportation officer. She did, but the first departure date was canceled without explanation.
Meanwhile, like other "high interest" detainees, Mr. Bajracharya was still in solitary 23 hours a day. "After a month or two, I started to scream that I was going to die if I didn't talk to anybody," he later recalled.
Ms. Cassin said she pleaded with the prison doctor to put him in the general prison population, but the doctor said he was crying so much he would cause a riot. Instead, on Dec. 11, a Muslim detainee was sent to share his tiny cell.
Expecting his imminent departure, Ms. Cassin and Mr. Wynne tried to fulfill the detainee's most insistent request: to go home looking like a respectable person, not a criminal. An assistant warden agreed to accept a box labeled "release clothing," containing the good suit he had worn when he came to America. Shortly before Christmas, Mr. Wynne made a special trip to deliver it.
But when Mr. Bajracharya was finally taken to the plane on Jan. 13, he was in shackles and an orange prison jumpsuit. "I wanted to wait for my clothes, at least the shoes and the jacket," he said, "but they took me by force."
Mr. Bajracharya's accounts of mistreatment fit the pattern reported by the inspector general. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Brooklyn, Robert Nardoza, said the office recently declined to prosecute abuses detailed in the reports "mainly because all of the witnesses had been deported and were unavailable to be interviewed."
Back in Nepal, which is riven by civil war, Mr. Bajracharya said he would be willing to testify against those who mistreated him if he were asked, though he fears what the government would do to him if he did so. Nonetheless, he remains grateful that he experienced America.
"What happened to me could have been an isolated incident," he said. "I still believe the American government is the best in the world."
Weeks after Mr. Bajracharya returned to Nepal, Mr. Wynne and Ms. Cassin managed to arrange delivery of his possessions by mail, including his camcorder. But when he tried to show his wife his travelogue of New York, all that remained on the tape was the pizzeria and the flower shop.
Mr. Wynne, sounding a bit sheepish, allowed that he had "probably erased" the rest, thinking it might fall in the wrong hands.
"Just an abundance of caution," he murmured.
― hstencil (hstencil), Wednesday, 30 June 2004 14:17 (twenty-one years ago)
Watchdog Group Complains About Nader Aid
1 hour, 21 minutes ago
By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A watchdog group says it will file a complaint with federal election officials, accusing two conservative organizations of illegally helping Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, possibly with support from President Bush's re-election campaign.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington planned to file its complaint Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission. It says the Oregon Family Council and Citizens for a Sound Economy violated election laws last week by telephoning people and urging them to help Nader get on Oregon's ballot in November.
Spokesmen for both groups denied wrongdoing.
Both groups acknowledge trying to influence Nader's petition drive Saturday in Oregon, in hopes that getting him on the ballot would take votes away from Democrat John Kerry and help Bush win the battleground state.
But Melanie Sloan, the watchdog group's executive director, said Tuesday that the conservative organizations are also corporations that are prohibited by election law from making campaign donations.
Sloan said she also would name the Nader and Bush campaigns in her complaint because of reports that some Bush-Cheney volunteers may have made similar calls from Bush campaign offices.
"If Bush-Cheney was soliciting those corporations to assist the Nader campaign, then that's a violation," she said.
Mike White, executive director of the Oregon Family Council, said there was no coordination with Bush's campaign.
"I had my volunteers call and encourage them to go to the (Nader) convention, but I don't think that's federal election activity," he said.
Chris Kinnan, spokesman for Citizens for a Sound Economy, said an outside lawyer assured him the phone calls were proper. "We're confident that we can answer any charge," he said.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said he had not seen the complaint but called it "frivolous."
"We will respond accordingly if and when we receive it," Stanzel said.
Sloan's group also filed an FEC complaint against Nader last week saying the consumer advocate violated federal campaign laws by accepting office space and telephone service from a public charity he created. Nader has called all the complaints frivolous.
___
Boston's police union will host its own party for the 5,000 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, giving them an alternative to crossing promised picket lines at the 29 official welcoming parties.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who is locked in a bitter contract dispute with the union, is the official host of the parties, to be held throughout the city on July 25, the eve of the four-day convention.
The Boston Police Patrolmen's Association has been without a contract for two years.
Union picket lines outside the FleetCenter, site of the July 26-29 convention, delayed renovations to the sports arena and deterred Kerry from addressing a national mayors' conference this week.
"We want to give them an alternative to breaking bread with an anti-labor mayor," Jim Barry, the union's legislative agent, said of their counterparty. Invitations were being sent to delegates this week.
Menino's office did not return a telephone call for comment Tuesday. He has said he cannot give the union money the city doesn't have. Menino has offered an 11.9 percent raise over four years; the union's demand is closer to 17 percent.
Both sides are awaiting word from a mediator who sat down with them twice this month.
___
Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie says Democrats are trying to act as though good economic developments aren't really happening.
"They long ago came to the cynical conclusion that what's worse for the American people is what's best for them politically," Gillespie said in remarks prepared for delivery Tuesday night at a GOP fund-raiser in Portland, Ore.
Gillespie said the positive economic developments include the creation of more than 1.4 million new jobs in the last nine months and the highest levels of home ownership in the nation's history.
"As we emerge from a recession, the terror attacks of 9/11 and the impact of bad corporate actors, the economic growth we are experiencing is strong and durable," he said.
___
Associated Press Writer Will Lester contributed to this report.
___
On the Net:
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: http://www.citizensforethics.org
― hstencil (hstencil), Wednesday, 30 June 2004 14:19 (twenty-one years ago)
one year passes...