XI. Consequences of Arrest for Material Witness Detainees and their Families

I prayed to God not to hate, but I thought this was a setup and that I would spend my life in prison. I was depressed. I hated myself, my family, the officers, everyone. I did nothing, but I thought that if they asked me if I did something that would give me a death sentence, I was ready to [confess].

-Omer Bakarbashat[293]

For the material witnesses profiled in this report, the experience of arrest and incarceration has been devastating-in many cases a nightmare which continues to darken their lives. The misuse of the material witness law has not just been a violation of abstract rights. Being treated as potential suspects would be bad enough, but innocent men have found themselves without the reassuring safeguards and protections afforded to criminal suspects; they have been hauled off to jail by armed agents for no reason they could discern and with none provided, held for weeks and months in solitary confinement, and handcuffed and shackled, as though they were dangerous terrorist suspects. It is difficult to imagine the fear, confusion, despair, and devastation these men and their families have experienced in these circumstances. It is not supposed to be an experience one would ever endure in the United States.

Adding insult to injury, the arrests and detentions have tainted the reputations of these men and their families in their home communities. Because the arrests were often public and completed with numerous gun-wielding agents, often in small towns, rumors spread that the witnesses were terrorist suspects. In addition, although in court the Justice Department has insisted on complete secrecy for all records, there have been numerous government leaks to the press of the arrests, often in highly sensationalist terms, to suggest the government was triumphing in the war against terror. Newspaper stories, citing unnamed government sources, have celebrated the capture of local terrorist suspects.[294] The stories have created pervasive and lasting suspicions of the witnesses in their communities, suspicions that did not abate when the material witnesses were released.

Because almost all the material witnesses were limited to talking to their lawyers or family members while incarcerated, and lawyers faced gag orders, the witnesses were often unable to mount efforts to clear their names until after they were released. Moreover, closed court proceedings and sealed records have prevented the public, including the press, from being able to probe the leaked accusations against the witnesses and assess the strength or weakness of the government's evidence.

The consequences of arrest and detention for many material witnesses also included lost jobs and businesses. Many had to move away from their homes and communities to rebuild their lives.

The government's arbitrary detention of Muslim men without cause and without due process has led to their loss of faith in the American justice system, a loss of faith shared by many other Muslims. The arbitrary arrests of Muslim men when they stepped forward to visit an FBI office, like Eyad Alrababah, or on mere suspicion without probable cause, like Tajammul Bhatti,run the risk of creating reluctance among many Muslims to assist the U.S. government in its investigations. Indeed, many believe that the material witness arrests are evidence that the U.S. government believes the sacrifice of the rights of Muslims is acceptable in the "war on terror."

The post-scripts to the stories of some of the men held as material witnesses reveal the individual costs of the government's strategy of misusing the material witness law to obtain preventive detentions.

Tajammul Bhatti

After the government released material witness Dr. Tajammul Bhatti, a U.S. citizen and thirty-plus year resident of the United States, life changed for him in his small Virginia community. Upon release, he felt he was the object of constant suspicion and hostility. Bhatti told HRW/ACLU that "on a practical level, I lost most of my friends. They did not know what had really happened. When I would go for walks, I was afraid to be alone."[295]

Although the Justice Department never found that he had any connection to a terrorism investigation, Bhatti never received official clearance or an apology letter from the government. The government also never released any public information in his case. One area newspaper, The Bristol Herald Courier, obtained the sealed warrant and clarified that Bhatti was a material witness and not a criminal suspect. The court hauled Bhatti, his lawyer and the reporter into court for contempt proceedings and found the reporter, Chris Dumond, in contempt of court for not revealing how he obtained the warrant. The reason for Bhatti's arrest remains shrouded.[296]

Months later, Bhatti felt the suspicions of his neighbors had not subsided, and he could not feel at home in Abingdon. Shaken from the experience, Bhatti returned to Pakistan, where he stayed for a year. He recounted:

After I was released I was so upset. In October, my sister and brother-in-law visited and told me why don't you come to Pakistan. They wanted me to work to get it out of my system. So I left. I spent a year in Pakistan. It was useful. My need was to disconnect from the situation.[297]

Upon Bhatti's return to Abingdon, a resident told him, "We thought you wouldn't be back for awhile."[298]His experience changed his views about America. As Bhatti had told the FBI, he originally left Pakistan because it was a "closed country." He was married to a Catholic woman for twenty years and had two sons with her, both of whom are U.S. citizens living in the United States. But his wrongful arrest touched him and his family deeply:

I came to this country because you can have independent opinions and independent speech. I believed that for a long time. In practice it doesn't work that way. I grew up expecting and always believed you can read and speak freely without consequence, but this was different.[299]

Mohdar Abdullah

Mohdar Abdullah was released after spending two months in U.S. prisons as a material witness and almost three years on immigration and criminal charges.[300] After Abdullah completed his grand jury testimony in November 2001, the government charged him with document fraud, based on documents and information they obtained from him during his detention as a material witness.

In October 2002, Abdullah pleaded guilty to document fraud and received time served. He was immediately detained by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and in May 2003, an immigration judge ordered him deported.[301] However, for the next year, Abdullah languished in immigration custody because he was stateless; he was born to Yemeni parents in Italy but held citizenship in neither country. Finally, in May 2004, Yemen agreed to take him.[302]

When Abdullah was deported to Yemen, he was immediately jailed in a Yemeni prison:

When I arrived in Yemen, they took me away to a political jail. There was a criminal jail and a political jail, which holds suspected terrorists. I saw guys who were tortured, harassed very badly. I was held for a month and a half in the Yemeni political jail.

I could not ask questions. What's worse is that they put me at great risk of being physically harmed. You can't ask why.[303]

The U.S. government still has not relented in its suspicions of Abdullah, recently stating, "The FBI continues an active investigation of Mohdar Abdullah and any connection to the September 11 attacks."[304] But in the same statement the FBI acknowledged that after three years of detention, "The investigation to date has determined that there is no evidence to corroborate information that Mohdar Abdullah had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks."[305] The government never charged Abdullah with any crime related to terrorism.

Abdullah, now twenty-five, is trying to rebuild his life while remaining under the shadow of suspicion from the U.S. and Yemeni governments. He described to HRW/ACLU how he felt during his detention in the United States:

Overall, emotionally I was stressed. I cannot describe my emotions. I was quite angry and upset. I don't feel that I was put through a fair legal process. I feel I was deceived and tricked. I faced a lot of physical and verbal harassment until I was deported. Everyone knew about who they said I was it was all over the news. The guards saw me as someone who had come to the United States to harm them, who's evil, who will harm them.[306]

Nabil al-Marabh

Nabil al-Marabh faced a similar fate upon his deportation to Syria after being held as a material witness and then on immigration charges for over two years. The U.S. government jailed al-Marabh from September 18, 2001 until January 2004. Although al-Marabh's material witness proceedings were conducted in complete secrecy with no public documents, U.S. and Syrian papers ran stories alleging that he was a terrorist, a key figure in the Detroit Sleeper Cell case.

Al-Marabh feared being tortured in Syria given that it was widely known there that the United States had held him in connection with an alleged sleeper cell. So he applied for relief from deportation under a federal statute implementing the Convention against Torture.[307]Upon his September 2001 arrest, and during the trial, newspapers gave extensive coverage to his situation, labeling him a high-profile suspect, with leads referring to him as "No. 27 on the FBI's list of terror suspects after Sept. 11."[308]

An immigration judge in Detroit denied al-Marabh's asylum claim under the Convention Against Torture.[309] Upon returning to Syria, al-Marabh was questioned and detained by Syrian authorities. He has subsequently reported that he has been under surveillance.[310] The U.S. government has persisted in alleging he is a terrorist, leaking secret documents to the press as late as June 2004.[311] Since these documents were released, U.S. advocates who had been in touch with al-Marabh have lost contact with him.[312]

Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammad Azmath

Ayub Ali Khan and Mohammad Azmath were held in solitary confinement for more than a year under the material witness law and on immigration and minor criminal charges, amidst news reports that they were terrorist suspects.[313] Even though they are back in their hometown of Hyderbabad, India, they continue to face suspicion. Although the two men never faced terrorism charges, when they were arrested as material witnesses, U.S. government sources immediately leaked to the U.S. and Indian press their suspicions that Khan and Azmath were "planning to hijack a fifth plane, perhaps at the nation's second-biggest airport in Dallas."[314] International newspapers reported: "Investigators believe the pair were part of a hijack team which lost its nerve."[315] Soon after the arrest, Indian and U.S. papers reported government sources had indicated that the men were involved with the Anthrax attacks[316] and that they were "seen" with two suspected hijackers; neither claim was ever substantiated.[317]

Upon the arrest of Khan and Azmath, their families in India immediately became the subject of U.S. scrutiny and investigation by the Indian government.[318] According to the two men, U.S. and Indian authorities questioned their families in India while the U.S. authorities told the men, "We searched your house. We will make sure that your family will get prison."[319] Over the next three months, Indian authorities repeatedly searched their residences, seized their property, including marriage albums and family records, and posted officers outside of their families' houses.[320] The families became a target of state and community suspicion, with Khan's picture appearing on the front page of an Indian newspaper with the caption, "Is this Osama's man in India?"[321]

In addition, while Azmath was detained, Indian officials focused their suspicion on Azmath's wife, Tasleem Murad, a Pakistani national who had moved to India following her marriage to Azmath.[322] Citing national security concerns, the Andhra government initiated deportation proceedings against Murad, who was pregnant with Azmath's child.[323] Khan's family faced harassment in predominantly-Hindu Hyderabad.[324]

Because of the two men's incarceration, their families in India lost a primary source of family income. In India, Khan and his family "suffered a lot during the government's investigation of me. My mother went into shock."[325] Nonetheless, Khan's mother, through her daughter, began a campaign to release her son, or at to least find out why he was being held, writing government officials and the United Nations.

When Khan and Azmath returned to India, Indian authorities detained and questioned both of them. The Hyderabad authorities criminally charged Khan and Azmath with passport fraud and, as of June 2005, werestill routinely interviewing them and inspecting their homes.[326] The two men have faced anti-Muslim discrimination in India and believe the fall-out from the material witness arrests includes their inability to move forward on their plans to open a small business.

"Evansville Eight"

The "Evansville Eight" material witnesses suffered serious financial consequences from their detentions as material witnesses. Although the FBI apologized to the eight wrongfully detained men and the Muslim community in Evansville, the apology did not mitigate the community's suspicions and the impact on the restaurant owned by Tarek Albasti, where several of the other material witnesses worked. As Albasti describes:

[A]fter we were released we were in hell, you tell yourself, okay, well they released us so everyone should understand we are innocent, but that was not the case.Because I mean there are some people who support you and stuff like this but everyone is curious: did you snitch on somebody else, or did you make a deal with the government, or why were you released, or did you really do something or not. And just you know you get all these kinds of questions-if you didn't do anything why were you caught? It's just like all this doubt in people's mind.

At the time we lost about 30 to 40 percent of our business and then it kept getting worse and worse. And even when we got the apology and the newspaper wrote about it we thought we were going to be slammed because it's an apology on the first page of the newspaper. And [business] is slow. But people remember we were caught and this kind of thing and [business got even] slower. Then the Evansville Courier made a poll on the internet where they asked people did [they] talk enough about the apology enough in the newspaper to give these people their dignity back. It was so funny to get the response because most of the response from people was, yes, they had enough, okay, they are innocent, [but] let's go back to our life, if they don't like it let's tell them to go back to their home, we are trying to make the country safer. I mean it was all this outrageous stuff. But of course I think it's like human nature. Bad news just keeps going and going and going but the good news is the stuff we don't care about-well they are innocent, well everyone is innocent so let's go on. So that's why the apology didn't work for us.[327]

Albasti had to cut his wait staff, including his friend Tarek Omar. Albasti moved to Philadelphia.

Omar recalled:

I was put in jail for no reason. People are so nervous here. We lost so much business because they think we are all terrorists.

After, it was difficult. You shop in Walmart and people say "oh, you are the terrorist in the mall." . After the arrest, they thought terrorists are in this mosque and they wanted revenge. We had to have guards there.[328]