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Fed Dragnet Snares Few Terrorists

By Brad Heath
The Detroit News
Posted on Monday December 8, 2003

U.S. nabs 6,400, but only 23 get sentences of 5 years or more

The terrorism dragnet cast after September 11 has ensnared 6,400 suspects nationwide, but has led to only a handful of convictions for plotting terrorist acts, according to a review of federal investigations released Sunday.

The review found nearly 2,700 of the cases have already been concluded, yielding 879 convictions, mostly for immigration violations and other minor offenses.

Only an unspecified few have been charged with crimes directly related to terrorism. Just 23 cases have led to prison sentences of five years or more, about the same number as in the two years before the attacks.

The numbers suggest the reach of the federal war on terrorism has been far broader than the government previously has suggested, scooping up thousands of people with no clear criminal links to terrorism, concluded researchers at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which published the report.

“If a case is terrorism, they should deal with it as terrorism,” said Imad Hamad, Midwest director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“But they’re calling everything terrorism. And they are doing it because of ethnicity or your national origin.”

The report’s findings amplify a Detroit News special report, “Always Suspect: Local Arabs & The War on Terror” that last month found 155 terrorism investigations in Metro Detroit since September 11, leading to only three convictions for crimes directly linked to terrorism.

Critics say the report is further evidence that federal investigators have dramatically expanded the range of crimes they are willing to count as terrorism.

The change risks squandering anti-terrorism resources on penny-ante cases and makes it virtually impossible to assess whether the government is winning its war against major terrorist organizations.

“They’re casting a very large net, getting very little in return and in the process, causing serious harm to our criminal justice system,” said Kary Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan, which last week asked a federal judge in Detroit to declare some of the government’s sweeping new anti-terrorism powers unconstitutional.

The terrorism cases filed since September 11 include those against a Yemeni immigrant in Metro Detroit arrested after he applied for a Social Security number, a Georgia man who blew up his girlfriend’s empty car after a fight and west Michigan truck driver Richard Hiemstra, who admitted making three harassing phone calls to a former landlord in Virginia.

“It’s a bunch of bull,” Hiemstra said. “I’m not a terrorist.”

Justice Department guidelines stamp the terrorism label on cases in which investigators believe someone has committed a terrorist act or in which charging someone with a crime might “prevent or disrupt potential or actual terrorist threats,” according to the report.

Critics say that designation can lead to some procedural and sentencing differences, as well as changing the tenor of trials. But in other cases, even defense attorneys admit they aren’t told that a case has been flagged as terrorism.

Federal officials said the designations are appropriate because people suspected of being involved in terrorism frequently are charged with lesser crimes.

They contend their investigations have snared several suspects with ties to terrorist organizations and have led to important improvements in intelligence-gathering.

“The FBI has successfully adapted to its mandate to prevent acts of terrorism by taking a more intelligence-based—and less case-focused—approach to counterterrorism investigations,” FBI spokeswoman Cassandra M. Chandler said in a prepared statement.

She said the report’s analysis is “taken out of context and does not reflect the realities of the modern war on terrorism.”

2,800 referrals pending

Investigators put that stamp on 6,400 cases sent to federal prosecutors in the two years since September 11. So far, the referrals have led to 23 prison sentences of five years or more, compared to 24 such sentences in the two years before the attacks. Prosecutors expect that number to grow as they process 2,800 referrals that still are pending.

The report is based mainly on case tracking records maintained by federal prosecutors. Researchers supplemented that by using statistical tools to estimate the total number of terrorism referrals.

The pattern of dramatically increased enforcement is clear. Since September 11, prosecutors have acted on 3,555 terrorism referrals, six times as many as in the two years before the attacks.

Included among the cases processed so far are 96 filed in Michigan, ranging from harassing telephone calls to illegal transfers of money overseas. All but three were in the state’s Eastern District that includes Metro Detroit.

Among them was Kaid Ahmed-Nasser Makwalah, a Yemeni man living illegally in Metro Detroit who was arrested by the region’s Joint Terrorism Task Force because he had applied for a Social Security number, according to federal court records.

Makwalah was sentenced in January to time served—three months—and was deported to Yemen.

“I don’t think there was a terrorism case there,” said Andrew Wise, the federal public defender who represented Makwalah. “He certainly wasn’t sentenced like it was a terrorism case.”

Feds defend inquiries

Federal investigators have pointed mostly to a scattering of high-profile terrorism cases as evidence the widespread terrorism investigations are working.

They scored their first victory this year in Detroit when a federal jury convicted two men of providing material support for terrorism following a raid on a southwest Detroit apartment shortly after September 11.

The government said the men were in possession of drawings that laid out plans for attacks in Jordan and Turkey.

Another man was convicted of a lesser false documents charge in that case and a fourth man was acquitted by a jury.

In another case, six men from suburban Buffalo, N.Y., admitted they traveled to Afghanistan early in 2001 to train in an al-Qaida camp.

Two of the men were sentenced to federal prison last week—one for eight years the other for 10. The other men have not been sentenced.

Over the past two years, prosecutors have brought charges in 2,000 cases and have refused to prosecute 1,500 others, according to the report.

Many times they turned down cases because no law was broken or because of insufficient evidence, records show.

Terrorism label troubling

Even putting a terrorism label on those cases at all is troubling because, while it often carries no formal legal weight, it can have an impact on how a case plays out in court, said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington.

And it can influence how defendants are sentenced after they are convicted, he said.

“What this Department of Justice has done has been detrimental to the overall goal of making us more secure,” Zogby said.

He said the government’s widespread enforcement has cultivated mistrust between Arabs and investigators and has diverted investigators into anti-terrorism programs that have produced few compelling cases.

Prosecutors labeled Jeff Masters a terrorist after he was charged with using a pipe bomb packed with gunpowder to blow up his girlfriend’s car in an Atlanta suburb in 2000.

The car was empty and no one was hurt, but Masters was sentenced in May to 6 1/2 years in prison.

His girlfriend, Myranda Masters, forgave him. She believed him when he said he didn’t plant the bomb. They got married while he was free on bond before the trial.

“Whoever did this, I don’t consider them a terrorist,” she said. “I’m not a victim of terrorism. That didn’t enter my mind at all.”

Seven words hurt trucker

Hiemstra, the western Michigan trucker, was labeled a terrorist over seven words he left on a former landlord’s answering machine, according to court records.

“It’s time,” he said in one message.

“It’s not over,” he said in another. And: “It’s coming.”

By then he’d been sparring with his landlord for eight months over the fate of a mobile home he placed on a rented field in eastern Virginia.

The 54-year-old long-haul trucker from Delton tried to get everyone from local lawyers to police and the state attorney general to intervene, court records show.

Finally, he said, he resorted to making the phone calls across state lines because he knew the FBI would have to investigate and he figured it was the only way to get the federal government to intercede in the dispute.

Investigate they did. But it didn’t work out like Hiemstra had planned.

Not long after he made the calls, an FBI agent called and warned Hiemstra not to do it again. Federal charges followed. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of making harassing phone calls, paid a $250 fine and spent a year on probation.

“Were they harassing? I don’t think so,” Hiemstra said. “Were they annoying? Maybe.”

Hiemstra’s lawyer, Michael Hill, wasn’t told the government had stamped the case as domestic terrorism. “It’s crazy. They’ve gone off the deep end,” he said.

“It had nothing to do with terrorism. It was ridiculous. They should never have brought it at all.”

Even prosecutors concede the label doesn’t fit.

“I certainly wouldn’t have called it that,” said Brian Lennon, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Grand Rapids who handled the case after it was transferred to Michigan from Virginia.

Hiemstra is unrepentant.

Hauling a load of macaroni across Pennsylvania last week, he said if he had the chance to do it again, he’d skip the phone calls.

“But I can’t be remorseful because I was defending freedom.”