See Something, Say Nothing

by Philip Haney

  The action of targeting and detaining Plaintiffs with a purpose of questioning them about their religious beliefs and practices violates the First Amendment rights of Plaintiffs as guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

  The detailed and invasive questioning of Plaintiffs about their religious practices and the Defendants’ explicit policy that mandates the above-described treatment constitute an adverse action against Plaintiffs.

  The injunction also sought a jury trial and relief that

  bars Defendants from engaging in further unconstitutional practices by questioning Plaintiffs about their religious beliefs and religious practices, and, requires Defendants to remedy the constitutional and statutory violations identified above, including, but not limited to, eliminating any existing policy whereby Plaintiffs, other Muslim Americans, and others similarly situated are subject to religious questioning at ports of entry.23

  Part of the process included a litigation hold, which made demands for files, notes, memoranda, letters, correspondence, calendars, date books, logs, and draft documents. It also included demands for any relevant documents in government computer systems, laptops, PDAs, smartphones, home and personal computers, archived files, boxes at federal records centers, and digital voice mail.

  My own involvement in this part of the process required me to provide two major analysis reports, copies of two TECS records, an incident report, and a spreadsheet of all the information. I was also interviewed on the telephone and asked question such as:

  Were you in uniform while you interviewed Mr. Ali?

  Was there anyone else in the room with you and Mr. Ali?

  Known today as the Cherri case, after the chief plaintiff, it remains unresolved as of March 2016.

  BRIEFINGS

  On February 28, 2013, I was in Washington, DC, to brief several members of Congress, including some on the House Homeland Security Committee, including chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-TX, and Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-SC.

  After the general elections of November 2012, the roster in Congress changed dramatically, and many of the committees now had new chairmen and new members. The HHSC was no exception, so I had to start all over in some respects and reintroduce myself to a new group of members as well as to their chief counsels and staff members.

  One of things I shared with McCaul and Duncan was that Mohammed Akram al-Adlouni, the mysterious author of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Explanatory Memorandum detailing its aims for North America, was not only still alive and well, but was openly raising money for Hamas and the Palestinian cause in Europe and the Far East.

  New York Times reporter David K. Shipler described Adlouni as “an author we know little about, [who] writes in the tone of an underling,” and dismissed the memorandum itself as an “old document of questionable authority and relevance.”24 These misleading characterizations are still parroted by leaders of US Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

  In fact, Adlouni was a key leader in the Muslim Brotherhood network, holding prestigious positions in both the executive office and on the North American Shura Council.25 On May 5, 2008, Adlouni shared the stage with CAIR executive director Nihad Awad at a conference in Denmark commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the nakba, or “catastrophe,” as many Palestinians call the founding of the state of Israel.

  Since he was part of the Hamas Network case, Adlouni’s name came up on my radar on October 4, 2012, when his organization, known as the Al-Quds International Foundation, was put on the US Department of the Treasury list of charities controlled by Hamas, as designated pursuant to Executive Order 13224.

  These topics in February 2013 meetings were typical of the others I have had with members of Congress over the years.

  Along with updates on Adlouni, I discussed

  • the effect of the “Words Matter” memo on the law-enforcement community (2008);

  • the consequences of the DHS inaugural meeting with Muslim leaders (2008);

  • the TECS modification project (2009–2010);

  • the Muslim Brotherhood–linked individuals chosen for the Combating Violent Extremism Steering Committee (2010);

  • background information on Kifah Mustapha (2010), an HLF coconspirator who attended an FBI Citizen’s Academy course;

  • the deeper meaning of the ISNA-led Ground Zero Press Conference (2010);

  • the Muslim Brotherhood front groups’ public declaration of America as an Islamophobic country;

  • the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (2011);

  • the CAIR lawsuit in Detroit (2011);

  • deletion of the sixty-seven TECS records linked to the Institute for Islamic Education case (2012); and

  • the growing disconnect between the FBI and local Fusion Centers (2012).

  “WE NEED TO PROTECT YOU”

  Two weeks later, on March 13–14, 2013, I had another series of meetings with McCaul, along with his chief counsel, Nick Palarino, and congressional liaison Raymond Orzel.

  During that same two-day period, I also met with Duncan and members of his staff, as well as with Reps. Michele Bachmann, Louis Gohmert, and Trent Franks and their staff members.

  In the private meeting with McCaul, Orzel and I were huddled around a small round table in the congressman’s personal office, looking intently at my computer screen as I walked them through a PowerPoint briefing. Since I was sitting next to McCaul, I could tell that he was extremely concerned about the things I was showing him. As I went through the briefing, we were looking each other eye to eye.

  At one point, McCaul said, “We need to protect you, and we need to protect this information!”

  He wasn’t the first person to say that to me, and he wouldn’t be the last.

  When we finished our discussion, McCaul looked across the table and said to Orzel, “You want to bring him up?”

  Orzel answered, “Yes, sir, let’s bring him up.”

  With that, we all stood up and shook hands.

  “Okay, then, let’s bring him up,” said McCaul.

  The plan was to bring me to Washington as an active-duty CBP attaché and work directly with the House Homeland Security Committee to address the national security concerns I had just reviewed. I left the meeting that day thinking what we might be able to accomplish if we had the opportunity to work together.

  But I never got the chance to find out. Within days, I heard that coming up to the HHSC was “never going to happen,” and that the new plan was to send me over to the inspector general’s office and see if I could get some help from them instead.

  A month later, the Boston Marathon bombs exploded, and suddenly, all of those meetings with members of Congress were cast in a new light.

  I was literally holding the evidence of an intelligence failure in my hands, and as time slowed down, it dawned on me: “This is exactly what I was trying to warn them about.”

  10

  INVISIBLE SHRAPNEL

  Three days after two pressure-cooker bombs were detonated at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264 more, Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano was indignant.

  At an April 18, 2013, hearing of the House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Committee, a perplexed Rep. Jeff Duncan was asking why the Obama administration was about to deport a Saudi national who had been detained by authorities as a “person of interest” in the Boston case.1 Citing the Department of Homeland Security’s slogan, Duncan noted, “We’re asking average Americans to help ID and assist law enforcement in identifying who the bomber was – see something, say something. And now we have someone who is being deported due to national security concerns, and I’m assuming that he’s got some sort of link to terror or he wouldn’t be deported.”

  The congressman pointed out that the man, twenty-one-year-old Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, was at the scene of the attack and possibly could identify the bomber “just like we’re asking every other American that was on the scene to provide your pictures, h
elp us identify who may have been acting funny, everybody we’re asking that was in Boston, and we’ve got this guy who was there, we know he was there, he was arrested – or wasn’t arrested – was detained in the hospital, covered with blood, he was at the scene, and yet we’re going to deport him – ”

  Napolitano interrupted.

  “If I might – I am unaware of anyone who is being deported for national security concerns at all related to Boston,” the Homeland Security chief said. “I don’t know where that rumor came from … ”

  Duncan interjected: “I’m not saying it’s related to Boston, but he is being deported.”

  The DHS chief continued: “No, I – I – like I said, I – again, I don’t even think he was technically a person of interest or a suspect. That was a wash. And I’m unaware of any proceeding there. I will clarify that for you. But I think this is an example of why it is so important to let law enforcement do its job.”

  The South Carolina Republican insisted, “I want them to do their job, and that’s why I said, wouldn’t you agree with me that it’s negligent for us, as American administration, to deport someone who was reportedly at the scene of the bombing, and we’re going to deport him not to be able to question him anymore? Is that not negligence?”

  Napolitano’s anger was visibly rising.

  “I’m not going to answer that question,” she said. “It’s so full of misstatements and misapprehensions that it’s just not worthy of an answer.”

  Later that day, Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified as suspects through photographs and a surveillance video. In a massive manhunt the next day, Dzhokhar was arrested and Tamerlan was killed. On April 8, 2015, Dzhokhar was found guilty on thirty charges related to homegrown terrorism and later sentenced to death.

  During the two-minute-and-thirty-nine-second exchange with Duncan, Napolitano set off what I call the “third bomb” in the Boston Marathon attack, filled with invisible shrapnel that nevertheless wounded many people, including me.

  To this day, a veil of mystery shrouds the young Saudi who was injured near the finish line and hospitalized. Even though no evidence has surfaced that ties him to the Tsarnaev brothers or to the attack, there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the case.

  In a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing five days later, on April 23, 2013, Napolitano again declared Alharbi was never a person of interest, but she admitted that he was put on a watchlist while questioned by authorities, then removed from the list “when it was quickly determined he had nothing to do with the bombing.”2

  Ten days after the bombing, TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck held up a piece of paper in front of the camera on the Fox News Channel’s The O’Reilly Factor, claiming it was proof positive that authorities had designated Alharbi as a terrorist in connection to the Boston bombing and intended to deport him to his home country of Saudi Arabia.3

  While establishment media was relatively silent, Fox News’s Bret Baier addressed the controversy in his video blog post, The Daily Bret, holding a copy of the same piece of paper that Beck had shown to the camera:

  Janet Napolitano, the Security of Homeland Security just said today that [Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi] really was never a person of interest. But out of an abundance of caution and out of diligence according to these U.S. officials, federal authorities at that time, because they wanted to question him, added him to the no fly list. Now, this is key: When anyone inside the U.S. with a U.S. visa is added to the no fly list, the process, the process is started. And I stress process here, to revoke visa. And that’s automatically begun according to U.S. officials. The 212 is a national security indication and anyone looking at this would say this is a bad guy. This means they had a lot of stuff on this guy. The U.S. officials we’re talking to say this document was simply triggered by them putting him on the no fly list when they went to talk to him.4

  In March 2014, Alharbi filed a lawsuit against Beck and his media company, claiming assault, libel, and slander, along with defamation and violation of his privacy rights. It should not be overlooked that Alharbi is a foreign national, but he is still being allowed to sue an American citizen through the US justice system.

  And now, we come to the heart of the matter.

  Whether all of the claims Beck made on his television and radio show about Alharbi will ever be verified remains to be seen, but I know one thing for certain: my boss at the time, Janet Napolitano, was hiding something from the American people.

  Put another way, she either was lying or she was grossly misinformed by her staff of advisers.

  How do I know this?

  The evidence Beck presented on TV was a copy of the “event file” I personally provided to the House Homeland Security Committee, with the obvious presumption that its staffers would protect its contents, as they do any other sensitive information pertaining to national security. How a copy of the file ended up in the hands of Beck and Baier is unknown to me, but it’s a significant episode that resurfaces later in my story.

  In any case, the file, prepared by my former supervisors at the Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, undermines Napolitano’s testimony.

  While she was insisting to Congress and the American public that Alharbi was never a “subject of interest” or a “person of interest” and was never set for deportation on “3-B” terrorism charges, the event file on the Saudi national tells a different story.

  The file we all saw on TV stated that Alharbi was “linked to the Boston bombing” and, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was to be deported as an “armed and dangerous terrorist” under section 212(a)(3)(B) of the US code on “security and related grounds” and “terrorist activities.” I knew how to look up Alharbi’s file because that kind of work had been part of my job when I was at the NTC in 2011–12. I created events for the Tablighi Jamaat Initiative, and I also vetted new events that came in daily from other ports.

  More specifically, the reason I looked up his file is that, in law-enforcement parlance, I had a “nexus” to the case. In the hours and days immediately after the bombings, when no one knew who was responsible, every officer in the country with any nexus to the case was doing all he or she could to help find out who did it.

  Together, we were trying to put the clues together, not only to help solve the Boston bombing, but also to possibly prevent another attack.

  In such situations, officers and investigators don’t have the benefit of hindsight. We use every tool and every skill we have, and hope we can connect the dots before something else happens.

  I had nexus to the case because the bombing was in Boston, and four years before it happened, I had created TECS records on the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as part of a larger report that included 118 other linked records.

  In turn, this report was tied directly to the Hamas Network report.

  The 118 records in the ISB case were among the 818 records I had “modified” back in 2009–10. So now I was the owner of records that were linked to the Boston bombing but had been diminished in quality, by direct order of DHS top management.

  But we still haven’t come to the most important point in this story.

  During the four-year period, from the time when I first created the ISB report in 2009 to the time of the bombing in 2013, not a single person had queried the records related to the ISB.

  Worse still, when federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were all looking for clues about the shadowy Tsarnaev brothers, no one queried TECS for information on the ISB, except for one NTC colleague whom I had called right after the bombing.

  With events still in motion, I printed out one of the records and showed it to my colleagues. “Look, this is the mosque attended by the Boston bombing suspects, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Look at the date – May 2009 – almost four years ago!”

  Everybody said the same thing: “Wow, Haney!”

  As it turned out, I was the only one in our whole agen
cy who had entered records linked to the ISB, and there they stood, still archived in the system, shining like a beacon in the middle of the ocean.

  A news story published ten days after the bombing may help explain why the records were ignored.

  In an interview with USA Today, Yusufi Vali, the ISB imam, insisted his mosque did not spread radical ideology and could not be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers, referring to Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

  Then, he made a remarkably revealing statement.

  “If there were really any worry about us being extreme,” he said, according to USA Today, “U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque.”

  According to Vali, by 2013, the FBI, DHS, and DOJ had already been partnering with the Muslim American Society and ISB in outreach programs for at least four years.

  The American law enforcement community wasn’t investigating the ISB or its network of affiliated individuals and organizations.

  Far from it.

  It was engaging in “outreach,” despite the fact that the ISB has welldocumented links to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and numerous individuals tied to violence and terrorism, which has been known, at the very least, since 9/11.

  For years, federal officers such as I, along with credible counterterrorism specialists in the civilian world, have repeatedly tried to make this information available to political officials and members of the law enforcement community, but with very little success.

  This major intelligence failure – culminating with the fact that no one queried TECS records on the ISB after the bombing – is without question the most crucial part of the Boston Marathon story.

  What’s more, the Obama administration later chose the Islamic Society of Boston to be one of three “model communities” in its vaunted Countering Violent Extremism program rollout.

  The other two cities in the program were Los Angeles and Minneapolis–St. Paul. The original plan was to test-drive the CVE program in these three ‘“model communities,” then to have leaders from each area come to the White House to participate in the heavily promoted 2015 CVE Summit.