The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  Since most of the evidence prosecutors presented dealt with Mehanna’s watching jihadi videos, discussing suicide bombings, translating texts freely available on the web, and researching the 9/11 attackers, civil liberties groups characterized his conviction as a setback for the First Amendment. “It’s official,” wrote Nancy Murray, education director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a guest editorial in the Boston Globe. “There is a Muslim exemption to the First Amendment.”16 Andrew F. March, an associate professor of political science at Yale University who specializes in Islamic law, described the Mehanna case in a New York Times opinion piece as “one of the most important free speech cases we have seen since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.”17 In that case, Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in rural Ohio, gave an inflammatory speech that was recorded during a KKK rally in 1964. Ohio prosecutors charged him under a 1919 state law that prohibited advocating, among other acts, “unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.” Brandenburg was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. His appeal went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, and in a landmark decision, the justices voted unanimously to overturn Brandenburg’s conviction, writing that the government cannot punish speech unless it is intended and likely to result in “imminent lawless action.” The type of speech Mehanna engaged in wasn’t very different from Brandenburg’s, but prosecutors in his trial were able to get around the Supreme Court precedent by claiming that Mehanna’s advocacy of Al Qaeda and violence represented material support to the terrorist organization, which was involved in imminent lawless action, lending support to Nancy Murray’s provocative claim that there is a Muslim exemption to the First Amendment.

  At his sentencing on April 12, 2012, Mehanna addressed U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole in an eloquent speech that emphasized his belief that he was not a terrorist but rather the victim of a vengeful prosecution for his refusal to be an FBI informant:

  I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. The “easy” way, as they explained, was that I would become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for twenty-three hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard—and the government spent millions of tax dollars—to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell.18

  Judge O’Toole, unmoved by Mehanna’s statement, sentenced the twenty-nine-year-old to seventeen years in prison. Mehanna’s lawyers have filed an appeal.

  For every Foad Farahi, Sheikh Tarek Saleh, Yassine Ouassif, Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, or Tarek Mehanna who resisted FBI pressure to become spies in their communities, there are hundreds of cases—most of which we will never hear about—in which the Bureau succeeded in exerting enough pressure to turn resistant Muslims into informants. Overall, these aggressive tactics have been very effective for the FBI, helping swell the informant ranks to more than 15,000, the largest number in the history of the Bureau. However, the FBI’s actions have come with a heavy price, as they have alienated Muslims throughout the United States, with many reporting they are hesitant to talk to federal law enforcement for fear they might be targeted for recruitment as informants. Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, distributes a video online that counsels Muslims not to talk to an FBI agent without a lawyer present and never to allow agents into private residences without a search warrant. “If you are contacted by law enforcement, don’t answer any questions beyond giving your name,” the video instructs.19 In mosques around the country, newcomers are met with a suspicion that didn’t exist before 9/11—a particularly sad state of affairs, as for centuries mosques had been considered welcoming places for strangers and travelers, a tradition that dates back to the nomadic tribes of the Middle East and the earliest days of Islam. “Every Muslim I know just assumes that the person praying next to them is an informant,” Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told me in 2010.

  This frayed relationship between Muslim communities and the FBI has resulted in a restricted flow of voluntary information from these communities to federal law enforcement, contrary to the Bureau’s rationale for using informants in the first place. Muslims today see FBI agents as potential enemies, not as neighbors with a mutual interest in keeping the local community safe from harm. This means that credible and actionable tips from within Muslim communities—from the people with the best vantage points to see early problems or threats—are going unreported, as Muslim Americans are afraid that providing information to the FBI will make them the subjects of investigations or candidates for recruitment as informants. “It has a chilling effect on our ability to work with the FBI,” said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates and the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.20 Instead of going directly to the FBI, Muslims today are more likely to pass on any information about threats in their communities through a third-party organization, such as CAIR. When Ahmadullah Sais Niazi suspected that undercover FBI informant Craig Monteilh might be a terrorist, for example, he didn’t call the Bureau directly but instead gave the information to CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush, who then reported it to the FBI.

  The irony in this is that, as a result of aggressively recruiting informants in Muslim communities when the goal of increasing the amount of information available to its agents, the FBI is receiving even fewer credible tips, since very little of the information flowing to federal law enforcement from Muslim communities today is of a non-coerced nature. This is in spite of the fact that data suggests that Muslim Americans would be valuable partners for law enforcement if they felt comfortable talking to agents, since the interests and values of Muslims in this country are nearly identical to those of the general U.S. population. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, which interviewed more than 1,000 Musli Americans nationwide, found that Muslims in the United States reject religious extremism by large margins; that 70 percent of Muslim Americans who were born outside of the country become U.S. citizens, a much higher citizenship rate than in other immigrant groups; and that more than half believe Muslims come to the United States in order to adopt American customs and ways of life.21 The Pew data also shows that Muslims would not tolerate violent extremists in their communities any more than, say, Christians or Jews would. Yet because of the FBI’s dragnet approach in Muslim communities, there is less willingness among Muslims to report a tip to the FBI than there is in other religious communities, meaning that the Bureau’s alienation of Muslim communities is stifling the very flow of information its agents are working to increase through their aggressive and widespread use of informants.

  As a result, instead of local businessmen or community and religious leaders voluntarily providing information to the FBI about suspicious people worshipping in their mosques or living in their neighborhoods, the FBI now relies on coerced informants to provide this information. The credibility of the information these sources offer is questionable, particularly when compared to the potential value of information coming from people with families, businesses, and vested interests in their communities. FBI informants have vested interests too, of course, but they do not include the health and safety of local Muslim communities. They are instead primarily interested in money and working off criminal charges, as was perhaps most evident in Albany, New York, where federal agents used fraud and immigration charges to recruit as a snitch an accused murderer from Pakistan who would become an FBI terrorism superinformant.

  5. THE SUPERINFORMANT

  Mohammed Hossain, an immigrant from Bangladesh, had made a nice life for himself in the United States.
A short, slender man with a long gray beard, Hossain had immigrated to Albany, New York, in 1985 with most of his family—his mother and father, his wife and her mother, and Kyum, his mentally disabled younger brother. Hossain supported all of them by owning and operating the Little Italy Pizzeria on Central Avenue in Albany. Finding good help in Albany was difficult, so Hossain often did every job in the restaurant himself, including delivery. He and his family lived in a modest apartment above the pizzeria.

  When he wasn’t rushing around town dropping off pizzas, Hossain was buying run-down properties at municipal auctions, fixing them up, and then renting them out. He always paid cash, and owing to his frugal nature, Hossain would buy doors and fixtures and anything else the houses needed at secondhand stores. By 2003, at the age of fifty, and after less than two decades in the United States, Hossain had accumulated real estate valued at nearly $1 million.

  But Hossain’s dream life in the United States quickly turned into a nightmare when a visitor arrived at his pizzeria one afternoon in November 2003. Hossain was walking back to Little Italy after having delivered a pizza when he passed his children on the sidewalk, playing with small toy helicopters.

  “Who gave you these toys?” Hossain asked his kids.1

  “Uncle,” they replied, explaining that the man who gave them the helicopters said he was Hossain’s brother from Bangladesh. Hossain knew that this was impossible, however, as his brother didn’t have a visa, so there was no way he could be in the United States. Hossain thought it odd that a stranger would not only give his children toy helicopters, but then claim to be a faraway uncle the children had never met.

  The following day, as he entered the pizzeria, Hossain saw an unfamiliar man standing in the corner. He was tall and slender, with a fair complexion, dark brown eyes, and neatly trimmed black hair. He was the person, Hossain would soon discover, who had given his children the toy helicopters.

  “Brother, you don’t know me, but I know you,” the man said, giving his name as Malik. He said he was from Pakistan, and that he owned a gas station and convenience store in town. He told Hossain that he’d heard that the Little Italy Pizzeria was for sale.

  “I had wanted to sell it,” Hossain answered, “but that was a long time ago.” At one point, a community member had offered to buy Little Italy, but the sale had fallen through. He wasn’t actively looking for a buyer, Hossain told his new acquaintance, but if someone offered him the right price for the business, he’d sell it.

  Just then, Hossain’s brother Kyum came in from the kitchen. Kyum was in his thirties, but he had the intellect of a five-year-old and spoke only limited Bengali. Malik called Kyum over and told Hossain he could arrange to get Kyum a driver’s license, explaining that he was a translator who helped immigrants obtain driver’s licenses.

  “My brother doesn’t even know how to hold a driving wheel,” Hossain said. “He could cause a lot of problems on the road. However, if you want to help him, then give him an ID card, because he has gotten lost on several occasions.” Indeed, Kyum’s wandering had been a problem for the family. Once, after seeing a plane fly over Little Italy, Kyum decided he wanted to see airplanes up close and, without telling Hossain, walked to Albany International Airport. When he arrived, he was tired, thirsty, and hungry and didn’t have any money, so he started grabbing food out of people’s hands. The police arrested Kyum, but without any identification on him—he had forgotten his green card—they were forced to lock him up as a John Doe. Several days later, the authorities figured out who he was and called Hossain. It took immigration officials several weeks to return Kyum, a legal resident but not a citizen, to his family. That was why Hossain thought it would be a good idea for Kyum to have an official state identification card. Hossain thought he could trust Malik, even though he’d just met him, because he had official paperwork showing that he worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Malik said he’d charge seventy-five dollars to walk Kyum through the process of obtaining an identification card. Hossain agreed to pay the fee and provided Malik with documents proving Kyum’s identity as well as a bank statement with Kyum’s name on it. They agreed that Malik would take Kyum to obtain the identification card and then bring him back to the pizzeria, where Hossain’s wife would pay the seventy-five dollars. However, when Malik dropped off Kyum that evening, he handed the new identification card to Hossain’s wife but refused to take the money from her for payment. Instead, he asked her to tell Hossain to come to his office in Latham, a suburb fifteen miles north of town, and pay him there.

  Upon learning this, Hossain was annoyed. He didn’t have the time to drive to Latham to deliver seventy-five dollars. But what Hossain didn’t know then was that Malik had a reason for wanting him to come to Latham: he was an FBI informant, and Hossain was his prey.

  Malik’s real name was Shahed Hussain, and he was many things, in addition to being an FBI informant: an immigrant, a husband, a father, an importer, a convenience store owner, a scam artist, and an accused murderer.

  His story begins in Pakistan, and telling it requires a blanket disclaimer: Hussain has exaggerated and lied so often, including under oath in court, that it is difficult to separate truth from invention concerning his biography. As Hussain tells it, he was born into an affluent Karachi family that owned a chain of eateries called Village Restaurants.2 As a child, he lived next door to the family of Benazir Bhutto, the future prime minister of Pakistan, and grew up enjoying a privileged life, eventually earning a master’s in business administration.3 In the early 1990s, Hussain earned $100,000 per year from his family’s chain of six restaurants—a fortune in Pakistan. But after 1992, when the military in Pakistan began to target political opposition parties, Hussain claimed he was victimized, and his family’s restaurants were bulldozed.4 He was also charged with murder, arrested and tortured, and to this day bears a scar on his wrist he claims came from a violent police interrogation.5 He was released, he said, only after his father bribed the police officers detaining him.6 How Hussain could simultaneously be friends with Bhutto, then the prime minister, and face such life-threatening political persecution in Pakistan is among the many inconsistencies in a life story the informant has told under oath as a witness for the government.

  Reportedly fleeing persecution, Hussain and his family immigrated to the United States in November 1994 with the help of a Russian human smuggler and a few fake British passports. They flew from Karachi to Moscow and then to Mexico City.7 From there, they drove to the U.S. border and crossed at El Paso, Texas.8 The human smuggler, however, stayed in the United States only long enough to take back what was his. “The guy that came with us, he took the passport,” Hussain explained in court testimony.9 Hussain and his family, without any kind of documentation, traveled by bus to Albany, where a friend found them an apartment on Central Avenue, not far from the Little Italy Pizzeria.10 Hussain then applied for, and was granted, political asylum in the United States.11

  As an immigrant, Hussain was ambitious and entrepreneurial. His first job in Albany was as a gas station attendant earning four dollars per hour.12 Within seven years, Hussain owned two convenience stores and a middle-class home in a comfortable suburb outside the New York State capital.13 One of his convenience stores was located next to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and Hussain came to know the employees who stopped in on breaks to buy refreshments and cigarettes. One of those state workers told Hussain about a woman whose business provided translation services to the DMV. Able to speak five languages, Hussain was perfect for that kind of work, which paid well and offered a flexible schedule.

  Hussain tppk the job and figured out a way to cheat the system and earn even more money on the side. It started small. DMV test takers would pay him between $300 and $500 to help them cheat on written tests.14 Since DMV employees didn’t speak the languages he was translating the tests into, Hussain could easily provide the answers or take the tests himself without raising suspicion.15 If a test taker needed additional a
ssistance, such as passing the road test, Hussain charged a premium and then offered kickbacks to DMV employees who could help with his scam.16

  In short order, Hussain pulled off his con nearly a hundred times. Then, in December 2001, the FBI sent in an informant who paid Hussain $500 to help him gin up a fake ID.17 The informant told Hussain he needed a driver’s license to become a taxi driver in New York City. “He actually changed the address with the DMV employee and put a false photograph on a license,” FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll said of Hussain’s handiwork.18 The FBI arrested Hussain. In addition to as many as one hundred charges in federal court, Hussain faced deportation if convicted. Cutting a deal was the only way he could remain free and in the country, so Hussain agreed to become an FBI informant. At first, he wore a wire and worked against thirteen of his associates in the DMV scam.19 Some of his targets were friends.20 He then moved on to narcotics cases in and around Albany. But just as Hussain had been an asset to the DMV for his ability to speak multiple languages, he was a great catch for FBI agents working on national security cases, and the fraudster would soon have his first counterterrorism assignment.

  Yassin Aref, a refugee from the Kurdish region of Iraq, arrived in Albany in 1999. The son of an imam, Aref had fled Iraq with his family after the first Gulf War and stayed in Syria before coming to the United States.21 He initially worked as a janitor at the Albany Medical Center, but after a local university professor donated a building to found a new mosque in town, the Masjid As-Salam, Aref became its imam, earning $18,000 per year.22