The Oxford Anthrax Scare
One memorable weekend not long after September 11, 2001, someone sent letters containing little bags of the deadly powdered poison anthrax through the U.S. mail to several locations, including the U.S. Senate. Several people died. The U.S. Senate was closed for months while they decontaminated it. At the Justice Department, all mail was shut down during the same period. We had to use FedEx or UPS and sent all our letters and packages to off-site private addresses and had special screening procedures for all our own incoming mail. We were grateful the problem had not reached Oxford, although we were deeply concerned for our friends and colleagues in D.C.
Then during the weekend of the Ole Miss–Alabama football game in October 2001, the problem came home to us. Two Ole Miss students drank too much as part of their regular “beer marathon” run and decided to scatter little baggies of white powder along their route. One of the students looked to locals like an Arab, and some citizens who saw the bags being dropped decided it was anthrax and called the police. Although we were confident it was a prank, it was a crazy time, and no one could be sure. Oxford police chief Steve Bramlett, a funny, articulate, and highly proficient officer who was responsible for the safety of the more than seventy thousand visitors to Oxford, a town of ten thousand, told his officers someone needed to drive the bags of white substance to the state crime lab in Jackson, the only place with the facilities to test it properly. Several officers looked at their feet, but one lady officer stepped forward and took the bags and headed for Jackson.
Then the real problems began. Should we inform the public? A quick meeting resulted in a unanimous decision that no one had been exposed to the powder that we could tell. Making a public announcement of a possible anthrax attack could have caused a panic leading to a mass exodus from Oxford which could have caused injuries and possibly deaths. We decided to intensify the search for the students, whom several people had seen drop the bags. If we could question them, we’d probably learn the whole thing was a hoax. If not, we had a big problem on our hands.
Chief Bramlett notified FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management office in Jackson, who deferred to MEMA, the state office. Despite the terrorist threats nationally and our heightened state of alert, the MEMA staff for the entire state consisted of just four people, none closer than Jackson. We had met them earlier right after 9/11 and seen the big chart of all their supposed offices around the state with their supposed employees but knew they had no money to hire staff and that most offices, if they even existed other than on paper, were unstaffed. Phantom offices, in effect.
The MEMA officers on duty took their responsibilities seriously and called Chief Bramlett and told him to evacuate Oxford completely. Steve called together our team of federal, state, and local officials and asked for our advice. Which was worse, risk the anthrax being real and let someone die from a bag not yet found, or try to get everybody out of the football stadium and out of town without anyone panicking or being seriously hurt? This time we were the ones looking at our feet. Finally Steve took over and said there was no way he was evacuating the city over what clearly appeared to be a hoax. We agreed to sit tight.
Within a couple of hours, local officers had tracked down the culprits, who had sobered up and were a little contrite about possibly causing a panic but tended to take the whole thing much too lightly. We decided to make an example of them and I agreed we’d prosecute them federally. Having just been through multiple training sessions on federal terrorism laws, I felt sure we would have some tough laws to use. But as I began drafting a criminal complaint, it seemed no one had thought to make it a federal crime to fake a terror attack. I called the DOJ emergency operations center and they said the same thing.
They agreed to authorize us to stretch the terrorism statutes and charge the students with offenses that carried the death penalty. That clearly was overkill, so I called the local DA and my friends in the state Attorney General’s Office—at home—to see if they had any state law about making a false claim to use chemical weapons. Amazingly, they could find no state law the students had violated either. Finally, we just went with what the officers had told the boys orally and agreed to let them out on bond in the custody of their parents and sort it out before a federal judge on Monday.
Not long thereafter, the state crime lab called and said the powder was harmless baking soda. The huge football crowd had their good time, there was no panic, and we worked out a deal for the boys to go on federal pretrial diversion with some community service. It was all we could do. Besides, having sobered up and thought about it, they finally seemed sorry. We still wanted to make an example of them but couldn’t. All we could do was pressure DOJ to pressure Congress to enact a law posthaste outlawing terrorist hoaxes. Congress fell all over itself trying to see who could sponsor the toughest punishments. Then a backlash set in: How could you send someone to prison for life for a prank? The legislation dragged on. Fortunately the State of Mississippi and its legislature proved wiser. They quickly passed a statute and the governor signed it, making it a felony to fake a terrorist attack by phony drugs or otherwise but leaving state judges considerable leeway on punishment depending on the circumstances. The mighty U.S. Congress finally did likewise many months later.
The siege of Oxford was over. In the meantime other offices had it far worse than we did. The FBI office at Little Rock received scores of phony terrorism reports to the point that my old friend Michael Johnson, the criminal chief there, said the FBI could hardly work any other cases for chasing terrorist shadows and that he had three of his prosecutors chasing their tails with the agents trying to find something to charge people with. Then, as quickly as it began, it was over, and people soon forgot about the threat. Now hardly anyone remembers it ever happened.
CSI Oxford: A Godfather from Yemen Sets Up Shop in Our District3
We used to wonder how the twenty-first century would begin. For most Americans, the biggest worry was that our computers would crash because they might not accept 2000 dates instead of 1900s. We’d all heard of terrorism, but it seemed far away unless it was done by some American like Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. September 11, 2001, changed all our assumptions, especially in the Department of Justice. Although shocked, Washington acted quickly. On September 20, DOJ ordered every U.S. Attorney’s Office to form its own antiterrorism task force made up of federal and state prosecutors and investigators. These task forces were meant to supplement the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) which existed only in major cities like New York and L.A. Our district had no JTTF. No one knew where or when the next attack might occur. Large public gatherings like malls or football games seemed likely targets. Having recently returned from multiple training missions in Muslim countries including Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, and Oman, which is beside Yemen and guards the entrance to the Persian Gulf and its oil, I drew the short straw and was named lead task force attorney for our district. In less than a week, our Oxford task force was up and running.
My selection was not based solely on my recent training missions for prosecutors in Muslim countries. I also grew up with Arab culture. My grandmother’s best friend was a Syrian lady whose family ran a Middle Eastern deli a block from her house. I was eating kibbe before I started school, and my lunch boxes often had more hummus and baklavas than hot dogs and twinkies. My older daughter had just lived for a whole year with a Saudi Arabian professor’s family in Oxford, whose relatives had once employed the Bin Laden family before they became rich. I’d also taken a semester of Arabic and spent a summer while in college hitchhiking (foolishly) through Algeria and Morocco. Despite what I thought was a fair knowledge of Arab and Muslim culture, I’d never heard of Osama Bin Laden. Ever since the presidency of the first George Bush, each U.S. Attorney’s Office also had one attorney designated as “National Security Coordinator.” I had also held that position since it was created. Our main job was to coordinate cooperation against criminal organizations that operated acros
s countries, especially drug smugglers. We had once done what they call an “extraordinary rendition,” i.e., an “informal” extradition by tricking a corrupt former Mexican police chief wanted for several murders into flying back to Mexico voluntarily. He had been working as headwaiter at a Mexican restaurant in Oxford.
At first, we had little idea what to do to help in the struggle against terrorism. Reading the federal laws on the subject, such as “Offering Material Support to Terrorists,” sounded as remote as climbing a mountain in Tibet. Then, in the first week of November, came a letter from Attorney General John Ashcroft, which noted that the federal agencies primarily responsible for pursuing terrorists—the FBI in the United States and the CIA outside the United States—were overwhelmed with leads from the four Trade Center plane-bombs and other terrorist plots. DOJ had a list of over five thousand foreign nationals residing in the United States, mainly students, who had not made the contacts or appointments required to continue in the U.S. on their visas. The letter stated that these persons were not suspected of terrorism but needed to be found and interviewed. Each U.S. Attorney’s Office was asked to help locate several such foreign nationals in their districts because the usual federal investigators had more serious suspects to pursue. A second purpose was the hope was that the students would furnish us useful information on possible terror plots or persons who warranted investigation.
A follow-up memo informed us that five such persons either resided in our district or had listed someone in our district as their contact person. I quickly found four of them, who had simply failed to notify INS of changes of address. All were cooperative. Two even offered to work for us to gain information. The fifth proved different. A native of Yemen, he had enrolled at a university in New Mexico but gave a backup address in far away Byhalia, Mississippi. When I went to talk to the chief of police in Byhalia, an old friend, AUSA Jimmy Warren from Marshall County went with me. The address turned out to be a trailer on the DeSoto County line. The residents, who’d lived there all their lives, had never heard of such a person but suggested we try three or four local convenience stores, all of which were owned and run by persons of Arab or Muslim origin. We did. To our surprise, every store had a back room full of young, nervous-looking Arab males. The managers, all of whom spoke good English and were friendly and cooperative, said they’d never heard of the guy we were looking for but volunteered to ask about him throughout the community. We recontacted them several times, but they never heard of him. I reported this to DOJ, who never asked us to do anything more.
I mention the Interview Program just in case anyone may have read the book Fall of The House of Zeus, which alleges at p. 153 that it was not DOJ but “a lone and dubious confidential informant” in Byhalia who prompted our office to unfairly target Arab-American convenience store owners there, issuing grand jury subpoenas and calling for tax investigations of individuals never suspected of any illegal activity. None of that ever happened. Ironically, at p. 353 the book cites as the only basis for those serious allegations certain “confidential sources.” This serious factual error doubles the irony because, as a career prosecutor, I have been wary all my life of relying too much on confidential sources. In this case the sources were dead wrong. The only contact we ever had with Byhalia was to look for the one missing student and we never had any confidential source there.
The confusion obviously arose from an open and public investigation by the FBI and other agencies in which we later prosecuted a large number of Yemeni convenience store owners, mainly for drug, food stamp, and contraband cigarette offenses. That case began when the FBI convened in New Orleans a nationwide meeting of agents and prosecutors from at least eight states, from New York to California, prominently including Louisiana and Mississippi. The most I can say is that a foreign intelligence service had told U.S. agents that “sleeper” cells were being established across the United States, primarily in Yemeni-operated convenience stores, to be activated as needed should further terrorist attacks be launched. We were ordered by DOJ to assist the FBI, the lead anti-terror agency, in locating and legally disrupting any such operations. We received training on prior Yemeni terror operations in the United States from North Carolina investigators who successfully infiltrated them. (See “Blood Money” in the bibliography.)
After several months of secret attempts to gain information, we could find nothing indicating any ties to terrorism or even sympathy with anti-American groups in our district by the Yemenis. We did, however, find plenty of other illegal activity. We found many instances of food stamp fraud. Most of the stores checked out by ATF also dealt in contraband cigarettes. The stores’ real illegal profits came from huge sales of cases of ephedrine, the necessary precursor for making the deadliest and most addictive drug in our district, methamphetamine, or crystal meth.
There being no terrorist connections, the FBI withdrew from the case, which was pursued undercover by the MBN and DEA, assisted by ATF and the Department of Agriculture. In those days of classified antiterror investigations, every undercover operation had a code name. We tried to keep our names low-key and anonymous. When I began the Abdel Ashqar case, we labeled the boxes of evidence “AA” but had to change that when secretaries began asking if someone in our office had joined “Alcoholics Anonymous.” To make the convenience store operation more bland, we named it simply “CSI” (for Convenience Store Initiative) after the popular TV series CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) as in CSI New York and CSI Miami. The name seemed commonplace and drew attention away from the undercover operation, which turned out to be quite successful. The main targets of the investigation were two brothers from Yemen: one in Louisiana nicknamed “Grandfather” and one in Columbus in our district who called himself the “Godfather.” Not lacking in heavy-handed humor, and operating mainly in minority neighborhoods, he had a big sign stating, “The Godfather, the real nigger.” In the end we obtained a thirty-nine-count federal indictment against eleven store owners and clerks for selling contraband cigarettes and thousands of ephedrine doses knowing they would be used to make meth, and for buying federal food stamps for cash for fifty cents on the dollar.
Twenty-two other defendants were arrested by local police, sheriffs and MBN agents, ten of them in Columbus and others in Holly Springs, West Point, and Starkville. MBN director Marshall Fisher announced the state arrests in partnership with the local district attorney’s office, which prosecuted all those cases under state law. The state part of the operation was code-named Operation 607 after the anti-meth law sponsored in 2005 by Governor Haley Barbour, which was House Bill #607. In an excellent, in-depth article summarizing the state convictions, Columbus Packet owner/editor Roger Larson noted that although most of the defendants had lived in the U.S. for years, most needed interpreters to understand the court proceedings. (Columbus Packet, January 25, 2007)
Leesha Faulkner of the Daily Journal wrote several thorough and fair-minded articles stressing the successful integration of many law-abiding, legal-resident Yemenis in our district (Daily Journal, January 29, 2007). Those defendants, who spoke good English, had all acquired American nicknames such as “Ed, Nick, and Mike.” Defense attorneys filed numerous motions challenging the indictments, but by July 2007 all our defendants had pled guilty. Most received relatively modest sentences under federal guidelines tailored to fit the offenses. Mastermind Hamzah Ahmed, however, the self-styled “Godfather” of the multistate criminal enterprise, was sentenced to 138 months or eleven and one-half years. The case was ably prosecuted by AUSA Curtis Ivy Jr. of our Drug Task Force. Given the recent tumultuous events in Yemen, many of the defendants might well have been better off doing short sentences in the U.S. and remaining here afterward rather than being engulfed in a bloody civil war in their native Yemen. And there was certainly no anti-Yemen discrimination by our office as alleged in Zeus.
A Reluctant Terrorist: Adnan “Captain Joe” Awad4
One day in 1993, acting U.S. Attorney Al Moreton came into my office and said, �
��John, I’ve got a case you’re going to love. It’s not a bank robbery, but may be even better.” Since there is nothing better than a good bank robbery, I wondered why the usually calm and collected Al More-ton seemed so excited. “Is it a kidnapping?” I asked, going for my next favorite. He told me to be patient. “First the bad news: It’s a civil case.” Was it some emergency thing that the civil guys don’t want to handle, like a TRO (temporary restraining order), one of those high noon shootouts with none of that boring pre-trial discovery that usually ruins civil cases?
“It’s better than that. The name of the case will tell you something.” He put the complaint on my desk. It was entitled Sealed Plaintiffs v. Sealed Defendants. I’d never heard of such a thing. “Before you even read the thing, you have to sign a statement agreeing to abide by a secrecy order. It is a federal tort claim against the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, and the U.S. Attorney in Hawaii by a former Arab terrorist who is now in the federal Witness Protection Program, whose director is also a defendant. Since you loved that other civil case where you defended the head of the Witness Protection Program, and you are our antiterror coordinator, it has you written all over it.” Al was right. The case where I had defended Gerald “Gerry” Shur, head and founder of the Witness Protection Unit, a hero of mine, against serial murderer Marion Albert “Mad Dog” Pruett, had been one of my all-time favorites. Also, Washington had recently sent me to Tunisia twice as part of our Anti-Terrorism efforts.
Al had me hooked. I signed the form and opened the file. I saw Gerry Shur’s name and was excited. I also saw that one of the accused FBI agents was Ed Needham, with whom I’d recently worked on the Ashqar case. Defending Ed and Jerry would be a pleasure. Then I noticed a potential downside. Because of its sensitive nature, the lead counsel would not be the local U.S. Attorney but DOJ in Washington. My experiences with the lumbering national bureaucracy had not always been positive. Individual attorneys were often excellent, but there were always three or four tiers of career-minded superiors who had to review and initial everything you did. You couldn’t blow your nose without several bureaucrats initialing your handkerchief.
From Midnight to Guntown Page 46