For 35 years, James Wedick had been a star at the FBI. When his former
colleagues prosecuted a suspected terrorist, he came to the side of
the defense and was branded a traitor.
By Mark Arax
Los Angeles Times
May 28, 2006
http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-wedick22may28,0,4951185.story?coll==la-home-magazine
Before the wins and losses are tallied up and the war on terror goes
down in the books as either wisdom or folly, it might be recalled what
took place this spring on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in
Sacramento. There, in a perfectly dignified room, in front of
prosecutors, defense attorneys and judge, a tall, gaunt man named
James Wedick Jr. was fighting for a chance to testify, to tell jurors
about the 35 years he spent in the FBI and how it came to be that he
was standing before them not on the side of the U.S. government but
next to two Pakistani Muslims, son and father, whose books and prayers
and immigrant dreams were now being picked over in the first terrorism
trial in California.
Wedick watched the prosecutor from Washington stand up and call him a
hired gun for the defense and say that any criticisms he had about the
investigation would only confuse the jury and waste the court's time.
He wanted to answer back that he had been the most decorated FBI agent
to ever work out of the state capital, and for years prosecutors,
judges and juries had nothing but time to ponder the way he busted
dirty state senators and mobsters and cracked open the biggest health
scam in California history. Yet he could only sit and listen as the
judge ruled that by the weight of legal precedence, he would have to
be muzzled. In eight weeks of trial, 15 witnesses for the prosecution
and seven witnesses for the defense took the stand, yet the one whose
testimony might have changed everything never got to tell his story.
He never got to trace his metamorphosis to a Sunday morning last June,
when he woke up thinking he had seen all the absurdities that a life
of crime fighting had to offer only to find the FBI videotapethe
confession that would become the heart of the terrorism caseon his
doorstep.
It had arrived with no small hype: Down the road on Highway 99, the
feds had busted up an Al Qaeda sleeper cell in Lodi, a little farm
town at the northern edge of the San Joaquin Valley that had gone from
the "watermelon capital of the world" in the 1880s to the "Tokay grape
capital of the world" in the 1920s to the "Zinfandel capital of the
world" today. The community boasted 60 wineries, 36 tasting rooms, a
Zinfest in May and its own appellation: Lodi-Woodbridge. Somehow
burrowed into the 90,000 acres of grape fields that pleated the rich,
flat loam of the Mokelumne River basin was a radical young Muslim
carrying a prayer of jihad in his wallet.
He had just returned home to Lodi from a terrorist camp in the hills
of his ancestral Pakistan. He had been trained there with Kalashnikov
rifles and curved swords and target dummies wearing the faces of Bush
and Rumsfeld. He was awaiting instructions, via a letter in his
mailbox, to bomb hospitals and supermarkets in California's heartland.
In the meantime, he was packing Bing cherries on the outskirts of
town. The two imams at the small marigold mosque across the street
from the Lodi Boys and Girls Club directed the sleeper cell at the
behest of Osama bin Laden. They were building a multimillion-dollar
school to spread the seeds of Islamic holy war to Pakistani immigrant
children up and down the farm belt. If the whole story sounded too
bizarre to be true, the 22-year-old jihadist and his 47-year-old
fatherthe neighborhood ice cream manhad confessed to everything on
camera.
At home in the Gold River suburbs of Sacramento, Jim Wedick agreed to
study the FBI video as a favor to one of the defense attorneys. He was
fully expecting to call the attorney back and advise him that son and
father, guilty as charged, needed to strike a quick plea deal. It was
hard to trump a confession, and in this instance the feds were holding
not one confession but two. Even so, Wedick always had been the kind
of investigator who needed to measure every bit of evidence for
himself. So he stuck the video in his player and sat back on the couch
to watch. The images were grainy, but he recognized the setting right
off. It was the old polygraph room at the FBI's regional headquarters
on the north side of the capital. He recognized several of the agents
too. In the year since his retirement, they had become experts on
counterterrorism. Now, two at a time, they began a five-hour
interrogation that would crack a suicide bomber in the making.
Wedick could see that Hamid Hayat was cold and scared. To keep from
fidgeting, he locked his hands between his legs like a kid trying not
to pee. He was rail-thin with deep sunken eyes and eyebrows so
wonderfully arched that he had the gaze of perpetual befuddlement.
Even with his long black beard, he looked more teenager than man. The
agents gave him a blanket and pulled their chairs closer. We're here
to listen, not judge. Whatever you tell us about the training camp
won't come as a surprise. We have spy satellites over Pakistan. If
you're thinking about lying, you might think again. Wedick knew the
game they were playing, the back and forth between trust and fear. It
might take hours, but if trust and fear were maneuvered the right way,
the whole room suddenly would turn. One moment the suspect was way up
hereseeing the world his way. And the next moment he was way down
hereseeing it your way. The freefall, Wedick called it. The release
that came from finally shedding the weight of lies. It happened with
even the most cunning crook.
Hayat shifted in his chair, and his voice grew submissive. One hour,
two hours, yawns, cigarette break, yawns, candy break, exhaustion. The
freefall never came. Instead, each new revelation, each dramatic turn
in his story, was coming from the mouths of the agents first. Rather
than ask Hayat to describe what happened, they were describing what
happened for him and then taking his "uh-huhs" and "um-hmms" as solemn
declarations. He was so open to suggestion that the camp itself went
from being a village of mud huts to a building the size of Arco Arena.
His fellow trainees numbered 35, 40, 50, 200. The camp was run by a
political group, a religious school, his uncle, his grandfather, yes,
it was Al Qaeda. The camp's location was all over the mapfrom
Afghanistan to Kashmir to a village in Pakistan called Balakot. As for
weapons training, the camp owned one pistol, two rifles and a knife to
cut vegetables.
Wedick was troubled by the inability of the agents to pin down the
contours of one believable story. They didn't seem to know the terrain
of Pakistan or the month of Ramadan. They didn't seem to fully
appreciate that they were dealing with an immigrant kid from a lowly
Pashtun tribe whose sixth-grade education and poor command of the
English language"Martyred? What does that mean, sir?"demanded a more
skeptical approach. And then there was the matter of the father's
confession. Umer Hayat described visiting his son's camp and finding
1,000 men wearing black Ninja Turtle masks and performing "pole
vaulting" exercises in huge basement rooms100 miles from Balakot. The
agents going back and forth between the two interrogations that night
never attempted to reconcile the vast differences in the confessions.
The video ended and Wedick picked up the phone and called defense
attorney Johnny L. Griffin. Whatever hesitation he had about taking on
the FBI office that he, more than anyone, had put on the mapthe
office where his wife still worked as an agentwas now gone. "Johnny,
it's the sorriest interrogation, the sorriest confession, I've ever seen."
They speculated that the government had its best evidence still tucked
away. "There's got to be a silver bullet, Johnny. Because without it,
I just can't see the bureau or the U.S. attorney going forward with
this case."
What he didn't fully appreciate was that this was a different Justice
Department, charged with a different task, than the one he knew.
jim wedick could tell you all about the lore. Even as a kid growing up
in the Bronx in the 1950s, he imagined not DiMaggio roaming center
field but Melvin Purvis, the G-man, running down John Dillinger and
Baby Face Nelson. Out there was a new Public Enemy No. 1, and he wrote
the FBI saying he'd like to join. A month later, an agent from New
York was on the phone, wondering if he might come in for an interview.
Wedick paused and stammered. He must have forgotten to mention that he
was 14 years old.
Nine years later, an accounting degree from Fordham University in his
back pocket, he was standing inside the FBI Academy when he received
his first posting: Indiana. "How in the hell did that happen?" his
fellow graduates wanted to know. All through training, as the other
rookies set their sights on San Diego or Miami Beach, Wedick kept
telling them about his dream job in Gary, Ind. That's where Purvis
worked. That's the territory where Dillinger carved the gun out of
soap to escape from prison. That's where the Lady in Red who fingered
Dillinger ran her brothels.
Within a week of landing in Gary, Wedick was pursuing a ring of
thieves who were hijacking big rigs loaded with steel. He leaned so
hard on one crook that the local mob assumed the guy was talking to
the new agent with blue eyes. To get the guy off the hook, Wedick
faked a confrontation in an underworld bar to prove that he and the
guy were enemies. The crook was so pleased to have his loyalty to the
mob restored that he agreed to turn informant. The next day, he led
Wedick to a giant silo outside of town where the hijacked trucks and
all their cargo were being cut up like cattle for market.
His hustle caught the eye of the star of the office, and they traveled
the country working undercover. Whatever the caseOperation Fountain
Pen that put dozens of white-collar criminals and mobsters in prison
or Shrimpscam that netted 17 convictions in California for political
corruption and ended the careers of four state senators and an
Assembly leaderWedick showed the same crazed devotion to detail. He
skipped meals and sleep and came home only long enough to watch his
first wife leave him. "I was so lost in work I didn't even see it
happening. She was packing her bags right in front of me, and it
didn't sink in. She ran off with somebody else, and it nearly
destroyed me. I kept the house exactly the way she left it for almost
two years. Same pictures, same calendars, same notes affixed to the
refrigerator."
All through the 1990s, as he headed the public-corruption squad out of
the Sacramento regional office, Wedick and his agents continued to
break big cases and make national headlines. They caught developers in
Fresno buying zoning votes from city councilmen for a pittance: a set
of tires, a brake job, a new blue suit. They caught medical providers
defrauding the state out of $228 million in healthcare payments. So
remarkable was his success that then-FBI Director Louis Freeh summoned
him to Washington to receive the Director's Award as the criminal
investigator of the year.
His run, like so much else, came to an abrupt end on Sept. 11, 2001.
Wedick was vacationing with his wife, Nancy, riding bicycles through
the Scottish highlands, when the hijacked planes struck the World
Trade Center. His first thought was his deceased father, James, a New
York City fire battalion chief who had waged his own personal battle
to keep the twin towers from being built. If hit by plane, he warned,
they'd be a deathtrap for firefighters. "What would Dad now think?" he
kept muttering.
He came home to a different imperative. The war on white-collar crime,
his bread and butter, was suddenly an indulgence. In FBI offices
across the country, the shift to counterterrorism was swift and
unmistakable. In Sacramento alone, dozens of agents from public
corruption and other squads were now working foreign intelligence,
domestic terrorism and international terrorism. "With everyone looking
for Bin Laden," Wedick told friends outside the bureau, "there's no
better time for the crooks to steal from the people." Twice he had
voted for George W. Bush, but he couldn't help but wonder if the whole
war on terror was overblown, based on the false premise of a constant
threat. He saw the nation toss its civil liberties to the wind and
thought about the Japanese, more than half a century ago, interned in
their desert camps.
And then on a spring day in 2004, federal agents, prosecutors and
judges gathered at a local restaurant to pay him tribute. They read a
letter from Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft praising his outstanding career
and calling his cases "models for other agents to emulate." They shook
his hand and wished him well in his new life as a private eye. Whether
they realized it or not, they were retiring not only their most
celebrated agent, but the old FBI too.
in a cramped room off the 10th floor of the federal courthouse in
downtown Sacramento, a trio of federal officials gathered on the
morning of June 8, 2005, to tell the public about the terrorist nest
found across the river and down the field in Lodi. "I wish to
emphasize that this investigation is evolving literally by the
moment," said McGregor W. Scott, the top prosecutor in the Eastern
District of California. "Every step we have takenand will takeis
examined, reexamined and vetted by the highest levels of the Justice
Department."
The Joint Terrorism Task Forcemore than a dozen federal, state and
local agencieswas working around the clock to pursue a sleeper cell
intended to "kill Americans." Agents had searched the residences of
the Hayats and the two local Muslim clerics, Mohammed Adil Khan and
Shabbir Ahmed. The imams were tucked away in the arms of U.S.
Immigration and Customs.
Some reporters took note that the government was already backing away
from details leaked the day before. In a revised affidavit, the U.S.
Attorney had removed any mention of hospitals and supermarkets as
potential targets. Also deleted was the assertion that Hamid Hayat's
grandfather in Pakistan, a prominent Muslim cleric, was friendly with
a man who ran a terrorist camp in Afghanistan. As it turned out, his
friend was actually a different man who shared the same last
nameRehmanwith the terrorist. It was the Pakistani equivalent of
Jones or Johnson.
"Bureaucratic errors," the Justice Department called them, though it
hardly mattered to the TV news crews stampeding into Lodi and chasing
down everything Muslim: S. Khan's auto repair shop. The Pak India
market. The Jehovah Witnesses hall-turned-mosque. And the tiny lair on
the side of a wood shed where Hamid Hayat had fed his growing hatred
of America.
How was it that the FBI had chosen to focus on Lodi? How did it even
come to be that a few thousand Pakistani immigrants found themselves
living amid the "Grape American Dream," a town built by German wheat
farmers from the Dakotas whose descendants still resided in neat
brick-and-stucco houses lined with oak trees and azaleas and who every
Tuesday still grabbed a bowl of creamy borscht soup for $2.89 at
Richmaid's?
It was a familiar story, really. Like the Chinese and Japanese and
Mexicans before them, the peasant farmers of the great Indus valley
had migrated to California in the early 1900s to work the land. They
had grown cotton, wheat and sugar cane, and though the soil back home
was fertile and the water plentiful, they were caught at the bottom of
a strict caste system. They traveled thousands of miles only to land
smack dab on the same old line of latitudethe Punjab sun was the
valley sunand find a new caste system where each group was pitted
against the other to keep wages in the fields low.
Umer Hayat was 18 years old, a village boy with few prospects, when he
left Pakistan in 1976. He had nothing to show a future wife. No family
farm. No learning beyond the eighth grade. Like his father and
grandfather, he could have married a girl from the village, but he had
a different idea. He would come to Lodi, become a naturalized U.S.
citizen and use his paper status to attract a city girl back in
Pakistan. It worked in a way he never imagined: She was the daughter
of Qari Saeed-ur-Rehman, the revered Muslim scholar who operated a
religious school, or madrassa, in Rawalpindi. The citizenship paper
clutched by the young suitorthe chance for his daughter and his
future grandchildren to prosper in the U.S.was all the assurance the
old man needed.
That Umer Hayat ended up squandering this opportunity may have been
his one true crime. It wasn't so much what he had chosen to do with
his own life. After all, he had found a job outside the fields and the
canneries, driving a beige ice cream van with Homer Simpson painted on
the back, learning Spanish and giving himself the name "Mike" to
better serve the neighborhood kids. And it wasn't so much the strong
ties he kept to Pakistan. He was like so many other immigrants who
made their way to America as adults, never quite accepting the country
as their own, still looking backward and intending one day to return
home. Rather, the problem was his insistence that his four children,
each one born in the U.S., do the same.
Keeping America outside the door of the little yellow wooden house
proved a monumental task. Because the public schools didn't segregate
boys from girls and there were no classrooms at the mosque to send his
daughters, he insisted they drop out at 13. He fretted most about his
oldest boy, Hamid, and wanted badly for him to become a Muslim scholar
like his father-in-law. Toward that goal, he yanked him out of school
in the sixth grade and sent him to Pakistan to live with his
grandparents. The boy was there for more than a decade and memorized
the entire Koran. But once he returned home, he was too lazy to secure
a job as a cleric-in-training at the Lodi mosque. So he lived with his
father and sick mother and 11 other relatives, sleeping all day and
waking up to eat six McDonald's fish burgers and watch big-time
wrestling and the Pakistani national cricket team on satellite TV.
Late at night, all by himself, he'd head down Highway 99 to nowhere.
"I'm a speeder," he boasted. "Seventy miles per hour, man."
Caught between two lands, he kept a scrapbook in his room with
articles he clipped from a Pakistani newspaper that harangued the
United States and "Bush the Worm." He had no friends to speak of, and
no Pakistani girls in the U.S. would give him a second look. His nose
would bleed at the most inopportune times, and he was convinced that a
black-magic curse by an enemy had jinxed his love life. Maybe things
would change if he could quit smoking and drink less tea and save more
money from his job packing cherries.
Then in the summer of 2002, a real friend walked into his world, a man
10 years his senior, a clean-cut guy with neatly pressed pants and
shirts always tucked in and wavy black hair pushed back. He had a
fancy job at a computer company and drove a shiny SUV and spoke
perfect English and fluent Pashto and Urdu, two of the main languages
of Pakistan. His name was Naseem Khan, and he had come to the U.S.
with his mother in the late 1980s, living for a time in Lodi.
Umer Hayat wasn't sure about the stranger eating curry beef at the
house, but Hamid told him not to worry. Khan had befriended the two
imams, spending the night at their homes and working on the website
for the planned Farooqia Islamic Center. He was, above all, a
passionate Muslim who believed "We are from God and to God we return."
For Hamid, it was much more than that, of course. Khan was the first
friend who actually wanted to see his scrapbook and hear his stories
about the mujahedin fighters who attended his grandfather's religious
school before heading off to Afghanistan to battle the Soviets.
"Have you watched the news?" Khan asked him one afternoon in March 2003.
"No. About what? The Al Qaeda thing? . . . Al Qaeda is a tough group,
man. They're even smarter than the FBI, friend."
Khan laughed. "Yeah, better than the FBI, huh?"
They spoke in their native tongue and in English, but Khan wasn't much
of a talker. That he was considerably more comfortable asking
questions might have been Hamid's first clue. Yet the kid was so
desperate for someone to take him seriously that he didn't seem to
notice how Khan always steered their conversation to the same place.
"I'm going to fight jihad," Khan declared. "You don't believe, huh?"
"No man, these days there's no use in doing that. Listen, these days
we can't go into Afghanistan. . . . The American CIA is there."
As for the training camps, Hamid said he had seen one on a video, and
it demanded far too much out of its students. Forty days of training.
Guard vigil all night. Push-ups in the cold morning. Bazooka practice.
"Man, if I had a gun, friend, I wouldn't be able to shoot it," he said.
Over the next six months, Khan would record more than 40 hours of
conversations with Hamid and his father, mostly in the privacy of
their home. As a job, confidential witness for the FBI's war on terror
paid wellmore than $225,000and Khan threw himself into the part with
such ardor that he looked more FBI than the agents themselves. Still,
it wasn't easy doing this to your own people, especially to a kid who
kept referring to him as his "older brother" and to a father who now
called Khan his "other son." Khan replied in kind: "If you've accorded
me the position of a son, then you're no less than my honored father."
The FBI had come calling on Khan in the weeks after 9/11. He was
living in Oregon, working double duty at McDonald's and managing a
convenience store, bringing home $7 an hour to an American girl who
was falling in love with him. He did his best to impress the two
agents. Yes, he was familiar with the Pakistani community in Lodi. In
fact, a few years earlier, he had seen Al Qaeda's No. 2 man, Dr. Ayman
Zawahiri, coming in and out of the mosque on Poplar Street. And not
only him. Among the men on their hands and knees praying were the main
suspects in two bombings of U.S. embassies and a military complex in
Saudi Arabia.
The FBI would later concede that Khan's sightings were almost
certainly false. Yet the bureau opened the Lodi case, gave Khan the
code name Wildcat and sent him back to the farm belt in a new Dodge
Durango. The two Lodi imams would eventually grow uncomfortable with
his jihad talk and warn students to stay clear of him. Inside the
yellow house, though, he would have no trouble getting Hamid Hayat to
pour out his heart.
The kid had a militant side, no doubt, that found comfort in Khan.
During one visit, Hamid wondered if his friend had read the news about
the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, in Pakistan.
"They killed him. So I'm pleased about that. They cut him into pieces
and sent him back. That was a good job they did. Now they can't send
one Jewish person to Pakistan."
If Hamid felt that strongly, Khan wondered, why was he hesitating to
return to Pakistan for more religious training and possibly a camp.
"You told me, 'I'm going for jihad.' " Khan reminded him. "What happened?"
"I'm ready, I swear. My father tells me, 'Man, what a better task than
this.' But when does my mother permit it? Where is a mother's heart?
She said, 'I kept you separated for 10 years. I won't let you be
separated from me again.' "
In the summer of 2003, Hamid did go to Pakistan, to meet the girl his
parents had arranged for him to marry and bring back some herbal
medicine to cure his mother's diseased liver. But the bride-to-be
rejected him, and his mother was forced to fly out and go door-to-door
in the village until she found another father willing to marry his
daughter to Hamid. Two months into his stay, he picked up the phone
and heard the angry voice of his best friend calling from the U.S.
"You're just sitting around doing nothing," Khan said.
"I do one thing. I pray. That's it."
"You fing sleep for half a day. You wake up. You light a fing
cigarette. You eat. You sleep again. That's all you do. A loafer guy."
"What else am I going to do?"
"You sound like a fing broken bitch. Come on. Be a man. Do something."
"Whatever I can do, I'll do that man."
"When I come to Pakistan and I see you, I'm going to fing force you,
get you from your throat and fing throw you in the madrassa."
"Yes, God willing. After Ramadan. God willing. I'll study and become a
religious scholar."
*
In the months leading up to the trial, even as President Bush
congratulated the FBI for its work in the Lodi case and intelligence
czar John Negroponte cited a network of "Islamic extremists" in the
farm town, it became more clear that no case existed beyond the
Hayats. The two imams, the so-called big fish who allegedly
masterminded the terrorist recruitment drive, were found to have
uttered anti-American remarks years earlier during a clamorous time in
Pakistan, but nothing more. In the end, citing minor immigration
violations, the government deported them.
In mid-February, Jim Wedick opened the heavy door to the courtroom of
U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr., the former Marine from
South-Central Los Angeles who had presided over the Unabomber case.
Wedick scooted past defense attorneys Johnny Griffin and Wazhma
Mojaddidi and took a seat next to the two defendants. For eight
months, working for free, he had been preparing for this moment,
deconstructing the confessions of father and son and poring over every
piece of paper the FBI had handed over. For the old agent, it all
boiled down to a few basic questions.
Why, if this case was so important, did the FBI entrust the
investigation to a rookie agent? Why didn't the bureau use its
considerable manpower in Pakistan to follow Hamid and determine if he
had attended a terrorist camp? Why, if he was such a threat to
national security, did the FBI take him off a "No Fly" list and let
him reenter the U.S.? Why, if Hamid was truly confessing, did the FBI
find it necessary to spoon-feed him all the answers?
The trio of young prosecutorsS. Robert Tice-Raskin, Laura L. Ferris
and David Deitchbarely looked over at Wedick. He tried not to make
eye contact with the FBI supervisors huddled around the government's
table, but whenever he did, they pretended not to see him. He knew
what they were thinking. His wife had come home in tears from the
office, saying fellow agents were calling him a "traitor" and that he
wouldn't be welcomed at a retirement luncheon for an old colleague.
Now he fixed his eyes on the jurors who had come from one of the most
conservative regions in the stateit could have been a jury in
Oklahoma, for that matterto decide Hamid's fate.
Ferris stood up to address the jurors. She told them that Hamid kept a
"jihadist" scrapbook and had immersed himself in extremist Muslim
views before heading off to Pakistan. There he attended an Al Qaeda
training camp and returned home to do harm to Americans. "He talked
about training camps. He talked about acts of violence," she said. "He
talked about jihad, jihad, jihad."
Then it was defense lawyer Mojaddidi's turn. A refugee from
Afghanistan, she and the Hayats came from the same Pashtun tribe, only
they were village and she was city. "The government cannot prove that
he actually attended a camp. It's a crucial missing link." Instead,
Hamid's time in Pakistan was spent playing cricket and getting married
and taking religious classes at a madrassa. As for the confession,
Hamid merely uttered "the words the FBI wanted to hear." It was
nothing more than garbage in, garbage out.
And then the witnesses began to take the stand.
There was Lawrence Futa, an FBI agent in Japan who testified that on
May 30, 2005, a Korean Air Lines flight to San Francisco was diverted
to Tokyo because it held a passenger who appeared on a "No Fly" list.
Futa interviewed Hamid Hayat and found a pleasant young man who denied
any links to terrorism, so he let him board a later flight.
There was Pedro Tenoch Aguilar, the rookie agent who headed the case
and conceded that he could never corroborate whether Hamid had
attended a camp or not. "Minus his statement, no," Aguilar said. There
was Naseem "Wildcat" Khan, who testified that Hayat expressed a desire
to go to camp but never told him that he had done so.
There was the professor of Islamic studies who testified that the
verse Hamid kept in his wallet"Oh Allah, we place you at their
throats, and we seek refuge in you from their evil"may have been the
prayer of a traveler seeking divine protection. More likely, though,
it was the supplication carried by "fanatics and extremists." Finally,
there was the Defense Department analyst who testified that satellite
pictures taken in northeastern Pakistan revealed a camp near Balakot
that "likely" matched one of the camps described by Hamid.
It was all rather murky, and son and father weren't about to testify
to clear things up. The trial, it seemed, would turn on the confession
that really didn't become a confession until the early morning hours
of June 5, 2005. That's when agent Tim Harrison became Hamid's main
inquisitor.
"So jihad means that you fight and you assault something?"
"Uh-huh."
"Give me an example of a target. A building?"
"I'll say no buildings. I'll say people."
"OK, people. Yeah. Fair enough. People in buildings . . . I'm trying
to get details about plans over here."
"They didn't give us no plans."
"Did they give you money?"
"No money."
"Guns?"
"No."
"Targets in the U.S?" the agent asked again.
"You mean like buildings?"
"Yeah, buildings," the agent nodded. "Sacramento or San Francisco?"
"I'll say Los Angeles and San Francisco."
"Financial, commercial?"
"I'll say finance and things like that."
"Hospitals?" the agent suggested.
"Maybe, I'm sure."
"Who ran the camp?"
"Maybe my grandfather."
"Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda runs?"
"I'll say they run the camp. . . . Yeah, that's what I'll say."
What were the jurors thinking? Wedick wondered. If he wouldn't be able
to tell them exactly what he thoughtthat this was the "most derelict
and juvenile investigation" he had ever seen the FBI put its name
tohe could at least take the stand and point out the gibberish in the
interrogation. He could at least tell them about the care he took in
Shrimpscam, how he had prepared a single year for one interview and
got an informant to cooperate after he meticulously lined the
interrogation room with giant surveillance photos of the guy accepting
a sizable campaign check.
It was far from certain, though, that the court would agree to Wedick
being an expert witness. Up until now, Judge Burrell had shown
something akin to belligerence when it came to the defense attorneys.
Whenever he ruled against them, he did so with an impatience that
bordered on browbeating. And on the matter of Wedick testifying,
prosecutor Deitch had filed nearly 100 pages of motions to keep the
former agent off the stand. He argued that Wedick had "grossly
overstated" his experience in counterterrorism and that his musings
would amount to "needless" cumulative evidence, the legal equivalent
of piling on.
Johnny Griffin, representing the father, stood up to offer several
reasons why Wedick was needed to illuminate key shortcomings. To no
one's surprise, Burrell told him to sit back down. "I know his
proposed testimony," he snarled at Griffin. "You can go on to the next
issue."
Outside the courtroom, Wedick wondered how the same government
dismissing his credentials could have failed to produce a single piece
of corroborating evidence in four years of sleuthing that cost
taxpayers millions of dollars and unearthed a cherry packer and an ice
cream vendor who drove around town playing "Pop Goes the Weasel." "To
see the government's power from this side of the fence is a strange
thing for me," he conceded. "What we're doing to these Muslims is the
same thing we did to the Japanese in the 1940s. It's the same fear and
the same overreaction. Instead of internment camps, we're sending them
to prison."
With Wedick silenced, both sides closed and the cases against father
and son went to two separate juries that had sat side by side for two
months.
*
The Pakistani Muslims of Lodi watched and waited, huddled in the shade
of the mosque, heads down as they wheeled out 40-pound boxes of fresh
kosher chicken from the Pak India marketthe same store the
government's informant had placed at the center of a ring that was
sending funds to Osama bin Laden. "This little place can't even
support one damn family," the storekeeper said. "How can it support
Osama bin Laden?"
At the yellow house, the kids were playing hoops along a driveway
lined with pomegranate, fig and loquat trees, one child in traditional
garb driving to the basket and his cousin in jeans trying to block
him. The ice cream truck sat idle and the coop where father and son
used to tend to their birds was empty. Hamid's uncle, Umer Khatab,
shuffled outside in his leather sandals. He stood beneath the freshly
washed purple and gold cotton garments hanging from a cord strung
across the porch and sighed. "We are sitting and waiting. We have been
sitting and waiting for a year." Then a young man, a dead ringer for
Hamidonly he was wearing a Tupac Shakur cap turned backward, baggy
jeans slung low and Air Jordanswalked up the steps into the house.
This was Arslan, Hamid's teenage brother. "It's a lie. The whole
world's a lie." He pushed a wheelchair carrying his dying grandfather
out the door and loaded him into a small truck headed for the doctor.
Just then, the new ice cream man, playing a different tune but also a
Pakistani, steered his van onto the block, offering the kids popsicles
red, white and blue.
The verdicts came a day later. One jury was deadlocked and couldn't
reach a decision on Umer Hayat. The judge declared a mistrial, though
the government vowed to try him again. As for his son, he was found
guilty on two counts of making false statements to the FBI and one
count of providing "material support" to terrorists. He faces up to 39
years in prison. "I hope it gets the message out," explained juror
Starr Scaccia. "Don't mess with the United States. It's not worth it."
Wedick couldn't look Hamid Hayat in the eye. He had pledged to him
months earlier that he was going to do everything he could to see
injustice righted, even if it meant turning his back on 35 years in
the FBI. "Hamid is a hapless character, but, my God, he isn't a
terrorist. The government counted on hysteria, the 1,000-pound
gorilla, to be in the room. And it worked. Damn, it worked."
He saw one juror holding back tears and made a straight line for her
apartment. She wouldn't let him in at first, talking through a crack.
Two hours, four hours, finally she opened the door and told him what
he suspected. She didn't believe Hamid was guilty. So intense was the
pressure from fellow jurors to convict him that she had to check into
the hospital. Throughout the trial, she said, the foreman kept making
the gesture of a noose hanging. "Lynch the Muslim," she took it to
mean. Wedick persuaded her to write it all down and sign it. Then he
filed the affidavit with the federal court, hoping it might lead to a
new trial.
The next day, Wedick drove out to a field at the edge of a vineyard
along Highway 99 and looked down a long entrance road to a spot where
400 Muslim men in skullcaps and flowing dress had gathered. He drew
close enough to see their faces and hands worn to the bone and watch
them carry the pine box to a simple hole in the ground. The body of
Umer Hayat's father was wrapped in three linen sheets, all that would
separate him from the soil of this strange land. Wedick stood back and
watched the men break into 20 lines, side by side, facing east, toward
Mecca. And then they began to pray. In the distance, as the sun was
setting, he thought back to a different American people, in a
different American era, burying their dead in a desert they didn't know.
http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-wedick22may28,0,4951185.story?coll==la-home-magazine
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{Invite (mankind, O Muhammad ) to the Way of your Lord (i.e. Islam) with wisdom (i.e. with the Divine Inspiration and the Qur'an) and fair preaching, and argue with them in a way that is better. Truly, your Lord knows best who has gone astray from His Path, and He is the Best Aware of those who are guided.} (Holy Quran-16:125)
{And who is better in speech than he who [says: "My Lord is Allah (believes in His Oneness)," and then stands straight (acts upon His Order), and] invites (men) to Allah's (Islamic Monotheism), and does righteous deeds, and says: "I am one of the Muslims."} (Holy Quran-41:33)
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said: "By Allah, if Allah guides one person by you, it is better for you than the best types of camels." [al-Bukhaaree, Muslim]
The prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) also said, "Whoever calls to guidance will have a reward similar to the reward of the one who follows him, without the reward of either of them being lessened at all." [Muslim, Ahmad, Aboo Daawood, an-Nasaa'ee, at-Tirmidhee, Ibn Maajah]
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