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New York Daily News - March 26, 2006
An innocent man's life left in ruins
Muslim convert & drifter wanted
to fly but did months in jail
BY RUSS BUETTNER
Adam Blake thinks he was guilty of only one thing: trying to fly while Muslim.
Blake has lived a legal nightmare in the post-9/11 era. Born and raised in the Bronx, Blake was held without bail for three months and has been unable to work for nearly a year because federal officials have kept his identification. A pretrial report even alleged he belonged to a terrorist organization, court records show.
Now, as he has spiraled into homelessness, federal prosecutors have dropped every charge against him.
Blake said investigators told him his troubles began when the mother of his estranged wife allegedly reported that he was a terrorist, and because events in his life fit that profile.
Blake, 36, converted to Islam and adopted a Muslim name in 1991. He traveled through the Middle East off and on for a decade, without obvious sources of cash, before returning to the United States to study aviation.
But a closer look offers mundane explanations. His mother says she paid for his travels. His interest in aviation dates back to his childhood, when he would ride subways and buses to airfields and heliports, including Floyd Bennett Field.
"I really wish I had had the money right out of high school for him to study to be a pilot," said his mother, Toni Blake, who now lives in South Carolina.
Blake's experience highlights the line that federal investigators continue to walk between respecting the rights of innocent people and risking disaster should they let a real terrorist remain free.
Arsalan Iftikhar, the national legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, acknowledged the difficulty, but added that Blake's experiences sound like too many other examples of Muslims being unnecessarily detained since 9/11. "The American Muslim community feels as though they have been under siege by an overzealous Justice Department," said Iftikhar. "Unfortunately, the vast majority of these cases turn out to be nothing more than minor civil violations."
Blake said he abhors terrorism. By the time prosecutors dropped his case, he was living at the men's homeless shelter in Manhattan. But he expressed no bitterness. "I just want to get my identification back and get a job so I can send money to help my wife raise our son," he said.
Blake was born with the name Christopher Mussenden and attended public schools in the Bronx. He said he spent four years in Seattle, during which he converted to Islam, changed his name to Idris Jibreel and made a pilgrimage to Mecca. From 1997 through 2004, Blake traveled repeatedly through the Middle East and to Asia, sometimes working in the gem industry, he said.
After 9/11, he returned briefly to New York and changed his name to Adam Blake, adopting his mother's maiden name. "I didn't want problems running around with a name like Jibreel," he said. "And I never liked the name Christopher."
During a month-long trip to Kuwait in 2004, he met a Vancouver woman online. "I told her that I had no money and no prospects," Blake said. "She said, 'Come here and let's start a new life.'" Three months together didn't go well, though a child was conceived. In August 2004, Blake got on a bus to Seattle.
Blake said that a border patrol officer told him his passport photo wasn't right. He went to a Seattle office the next day and paid for an expedited copy.
After many calls, Blake was told the new passport was ready. But when he went to pick it up, he was arrested by federal and local officials on a 1993 warrant alleging he had used his employer's phone to make personal calls, said Lawrence Hildes, a Washington attorney who advised Blake on his passport woes.
"It gives the strong appearance that they were targeting him because they believed him to be part of a terrorist organization, which I'm 100% sure he's not," Hildes said.
Blake said he was held at a county jail for six weeks. After his release, he enrolled in a correspondence course in aviation.
In January 2005, he was told again that his passport was ready. This time he was interrogated by the FBI for five hours before being sent home, he said.
The following day, Blake was arrested on charges that in 1995 he had failed to check a box on a passport application noting that he had previously possessed a passport, and that on another application in 1996 he had misstated the date that his most recent passport had been issued.
Blake's wife, Megan Harrison, told the Daily News she didn't believe her mother had called authorities - or that Blake has ever been interested in terrorism. "It's laughable to anyone who knows him," said Harrison, who still lives in Vancouver.
Blake was sent back to Manhattan and held without bail until April, when he was released on a $50,000 bond signed by his mother. Still lacking his essential identification papers, prosecutors gave him a letter saying he had a federal case pending.
Last month, prosecutors offered Blake a deferred prosecution agreement. It would have erased the case after a year if he followed the "instructions and advice" of a pretrial services officer - and waived his right to sue.
Blake resisted, even as his court-appointed attorneys and the judge in his case, John Keenan, pressured him to sign. "I told you it was a great deal," Keenan said in court. "I never met a man in my life until I met you that wouldn't accept a deferred prosecution agreement."
"This, unfortunately, I believe, is the br'er rabbit defense," added Frederick Cohn, Blake's court-appointed attorney. "But I don't believe he was born and bred in the briar patch."
But on March 6, prosecutors dropped the charges based on "a review of the evidence."
Blake has now boarded a bus and moved to his mother's home…..
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/403186p-341350c.html
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