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Los Angeles Times - August 7, 2006
Pressured to Name Names
A Moroccan says the U.S. gave him a stark choice:
Inform on fellow Muslims or be deported as a likely terrorist
By Lee Romney
SAN FRANCISCO — The document that federal agents handed to Yassine Ouassif to justify his deportation contained startling language: "The United States government has reason to believe that you are likely to engage in terrorist activity."
Ouassif was in exclusive company. Since Sept. 11, only five people have faced that ominous charge. Ouassif was about to become the sixth.
The slip of paper offered no details on what was behind the accusation.
As federal officials took him into custody in December (2005), they told the 24-year-old Moroccan — a permanent resident who had moved to California nine months before the terrorist attacks — that he would be taken to a detention facility in Arizona. He could fight deportation from there, but it would take at least two years, they said. And they assured him he would fail.
Ouassif was scared. He cried. But he was not surprised.
Just three weeks earlier, an FBI agent had laid out a stark choice in a furtive meeting near an East Bay commuter rail station: If Ouassif signed on as an informant in the government's war to root out terrorism, all his problems would disappear. If he declined, Ouassif would almost certainly be deported.
"He was gambling on me," said Ouassif, a devout Muslim whose thick, curling eyelashes lend him a childlike demeanor.
Ouassif, saying he is a law-abiding green-card holder, chose to fight back. "Hire people to help you and pay them," he said. "Don't put someone in the field and say, 'You have to help us.' "
The story of the San Francisco resident — a security guard and part-time engineering student — is in some ways unremarkable. He is one of many immigrants investigated, yet not charged or deported, in the post-Sept. 11 era. But his case reveals a lesser-known aspect of the war on terror: the federal government's high-stakes — some say coercive — tactics to recruit Muslim collaborators.
Ouassif treaded water for seven months in a murky administrative netherworld — facing vague accusations of terrorist activity, but granted no court hearing — while he says he was pressed aggressively to become an informant.
The account of Ouassif's ordeal is based largely on interviews with him and his lawyer, as well as his own voluminous written chronicle. Immigration officials declined to comment, since no formal action was taken against Ouassif. FBI officials also declined to discuss the investigation, saying it is classified.
Nevertheless, the basic outlines of Ouassif's tale check out — including evidence that he was told to contact a San Francisco FBI agent who tried to recruit him.
San Francisco FBI spokeswoman LaRae Quy said the known facts — that Ouassif did not become an informant and was not deported — prove that he was treated fairly. "It's clear that there wasn't any coercion here or he would have been thrown out of the country for not cooperating," she said.
But lawyers and local Islamic leaders in California cite at least a dozen recent cases of clients who were aggressively encouraged to become informants after they were detained for minor visa violations.
"They are trying to cultivate and exploit innocent people, enticing them, bribing them, tricking them in all these ways to snitch and spy," said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the 70-mosque Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. Syed said he has heard of about 10 attempts to turn Muslims with immigration troubles into informants in the last 18 months.
Most Muslims who have been approached as potential informants are too fearful to talk publicly. Ouassif said he decided to speak to reporters from The Times and the Wall Street Journal because he hoped to encourage the FBI to find "a way of dealing with a situation like this in a non-harmful way." ……
Informants have long been key to criminal investigations. But they are usually used merely to turn up leads. Agents then accumulate other evidence or follow through on their own, undercover.
Terrorism cases, in contrast, are increasingly built solely on informants.
Rand Corp. terrorism expert Brian Jenkins said the reasons are varied. The FBI lacks agents with language and ethnic backgrounds to infiltrate potential jihadist groups. Pressure has mounted to intervene before terrorist acts are carried out. And would-be terrorists now favor "local initiatives beneath the radar of international intelligence," he said, making investigation of homegrown groups much more critical.
The recent arrests of seven Miami men who allegedly talked of blowing up Chicago's Sears Tower, for example, stemmed entirely from the work of an undercover FBI informant who posed as an Al Qaeda operative.
Still, problems with informants in high-profile cases have underscored the perils.
The informant, and star witness, in a botched Detroit terrorism prosecution allegedly told his cellmate that he had lied. The case unraveled after an investigation revealed prosecutors had withheld that and other key information from the defense.
Another informant in a high-profile New York terrorism case set himself ablaze in a personal protest against his handlers.
And in the California prosecution of a Lodi father and son, the informant told tales of seeing top Al Qaeda officials in the Central Valley — sightings discounted by terrorism experts as preposterous.
Initially investigated as a suspect, that informant agreed to help in exchange for more than $200,000 — payments that critics contend could lead informants to lie or entrap.
Appealing to an innocent person's concern for potential violence is the best recruiting approach, experts and the FBI's Quy said.
One way to exert such leverage is through immigration violations. Even when the offense is minor, the consequences are almost always severe.
"For many people, the stakes are whether they get to continue living in the country that is their home," said Georgetown University law professor David Cole, who has represented terrorism defendants. "That is a huge hammer to hold over somebody's head."….
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-informant7aug07,0,7097537.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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