U.S. Campaign Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Charges Statistics Often Count Lesser Crimes
By Dan Eggen and Julie Tate
Sunday, June 12, 2005; Page A01
Washington Post Staff Writers
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/11/AR2005061100381.html
Correction to This Article
An article in an early edition on June 12 incorrectly said that a Washington Post analysis of Justice Department data found 19 convictions for terrorism- and national- security-related crimes since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The correct number is 39. The mistake was caused by a typographical error.
First of two parts
On Thursday, President Bush stepped to a lectern at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy in Columbus to urge renewal of the USA Patriot Act and to boast of the government's success in prosecuting terrorists.
Terror Cases
A Breakdown of 330 Cases Includes data sorted by type of conviction and terror group affiliation.
Narrowing the Field
Ten High-Profile Prosecutions
Living With the Terrorism Label
More than a year and a half before Sept. 11, 2001, Ali Alubeidy was caught up in an investigation of fraudulent Pennsylvania commercial driver's licenses. It wasn't until after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon that the FBI pursued his case as having a possible link to terrorism. Although the connection soon unraveled, Alubeidy, an Iraqi immigrant, lives with the stigma.
Flanked by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush said that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
Those statistics have been used repeatedly by Bush and other administration officials, including Gonzales and his predecessor, John D. Ashcroft, to characterize the government's efforts against terrorism.
But the numbers are misleading at best.
An analysis of the Justice Department's own list of terrorism prosecutions by The Washington Post shows that 39 people -- not 200, as officials have implied -- were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security.
Most of the others were convicted of relatively minor crimes such as making false statements and violating immigration law -- and had nothing to do with terrorism, the analysis shows. For the entire list, the median sentence was just 11 months.
Taken as a whole, the data indicate that the government's effort to identify terrorists in the United States has been less successful than authorities have often suggested. The statistics provide little support for the contention that authorities have discovered and prosecuted hundreds of terrorists here. Except for a small number of well-known cases -- such as truck driver Iyman Faris, who sought to take down the Brooklyn Bridge -- few of those arrested appear to have been involved in active plots inside the United States.
Among all the people charged as a result of terrorism probes in the three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Post found no demonstrated connection to terrorism or terrorist groups for 180 of them.
Just one in nine individuals on the list had an alleged connection to the al Qaeda terrorist network and only 14 people convicted of terrorism-related crimes -- including Faris and convicted Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui -- have clear links to the group. Many more cases involve Colombian drug cartels, supporters of the Palestinian cause, Rwandan war criminals or others with no apparent ties to al Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.
But a large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance -- through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck -- and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.
For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts for about 10 percent of individuals convicted -- even though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties to terrorism in 2001.
"For so many of these cases, there seems to be much less substance to them than we first assume or have first been told," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who heads the Washington office of Rand Corp., a think tank that conducts national security research. "There's an inherent deterrent effect in cracking down on any illicit activity. But the challenge is not exaggerating what they were up to -- not portraying them as super-terrorists when they're really the low end of the food chain."
Justice Department officials say they have not sought to exaggerate the importance or suspected associations of those prosecuted in connection with terrorism probes, and they argue that the list provides only a partial view of their efforts.
Officials said all the individuals were first put on the list because of a suspected connection or allegation related to terrorism. Last week, they also said that the department had tightened the requirements for including a case on the terrorism list.
Barry M. Sabin, chief of the department's counterterrorism section, said prosecutors frequently turn to lesser charges when they are not confident they can prove crimes such as committing or supporting terrorism. Many defendants also have been prosecuted for relatively minor crimes in exchange for information that is not public but has proved valuable in other terrorism probes, he said.
"A person could not have been put on this list if there was not a concern about national security, at least initially," he said. "Are all these people an ongoing threat presently? Arguably not. . . . We are not trying to overstate or understate what we're doing. You don't want to put language or a label on people that is inconsistent with what they have done."
The Numbers
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department database has served as the key source of statistics on the status of terrorism investigations in the United States and has been cited frequently in official speeches and testimony to Congress. The list obtained by The Post includes 361 cases defined as terrorism investigations by the department's criminal division from Sept. 11, 2001, through late September 2004. Thirty-one entries could not be evaluated because they were sealed and blacked out. (The list does not include about 40 cases filed since then that account for Bush's total of about 400.) The Post sought to update and correct data whenever possible, including noting convictions or sentences handed down within the past nine months.
The list of domestic prosecutions does not include terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba or at secret locations around the world. Nor does it include many of the approximately 50 people the Justice Department has acknowledged detaining as "material witnesses," or three men held in a military prison in South Carolina, one of whom has been released.
The Post identified 180 cases in which no connection to al Qaeda or another terrorist group could be found in court records, official statements, the 9/11 commission report or news accounts. Even some of the terrorism-related cases featured early allegations of terrorist connections that were later dropped.
Of the 142 individuals on the list linked to terrorist groups, 39 were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. More than a dozen defendants were acquitted or had their charges dismissed, including three Moroccan men in Detroit whose convictions were tossed out in September after the Justice Department admitted prosecutorial misconduct.
Not surprisingly, these minor crimes produced modest punishments. The median sentence for all cases adjudicated, whether or not they were terrorism-related, was 11 months. About three dozen other defendants were given probation or were deported. The most common convictions were on charges of fraud, making false statements, passport violations and conspiracy.
Two life sentences have been handed down so far: to Richard Reid, the British drifter who was foiled by passengers in his attempt to blow up an aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean; and Masoud Khan, a Maryland man convicted of traveling to Pakistan and seeking to fight with the Taliban against U.S. forces. Two others convicted of terrorism-related crimes face life sentences: Ahmed Abdel Sattar, an Egyptian-born postal worker convicted of conspiring to kill and kidnap in a foreign country; and Ali Timimi, a Northern Virginia spiritual leader convicted of encouraging others to attend terrorist camps. (Timimi was indicted in late September and was not on the list obtained by The Post.)
Only 14 of those convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security have clear links to bin Laden's network, most notably Moussaoui and Reid. Others include Faris, an admitted member of al Qaeda who sought to sabotage the Brooklyn Bridge, and six Yemeni men from Lackawanna, N.Y., convicted of providing material support to terrorists by attending an al Qaeda training camp before Sept. 11.
In addition, Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, who is most closely associated with Afghanistan's deposed government, trained at an al Qaeda camp.
The patterns discovered by The Post are similar to findings in studies of Justice Department terrorism cases by New York University and Syracuse University, each of which examined more limited sets of data.
More than a third of the cases on the list arose from a post-Sept. 11 FBI dragnet, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds of Muslim immigrants for minor violations unrelated to the hijackings or terrorism.
"What we're seeing over time is the equivalent of mission creep: Cases that would not be terrorism cases before Sept. 11 are swept onto the terrorism docket," said Juliette Kayyem, a former Clinton administration Justice official who heads the national security program at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "The problem is that it's not good to cook the numbers. . . . We have no accurate assessment of whether the war on terrorism is actually working."
Tracking Al Qaeda
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, many veteran U.S. counterterrorism officials assumed that al Qaeda sleeper cells were hiding in the country, awaiting orders to launch attacks. The strikes -- carried out by 19 hijackers who arrived in the United States and trained here undetected -- prompted an aggressive campaign by the Justice Department, the FBI and other agencies to identify al Qaeda operatives on U.S. soil.
The results from the Justice Department database, however, raise the possibility that the presence of al Qaeda operatives and sympathizers within the United States is either limited or largely undetected, many terrorism experts say. "These kind of statistics show that we really don't know if they exist here in any significant way," said Martha Crenshaw of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, who has studied terrorism since the late 1960s. "It's possible that they could have sleepers planted here for a long time and we could always be very surprised. But I'd say that's less likely compared with them trying to repeat a 9/11-style infiltration from the outside."
Other experts and government officials say the relatively small number of domestic terrorism prosecutions is partly the result of the administration's strategy to handle some of its most dangerous suspects -- such as Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- outside U.S. courts.
As a result, only a limited number of potentially significant cases have been pursued publicly in U.S. courts.
Viet D. Dinh, a Georgetown law professor who headed the Office of Legal Policy at Justice before and after the attacks, said the primary strategy is to use "prosecutorial discretion" to detain suspicious individuals by charging them with minor crimes.
"You're talking about a violation of law that may or may not rise to the level of what might usually be called a federal case," Dinh said, referring to credit-card fraud and other offenses. "But the calculation does not happen in isolation; you are not just talking about the crime itself, but the suspicion of terrorism. . . . That skews the calculation in favor of prosecution."
Bush administration officials have frequently compared the strategy to the anti-Mafia campaign by former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who vowed to prosecute mobsters for crimes as minor as spitting on a sidewalk. But many defense lawyers and civil liberties advocates argue that the Mafia analogy is misplaced.
David Z. Nevin represented Idaho graduate student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a Saudi national who was acquitted of federal terrorism charges in a closely watched trial last summer but agreed to be deported rather than fight immigration charges. Nevin said there are key differences between current counterterrorism cases and the prosecutions of gangsters such as Al Capone, who was famously convicted of tax evasion to get him off the street. "Everybody knew that Al Capone was committing murders and was doing all sorts of things. They just couldn't convict him," Nevin said.
"That's fine if you take it as a given that you have the devil here," he continued. "The problem is that you end up with people like Sami Al-Hussayen. . . . Whenever you live in that realm, you're going to make mistakes and you're going to hurt innocent people."
Using One Case to Build Another
In the end, most cases on the Justice Department list turned out to have no connection to terrorism at all.
They include Hassan Nasrallah, a Dearborn, Mich., man convicted of credit-card fraud who has the same name as the leader of Hezbollah, or Party of God. Abdul Farid of High Point, N.C., was arrested on a false tip that he was sending money to the Taliban and was deported after admitting he lied on a loan application. Moeen Islam Butt, a Pakistani jewelry-kiosk employee in Pennsylvania, spent eight months in jail before being deported on marriage-fraud and immigration charges.
And there is the case of Francois Guagni, a French national who made the mistake of illegally crossing the Canadian border on Sept. 14, 2001, with box cutters in his possession. It turned out that Guagni used the knives in his job as a drywall installer. He was deported in March 2003 after pleading guilty to unlawfully entering the country.
"His case had nothing to do with terrorism, as far as I've ever been told," said Guagni's attorney, Christopher D. Smith.
Some of the cases, however, remain murky. The question of involvement in terrorism lingers even after formal allegations of such ties have been dropped.
Consider the case of Enaam Arnaout, director of the Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation, who was indicted amid great fanfare in October 2002 for allegedly helping to funnel money and equipment to al Qaeda operatives on three continents. The charity was shut down.
Less than a year later, prosecutors dropped six of the seven charges against Arnaout, and he pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering for funding fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. During a sentencing hearing in August 2003, U.S. District Judge Suzanne B. Conlon told prosecutors they had "failed to connect the dots" and said there was no evidence that Arnaout "identified with or supported" terrorism.
The administration views the case differently. Bush, in a speech Friday at the National Counterterrorism Center in Northern Virginia, said investigators had "helped close down a phony charity in Illinois that was channeling money to al Qaeda."
Sabin, the Justice Department's counterterrorism chief, said he could not discuss the specifics of most cases. But he said one case in particular illustrates the government's strategy: the conviction of Abdurahman Alamoudi, who admitted to taking $1 million from Libya and using it to pay conspirators in a scheme to kill Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
Alamoudi, who once worked with senior U.S. officials as head of the American Muslim Council, has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators as part of a plea agreement. Sabin said the case is "a significant success story" that shows how prosecutors can use one case to help build others.
"We have been successful in obtaining information and fueling our intelligence gathering efforts with many of these cases," Sabin said.
Research database editor Derek Willis contributed to this report.
Immigration Law as Anti-Terrorism Tool
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 13, 2005; Page A01
Second of two articles
Soul Khalil woke with a start. Her split-level home in Burke was shuddering, and the oppressive hum of a helicopter filled the room. Then she heard the pounding on the front door. "Police!" the voices yelled. She shook her husband. "Hassan! You hear that banging?" she later recalled saying.
Her husband, in his shorts, stumbled into the hallway. At the end of it was a masked agent, his gun drawn. "Get down!" he yelled, according to the husband's recollection. The Lebanese immigrant dropped onto his stomach, and the officers cuffed his hands behind his back.
The charge: lying on his immigration documents.
Authorities rarely go to such lengths to snare an immigrant accused of fraud. The dawn raid last month was carried out by Homeland Security and FBI agents from a local Joint Terrorism Task Force, working with a SWAT-style team -- dispatched because federal officials had information that Khalil, 36, had had weapons training.
Khalil's arrest is part of a broad anti-terrorism effort being waged with a seemingly innocuous weapon: immigration law. In the past two years, officials have filed immigration charges against more than 500 people who have come under scrutiny in national security investigations, according to previously undisclosed government figures. Some are ultimately found to have no terrorism ties, officials acknowledge.
Whereas terrorism charges can be difficult to prosecute, Homeland Security officials say immigration laws can provide a quick, easy way to detain people who could be planning attacks. Authorities have also used routine charges such as overstaying a visa to deport suspected supporters of terrorist groups.
"It's an incredibly important piece of the terrorism response," said Michael J. Garcia, who heads Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. And although immigration violations might seem humdrum, he said, "They're legitimate charges."
Muslim and civil liberties activists disagree. They argue that authorities are enforcing minor violations by Muslims and Arabs, while ignoring millions of other immigrants who flout the same laws.
They note that many of those charged are not shown to be involved in terrorism, including Khalil, a cellular-telephone technician who was freed by a judge pending his immigration trial and denies any connection to terrorism. Federal officials said they could not discuss any national security aspects of the case because it involves an ongoing investigation.
"The approach is basically to target the Muslim and Arab community with a kind of zero-tolerance immigration policy. No other community in the U.S. is treated to zero-tolerance enforcement," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and critic of the government's anti-terrorism policies.
Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, immigration agents were minor players in the world of counterterrorism. That changed during the investigation of the hijackings, when 768 suspects were secretly processed on immigration charges. Most were deported after being cleared of connections to terrorism.
Unlike that controversial roundup, most of the recent arrests have not involved secret proceedings. Still, they can be hard to track. A few cases have turned into high-profile criminal trials, but others have centered on little-known individuals processed in obscure immigration courts, with no mention of a terrorism investigation.
In some cases, the government ultimately concludes that a suspect, while perhaps guilty of an immigration violation, has no terrorism ties at all.
Authorities are often reluctant to disclose why an immigrant's name emerged in a national security investigation, because the information is classified or is part of a continuing probe. Homeland Security officials turned down a request by The Washington Post for the names of all those charged in the past two years, making it difficult to assess how effective their strategy has been at thwarting terrorism.
But a post-Sept. 11 aggressiveness is evident in dozens of immigration cases described by federal officials, defense lawyers and news accounts. For example, authorities have taken the unusual step of stripping some immigrants' U.S. citizenship. Officials are also using immigration charges to pressure people to provide information on Muslim organizations, several attorneys said.
This is an anti-terrorism effort fought largely behind the scenes, in the murky world of intelligence and informers, often barely visible in the court files of those charged.
Consider the case of Waheeda Tehseen.
Tehseen was a Pakistani graduate student when she immigrated in 1988 after spending a childhood in poverty near the Afghan border. Over the years, she acquired the trappings of a successful American life: a PhD in toxicology, a four-bedroom house in Fairfax Station and a $90,000-a-year job at the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA even presented Tehseen its "Unsung Hero" award for her volunteer work overseas with Afghan refugees.
But on Feb. 2, 2004, her success story abruptly ended.
Tehseen, then 46, was arrested and accused of lying on her naturalization application in 2001. The violation centered on one question: Have you ever claimed to be a U.S. citizen? No, Tehseen had checked. In fact, in 1998, she had accepted a job in EPA's pesticide division -- a position she knew was open only to U.S. citizens.
"I just had to have the job for my children," a weeping Tehseen said in an interview last year, explaining that she had been supporting three daughters and a son. She considered it "the tiniest error"; she had been a legal resident, and would become a citizen in 2002.
Authorities considered it part of a pattern of deception. They noted that Tehseen had also listed a phony employer, instead of the EPA, on her application in an apparent effort to disguise the lie.
The violations would probably never have been caught, but Tehseen came under scrutiny in a terrorism-related investigation. She said the probe apparently involved an orphanage she opened in April 2003 on the Pakistani-Afghan border, using funds from a Missouri-based group, the Islamic American Relief Agency.
Tehseen said the group had seemed to be a legitimate charity. But last October, the Treasury Department accused the agency's overseas branches of helping fund Osama bin Laden.
Several of Tehseen's colleagues defended her assertion that she was interested in charity, not Islamic radicalism. Federal prosecutors, however, apparently believed Tehseen could provide information. She said federal agents questioned her about the Islamic charity, the Taliban and al Qaeda, and authorities offered to go easy on her immigration-fraud charge if she became an informant.
Federal officials declined to comment on that investigation, saying the information is classified. An official close to the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that a deal was discussed but provided no details.
Tehseen declined the offer because, she said, "I'm not an FBI person who can go and sneak in and find out who's right and wrong." She was deported last August and is working on environmental projects in Pakistan.
Muslim activists say cases such as Tehseen's show that the government is scouring the immigration papers of Arabs and Muslims it considers suspicious.
"They see people they want to get, [and] they look in their records until they find something they can get them on," said Arsalan Iftikhar, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Homeland Security officials say they are not focusing on any ethnic or religious group.
"We're targeting people who our investigation shows are involved in some type of activity" that could jeopardize national security, Garcia said.
ICE officials say they have used immigration laws to take dangerous people off the streets. For example, Nuradin Abdi, a Somali immigrant living in Ohio, was locked up on an asylum-fraud charge in November 2003. He was subsequently charged with plotting with an al Qaeda member to blow up a shopping mall. He has pleaded not guilty.
ICE officials also point to cases in which they have deported active supporters of terrorist groups, including at least two men who had attended guerrilla training camps in Pakistan.
All cases with a terrorism connection are handled through the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, ICE officials said.
Authorities say they sometimes turn to immigration charges rather than terrorism charges because a case might be based on classified information that they cannot reveal in court without damaging other investigations. Sometimes they face other legal barriers.
For example, ICE agents alleged in federal court in Alexandria that investor Soliman S. Biheiri had done business through the mid-1990s with a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, which is on the U.S. terrorism list. But the statute of limitations had expired.
Prosecutors instead charged Biheiri with putting false information on his citizenship application. Biheiri, an Egyptian immigrant, has denied any improper dealings with Hamas. He was convicted and was sentenced to a year in jail, and is to be deported soon.
Homeland Security officials say immigration charges are being used much as they have been for years against drug traffickers -- as a tool to lock up suspects, gain informants and obtain search warrants. But some legal experts caution it can be harder to identify a terrorist than a narcotics kingpin.
"So much of national security threat analysis is guesswork," said Bo Cooper, who was general counsel of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service. Authorities will often have worrisome information "but not nearly enough to prove this person is a terrorist. . . . So whether it's legitimate depends on whether the person appears to be a risk, and whether he indeed violated immigration laws."
Some say the new focus in the immigration bureaucracy is long overdue. Bill West, a Miami-based immigration agent who handled national security cases in the 1990s, recalled urging the agency's leaders to make counterterrorism a higher priority. "It all fell on deaf ears," said West, who is retired.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, there were only 50 immigration agents on Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country, according to the Sept. 11 commission, which has criticized the immigration service for being slow to embrace a role in counterterrorism.
Today, the task forces include more than 200 such agents, who report to a bustling ICE Counterterrorism Section in downtown Washington. Since ICE was founded in March 2003, more than 500 people have been charged with immigration violations -- either in criminal or immigration courts -- after an initial report linking them to a terrorism or homeland security threat, according to an agency spokesman, Dean Boyd.
Some of the immigrants faced other criminal charges. Boyd emphasized that some immigrants were found to have no connection to terrorism.
Boyd provided the estimated total after The Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the number of cases and the immigrants' names and countries of origin. The agency denied the request, saying the data had not been compiled in any existing documents.
Among those accused of immigration fraud are at least 10 naturalized Americans, according to a tally by The Post based on court records, ICE documents and news reports. Khalil is among them. According to the charges, he failed to acknowledge in his 1999 naturalization application that he had been arrested and ordered out of the United States eight years earlier for overstaying his student visa.
Khalil disputes the accusation. He said he obtained a document in the early 1990s shielding him from deportation because of the war raging in Lebanon. He married his wife, a U.S. citizen, in 1994 and became a legal resident.
But the case is about more than a 14-year-old deportation issue.
Khalil said he was visited over a year ago by FBI agents who asked whether he knew of any threats to the United States and whether he had ties to Hezbollah, or Party of God, the armed Shiite Muslim movement that the U.S. government considers a terrorist group.
Khalil said he knew no members of Hezbollah in the United States but did in south Lebanon, where it is now a major political party. Agents asked him again during his arrest last month whether he knew of anyone intending harm to this country, he said.
"If I tell you I know nobody involved in Hezbollah, I'm a liar. It would be like saying I live in D.C. and never see a black person," Khalil said in an interview. He said he acknowledged to the agents that he had learned to use arms in Lebanon during the war, which he said was common.
Khalil added that he has been told several times in U.S. airports that his name is on a "no-fly" list, but that he has always been cleared to board.
Boyd, the ICE spokesman, said he could not comment on any national security aspects of the case. He said authorities used the helicopter and SWAT-style team because Khalil had had weapons and martial-arts training. "We have to be safe," he said.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan released Khalil pending his trial, stating that the immigration charge appeared "rather weak."
Although Khalil was charged in criminal court, many others are tried in the immigration court system, which is part of the Justice Department. Immigration lawyers have raised concerns about using such courts in terrorism-related cases, because they provide fewer legal protections for the accused. For example, those charged do not have the right to an attorney, and they may be detained even after a judge has ordered them freed on bond.
"There's no key to the jailhouse door when Immigration's got you," said Malea Kiblan, an immigration lawyer in Northern Virginia.
That was the complaint of one of her clients, Ibrahim Abdullah, who was charged last year with violating his student visa by holding a job. The arrest was part of an investigation by the local terrorism task force.
Law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they had a strong immigration case against Abdullah, a Saudi PhD student at George Mason University. They said he had received checks for thousands of dollars from the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, or WAMY, whose Falls Church office was founded by a relative of bin Laden's. The group has been under scrutiny for possible terrorism ties, officials say, although there has been no allegation of a crime. The group denies any such link.
Abdullah said that the money was reimbursement for supplies he had bought, and that he was simply a volunteer. He insisted he had no need to work, because he had a scholarship and a $3,000-a-month stipend from the Saudi government.
Immigration prosecutors indicated they would oppose bond for Abdullah, Kiblan said. That meant he could spend months in jail, because even if an immigration judge ordered his release, a post-Sept. 11 regulation allows the government to stay such decisions during an appeal.
Abdullah decided to plead guilty to the immigration charge.
"They scared me. I'm not used to the jail," Abdullah, 42, said in a telephone interview from Saudi Arabia, where he is a computer science professor. He was deported last July.
Researchers Julie Tate and Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.