Sting case negates core of U.S. values
By SHAMSHAD AHMAD
First published: Thursday, March 8, 2007
Albany [New York] Times Union, Opinion
We have seen many changes in our country since the tragic events of 9/11. This is especially true for American Muslims. Even though the 9/11 attacks were committed by people who entered this country expressly for that evil purpose, it was to the Muslims that the eye of suspicion turned. American Muslims, their institutions and mosques, became the focus of investigation and the objects of extreme scrutiny. The terrorists succeeded primarily because of an intelligence failure. In response, our government allocated a tremendous amount of resources, money and manpower to the intelligence agencies, including the FBI at Albany and its Terrorism Task Force. This, coupled with the formation of new legislation previously unthinkable: government surveillance made permissible and a so-called secret evidence law that allowed for people to be tried, without even knowing what was being used as proof of their guilt.
Our intelligence agencies felt an extra pressure, too -- a pressure to produce visible results. This pressure led to results across the nation, but often incorrect ones. Thousands of Muslims were detained and questioned, their property seized, and some were even charged with terrorism. But no real terrorists were found. Most cases were based on
suspicions and hardly of actual evidence. Many innocent people fell victim to this aggressive manner of policing, and many families, communities, mosques and Islamic institutions suffered.
Somehow, in this new age of suspicion, our mosque at Central Avenue in Albany and its members became a target of investigation by the FBI. The mosque was opened in 2000. It has about 300 attendees, mostly residents of the downtown Albany area, or those who are employed in that vicinity. The mosque serves as a place of worship and a community center. It provides a weekend school for children, and classes and counseling for adults. It also caters community needs such as weddings, community dinners, funerals, etc. A small community has grown in the area surrounding the mosque, with several stores and many residences.
Members of our mosque believe the FBI put the mosque and its members under surveillance immediately after 9/11. One member of the mosque, Ali Yaghi, was arrested, interrogated, detained for two years without any charge, moved to various prisons and then deported to Jordanian authorities. He was finally freed there, but he lost his family, his children and his life in the United States.
Dozens and dozens members of our community were investigated. They were either visited or invited by the FBI for interviews. These investigations discovered nothing, simply because the mosque and its members have nothing to do with terrorism or anything illegal. We are a law-abiding people. Respecting and obeying the law of the land is an integral part of our religion. We have no interest in harming the society and the country in which we and our children live.
We wish the FBI would have left us alone and moved on to discovering real terrorists elsewhere. However, it seems that in order to claim a success in countering terrorism, the FBI decided to target two individuals, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain. A very elaborate and comprehensive sting plot was created to convict them.
Aref and Hossain are simple, religious, family men with no criminal records and no inclination to terrorism. They were tricked in this elaborate deceptive plot. For this purpose, the FBI hired Shahed "Malik" Hussain, a convicted criminal in the United States and an alleged fugitive of a serious crime in his home country of Pakistan. For the next 10 months, Hussain was trained and coached in how to deceive and elicit statements that could be found incriminating from Aref and Hossain. These recorded conversations -- a lot of which are gossip and loose talk, some taken out of context, and some wrongly
translated -- were aggressively used by the prosecution in the trial of Aref and Hossain. It was simply too much for the jury to sort out the fact from the fiction, with the FBI drawing a picture of the two defendants as predisposed terrorists. They were found guilty and are to be sentenced today in federal court in Albany.
This case has left the Muslim community with a deep sense of pain, disappointment and demoralization. The lives of these two men, their wives and 10 young children combined are shattered.
Aref sought refuge in this country from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hossain came here from Bangladesh, with the hope that hard work and determination would open the doors of success for he and his family. Most of our immigrant members share the same story and the same dream: that we would be able to live and provide a better life for our children than what we found in our homelands; to live in a land free of discrimination, prejudice and injustice.
The laws and methods of investigation that have become acceptable after 9/11 are completely at odds with the general principles of fairness, justice and integrity that this nation stands upon, and they are doing very little to make our country safer. Intellectuals and responsible citizens must stand strongly against racial and religious profiling, detention, entrapment and prosecution of innocent individuals.
Shamshad Ahmad is founder and president of Masjid As-Salam Mosque in Albany. He was born and raised in India, received a Ph.D. from the Australian National University and teaches physics at University at Albany. His e-mail address is ahmad@albany.edu.