James Wedick, a 35 year FBI veteran with a stellar career of capturing white collar criminals didn't expect much when he received a copy of the interrogation tapes of two Pakistan Muslims - one 22-year-old Hamid Hayat and his father Umer - but what he saw was definately something.
What James didn't yet appreciate was that the FBI had significant changed since his retirement in 2001. After the fall of the twin towers in New York, everything changed. Everything.
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 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 rooms—100 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 map—the office where his wife still worked as an agent—was 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."
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.
So how did the FBI wind up focusing on Lodi? Well, it all started with a confidentential informant (CI) which they had paid to "smoke out" potential jihadists. An informant (rather ironically) name Khan.
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 well—more than $225,000—and 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
The witnesses who came forward in the case where mostly useless and murky, everything turned on the confession - the bogus confession. But the one person who could testify to it's worthlessness, a decorated and celebrated FBI veteran, was prevented from mounting the stand by the Prosecution.
What were the jurors thinking? Wedick wondered. If he wouldn't be able to tell them exactly what he thought—that this was the "most derelict and juvenile investigation" he had ever seen the FBI put its name to—he 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.The result?
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."
This is what we've come too? Bogus convictions on flimsy evidence, a lame pair of confessions that don't match up, testimony from a paid informant, and browbeating jurors to "Get the Muslim" and show them to "Not mess with America?" Is this the Democracy and Justice we're trying to export to the rest of the world (at the butt of a gun)?
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.
I certainly hope not, but I'm afraid - that's exactly what it is.
Vyan
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