Daily Gazette (Schenectady) : The View From Here

THE VIEW FROM HERE

Carl Strock | February 4, 2007

As the Albany Muslim men targeted by the FBI await sentencing, I visited one of them, Yassin Aref, at the Rensselaer County Jail the other day to see how he is preparing himself for the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison and what he is thinking and feeling.

I found him full of life in his own way––talkative, analytical, and thoughtful.

"If they want to put me life in prison, they can do it," he said in his imperfect but rapidly improving English, "but I have one question: Why? I think they know I did nothing in my entire life…I did not participate in any violence, and especially I never did anything against America."

He is a 36-year-old Kurdish refugee from Iraq who was sent to this country seven years ago as part of a United Nations resettlement program. He has a wife and four young children in legal limbo in Albany. He was found guilty of nine counts of supporting terrorism as the result of an elaborate sting operation run by the FBI, and he is scheduled to be sentenced a week from tomorrow in federal court. The government is asking for a sentence of at least 30 years to life, which if he got, he would probably have to spend at a "supermax" prison in the Midwest.

Is he scared?

No, he said, "I’m not scared any more. I’ll take it, even the death penalty...I am 100 percent sure, the judge, the jury, the FBI, they know I am innocent. They saw everything, they knew everything. I am a victim for their own policy, that’s all, to show people they are fighting terrorists."

An assessment, by the way, that I basically agree with. The FBI needed to show it was on top of the terrorism threat, and as the bearded imam of a local mosque, he was a convenient showpiece, even though there was nothing radical about him, much less terroristic.

What would be fair?

"If they want to be fair they must apologize to my children and let me go back to my family, but if they want to hang me, I’ll take it proudly," he said as we sat in a small conference room at the jail talking over a metal table.

He does not much focus on himself and the wreck that his life has become in his adopted country. "I’m one person," he said. "Maybe 700,000 died in Iraq. Most saw no trial, no court."

"If not for wife and children," he said, "I have no problem. I sit and read a book. This is punishment for them. Their life has been destroyed more than my life."

Sitting and reading a book is something he has plenty of time for. Since his bail was revoked in September 2005 he has been in so-called protective custody, meaning solitary confinement, locked into his one-man cell 23 hours a day, allowed out only for a daily shower and a visit to a recreation yard, which, until his co-defendant joined him in October 2006, was a solo visit. Plus he gets an hour a week of religion class and an hour a week of group prayer, which, however, he is not allowed to lead.

He is behind a steel door, with a small window onto the cellblock at eye level and a small grate at knee level. He is in there with a bunk, a toilet, a sink, a locker and a desk. "I keep myself busy with mainly three things," he told me. "Prayer and holy book; books and reading; and listening to news."

He is allowed to have a small radio with earphones, and he listens a lot to National Public Radio, and especially to a program by Amy Goodman, "Democracy Now." He wants to tell Amy Goodman, "If not your program and my holy book, I lost my mind."

And, oh yes, "I sing a lot, and I sleep too. I cry sometimes, too."

The songs are his own compositions, in Kurdish, 30 of them so far. And of course the tears are his own.

He has also busied himself writing his life story, some of which I have read, including the parts about his childhood in a hard-scrabble village of the mountains of northern Iraq where food was so scarce that he remembers his father often saying, when asked what he would like to eat, that he would take anything softer than stones.

He reminded me of that when I asked him how the food was in jail. "I have no complaint about the food," he said. "In Iraq many days we could not even get bread to eat. I saw people eat leaves of tree"––during Saddam Hussein’s war of extermination against the Kurds. "This helps me now enjoy the food, whatever it is."

With only another week left before he learns his fate, he is not without hope. "When the U.N. sent me to this country, I hope the judge proves they did not send me to the wrong country," he said, pointing up one of the many ironies of this case––that he did not choose to come here. When he was going to be relocated from Syria, where he had sought refuge with his new wife from the turmoil in his homeland, his preference was for Europe, where there were more Kurds and he figured he would have an easier time fitting in.

He got shipped here willy-nilly, and right away did what so many new immigrants do, get a low-level job and start learning English. He worked as a janitor at Albany Medical Center, studied hard and soon became the prayer leader, or imam, at a storefront mosque on Central Avenue.

Then 9/11 happened, and one of the ways the world changed was the FBI got a new mandate: Find terrorists before they can strike again.

Yassin Aref was not a terrorist or anything close to a terrorist, nor was Mohammed Hossain, from Bangladesh, running a pizza shop. But they were bearded Muslim men, the FBI had Yassin’s name from someone’s address book in Iraq, which they took as ominous, and the FBI went after the two of them, sending a Pakistani snitch to try to dupe them into exchanging cash for checks in such a way that it could be construed as supporting an attack on the Pakistani consulate in New York, something there is no evidence that either man had ever dreamed of.

It worked, or at least it worked to the extent that the government was able to sell it to a jury, and now here they are, both officially guilty of crimes that could put them away for the rest of their lives, and both waiting for the final word from the judge.

I wish I could do something about all of this.

OTHER DEFENDANT

In case you’re wondering why I interviewed only Yassin Aref and not his co-defendant, Mohammed Hossain, the answer is that Yassin’s lawyer gave permission for an interview, which the jail requires, and Hossain’s lawyer did not. But you should not read anything into that.

Lawyers generally don’t want their clients to talk to the press, lest they say something damaging, and in this case, one lawyer made one call, and the other lawyer made another, that’s all. I wanted to talk to both of them, and I wish them both well, equally.

Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com

Albany Times-Union : History will remember Albany terrorism sting as a witch hunt

History will remember Albany terrorism sting as a witch hunt
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By Fred LeBrun | January 12, 2007

Someday we'll look back on the present national paranoia over terrorism and the excesses done in its name with the same national embarrassment that Americans feel for Sen. Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunts of the 1950s and our appalling treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Someday.

But not anytime soon, and certainly not before Yassin M. Aref, the former imam at an Albany mosque, and Mohammed M. Hossain, a pizza shop owner, are sentenced on Feb. 12.

A federal jury convicted the pair of a varying number of counts in an FBI money laundering sting operation with terrorist overtones involving a phony missile launcher. They each face 25 years in jail.

There are motions before the court to throw out the conviction, but since the judge tipped his pro-prosecution hand during the trial, they will come to naught. And the inevitable appeal will stutter along. But given the dismal times for due process in our vaunted system of justice, the chances of reason, of common sense, prevailing over hysteria and hellbent ideology are slim.

History will see these two as victims. Not innocents, but victims. Of this I am utterly convinced. Small comfort for them, or their families. They have 10 children between, all under the age of 13.

This case should never have seen a courtroom. Because once the mesmerizing ingredients were brought into a trial -- the convoluted and selective translations, a glib informant avoiding 15 years in jail and the exploitation of our fears and anxieties over global terrorism by prosecutors, -- the results were predictable. The trial had remarkably little to do with Aref and Hossain. This was not our federal court system's finest hour, or the FBI's, either.

From the beginning, the feds knew better. Up front, the Justice Department in Washington admitted that this case was not all that strong or the defendants all that dangerous. But the FBI put a lot of resources and a lot of money, time and ego into a complicated sting that took months and months and leaps of faith to swallow. So the feds wanted a couple of scalps for all their efforts. They got them.

But that still begs the question of why the feds pursued this prosecution with such zealousness, even after recognizing as they must have that Aref and Hossain never posed any threat to our national security.

It seems there was an ulterior motive, also reflective of our times. Sending a chilling message through the American immigrant Muslim community.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Pericak, the lead prosecutor, told our reporter Brendan Lyons after the trial, that he was convinced that if a real terrorist showed up in Albany, "I am convinced they both would have helped him." Strange, since there is not a shred of evidence to support that.

"It's not just these guys, it's what happens tomorrow when a guy is somewhere and overhears someone talking about an attack," Pericak said. "We want that person to call the FBI. If they call the FBI because they're a good citizen that's great, but if they call the FBI because they think this is a sting and they might get caught up in it, that's OK, too."

Well, according to the Muslim Solidarity Committee, a local support group for Aref and Hossain, the government has been dazzlingly successful in spreading fear and distrust in the local immigrant Muslim community. However, that would be a fear of the FBI and our government.

Looking up from a warm seat somewhere, Senator Joe must be viewing all this with a knowing smile.

LeBrun can be reached at 454-5453 or by e-mail at flebrun@timesunion.com.

Metroland : Prosecution or Persecution?

Prosecution or Persecution?

Facing charges from money laundering to aiding terrorists, local Muslims say they are victims of a government witch hunt

By Chet Hardin

After evening prayer, an Afghani-born American citizen, a cab driver, comes outside into the light fall drizzle to smoke a cigarette. Crouching on the sidewalk in front of Masjid As-Salam mosque, he points out the parking lot across Albany’s Central Avenue. He says that he has seen federal agents standing in that lot peering at the mosque through binoculars.

Typical behavior these days, he says. Muslims are scrutinized. It is nothing for a member of his mosque to be contacted by the FBI. He himself has been interrogated multiple times, and the last time, he says, one of the agents asked him if he knew Osama bin Laden.

“Can you believe that?” he asks, obviously pissed. “I have lived my entire life in this country, and he asks me that?” So he told the agent that, yeah, he knows bin Laden, and the last time he saw him he was doing something unholy with the agent’s mom.

Of course, he didn’t use those words. And the agents, he says, didn’t practice much restraint.

Three members of Albany’s Masjid As-Salam have been arrested in connection to terrorism investigations over the past four years. The first man arrested was one of the mosque’s founders, Ali Yaghi, a Jordanian immigrant who had lived in the Albany area for about 15 years. He was one of the roughly 1,200 Muslims, mostly men, who were rounded up in the now-notorious nationwide sweeps of 2002.

Yaghi was arrested on an alleged tip claiming that he had been overheard making anti-American comments following the 9/11 attacks. He was held in solitary confinement for roughly 10 months without charge, before deportation. Even his wife, Shokriea Yaghi, had no idea what had happened to him.

On Aug. 5, 2004, Mohammed Hossain, another of the mosque’s founders, and Yassin Aref, the mosque’s imam, were arrested after a yearlong FBI sting. Hossain is being tried for 27 counts including money laundering and knowingly providing aid to terrorist groups. Aref faces the same 27 charges, as well as three other counts. These allege that Aref lied about his affiliation with the political group Islamic Movement of Kurdistan and that he also lied about his knowing Mullah Krekar, the founder of Ansar Al-Islam, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Both men face 400 years in prison.

The government claims that Hossain knowingly assisted a self-professed Islamic fundamentalist named “Malik” (actually, an FBI informant with a felony conviction) in a money-laundering scheme to hide the profits from Malik’s (fictitious) gun- smuggling racket. Malik set up a deal with Hossain in which he would give Hossain $50,000; Hossain would then pay the money back to Malik in small increments, around $2,000, thus “cleaning” the money, keeping $5,000 for himself. Further, Malik allegedly showed Hossain one of the weapons that earned him his ill-gotten boodle—a Chinese-built, shoulder-fired missile. Malik, the government claims, made it clear to Hossain that one such weapon was to be used in New York City in a (again, fictitious) plot to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador.
May Saffar

Aref was brought in by Hossain to observe the money-lending transaction, in accordance with Islamic tradition.

Hossain contends, through his defense attorney, that he thought the money was a loan, and that Malik had led him to believe that what they were doing was legal. Also, he claims that he has never supported terrorism nor spoken in favor of terrorist activities. His lawyers argue that he was not predisposed to criminal activity, potentially establishing the argument of entrapment.

Aref’s defense claims that he had no idea what the business deal involved, and that he was just performing his duties as an imam.

Critics see the government’s case as flimsy at best, the product of the overzealous pursuit of terrorists. But for some members of Albany’s tight-knit Muslim community, this case represents, with chilling effect, the dangerous bias directed toward people of their faith. Hossain and Aref, they argue, were targeted solely because they are proud Muslims, unafraid to voice their opinions about faith and foreign policy.

The case, which came to trial on Sept. 12, is currently in federal court.

To build its case against Aref and Hossain, the FBI surreptitiously recorded and videotaped many of Malik’s meetings with the two men. In an Aug. 7, 2003, meeting, Malik drew Hossain into a discussion about the attacks of 9/11.

According to court documents, this is what was said:

“What the Saudis did with the World Trade Center,” Malik asked, “in your opinion, was it good or bad?”

“This . . . this was bad,” Hossain replied, unaware that he was being recorded. “This was bad. Do you understand that?” He went on to explain that a true Muslim wants to spread Islam. And the best way for that to occur is to abandon violence and lead exemplary lives.

“We should have a good relationship with the unbelievers,” he told Malik. “Then, because of our goodness, Islam will spread and continue to spread.”

Later in the conversation, Hossain continued illustrating his point.

“I am a true citizen of this country. I am one of the best citizen of this country. I am teaching my children behave. I am a businessman. I am a house owner, I have nothing to do with anything else. And this is my country. Other, why I’m doing all of these things? . . . I am paying tax. I am praying. I never harm anybody. People like me society get benefit.”

“Why would I do anything to hurt this country?” Mohammad Hossain asks three years later. He is sitting in his pizzeria, Little Italy, at the corner of Lark Street and Central Avenue in Albany. There are few customers tonight, and his wife, Mossamat, is busy behind the counter.

“I have spent years investing in this country,” he says. “I have five house. I have six children. I have a wife and a business. Why would I hurt? Hurting this country would be like hurting myself.”

“I came to this country with dream that one day I be rich,” he continues. “I will not struggle for a piece of bread. In childhood, I was programmed by the tales of America.”

He remembers when he was a child, he had heard that Americans had went to the moon. What an amazing country, he thought to himself. In his tiny village in Bangladesh, the children would show off their knowledge of America. “Do you know the light bulb was made in America?” he would ask his friends. “Do you know who made the engine?”

He wore his hair styled like Elvis Presley.

His father was a police officer enlisted by the British, but even that didn’t protect his family from the crushing poverty of his village. Every few years, he says, devastating storms would hit. The wind would tear through the holes in the walls of his family’s bamboo house, threatening to rip the whole house away.

“It was so scary,” he recalls. “My mother would gather us in her arms.” He stops and covers his face. It is an overwhelming memory for the 51-year-old man. His youngest son sets napkins down in front of him. Hossain rips one in half and dries his eyes. All six of his children gather near him. His daughters sit staid and alert, his sons with their chins resting on the backs of the booths, all solemn, watching their father.

When he became a teenager, Hossain continues, he realized that he would have to leave his village in order to survive. He set to convincing his mother to let him go. She cried, and he pleaded with her. “Please, so I can help you.” Eventually, she sold jewelry that his father had given her, a cow, and a tree.

With that money, the young Hossain was able to purchase a passport with 200 rupees ($25) left over. In Bombay, he found part-time work on a Greek cargo ship, scooping tons of rust and silt from the hulls of the ship’s ballast tanks. It was a miserable job, he says, but a necessary one to keep the ship’s counterbalancing system operating. After a few days, his hard work attracted the attention of the ship’s captain, he says, who decided to take him on as permanent crew.

“That was awesome,” Hossain says. “It was one of the golden moments of my life.”

That boat took him all over the world, he says, eventually docking in Houston. In 1990, he became an American citizen.

“American citizenship is too deep for me,” Hossain says. “This is the land I fell in love with. I found America with so much sacrifice. I have such a deep love for this nation. My English is broken, but my love is not broken.”

He doesn’t look much like the man who was arrested two years ago. Back then, Hossain wore a long, thick beard, his closely-cropped hair covered with a Kufi. Now, his beard is short. His hair is longer and parted, styled with a blown-dried affect. It is difficult for Hossain to understand, he says, why he was singled out.

“When they arrested me, I couldn’t understand what happened to me. Why? Was it my ethnic background? My beard?” he asks. “My religion? Did God say you can’t love America? Where? Is America not a part of God’s love?”

“There is sometimes children sleep,” Hossain says, “but husband and wife can’t sleep. We talk. I say, ‘What will happen, we have no knowledge.’ She [Mossamat, his wife] will have to give up the shop. She is a woman, six children . . . “ he trails off. There is nothing he can say, and his voice is starting to break. He is contemplating those 400 years.

“But in the morning,” he continues, his youngest son crowding close to him, “we have to get up, get ready, drop students at school. And we open shop at 9:30.”

‘It is very pure and simple,” says May Saffar on why she has become so involved in Yassin Aref’s case. “He is a Kurd. He is an Iraqi. I am also an Iraqi.”
Assaulted mosque: A press conference is held outside Masjid As-Salam following the arrests.

When Saffar saw on CNN that Aref had been arrested, she said to herself, “ ‘Wow, wait a minute. This is somebody I know. I know his wife.’ ”

And she was furious, she says, with Aref.

“I was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous. This man is crazy.’ I was really against him,” she recalls, and she felt that it was her responsibility as an Iraqi-American to speak out against him. She began to call anyone who would listen. “I wanted to say something against not just him, but against all Muslims who are not saying anything about terrorism and all those ideas. I was so heated up by what I had heard in the media.”

She decided to attend the trial, to find out for herself what exactly was going on. And when she did, by attending the first and second hearing, she realized that the case wasn’t what the media had made it seem.

“It was very different,” she says. “It was very different from what I was hearing in the media.”

She noticed serious mistakes in the case almost immediately. First, there was the accusation that Aref was involved with terrorist groups in Iraq. It didn’t make sense to her, she remembers, that they had found Aref’s name in a book that belonged to a leader of a terrorist group in Iraq.

“No,” she demands. “I have family in Baghdad. And they assured me over and over again that there were no terrorist groups at that time in Iraq. Saddam had no connections with any terrorism groups in Iraq.”

At the second hearing, Saffar noticed the government’s mistranslation of a crucial term.

“The word ‘kakeh.’ It does not mean ‘commander’ by any means,” Saffar says. “Kakeh is a Kurd word, it is not Arabic. Any male Kurd can be a kakeh. It means ‘older brother.’ ”

The word is so common, how could they mess that up? she asked herself.

“The difference between kakeh and commander is the difference between night and day,” she continues. “Why would the government mistranslate like that? It matters a lot in this case. To mistranslate such a common word, part of me wonders if this is an oversight or deliberate.”

Saffar is a teacher of English as a second language, as well as a professor of Arabic, and as a professional, she says, she has certain standards. The government’s case simply hasn’t measured up.

“If you don’t meet criteria there’s an A, there’s a B, there’s a C, there’s a D and an F,” she says. “And you can allow a mistake or two. But when you continue those mistakes and you show consistency, that fails you. I don’t care what the justification is. As a professional, I can only give you an F.”

“Who is holding the government accountable in this case? For making such big mistakes?” Saffar asks. “These fatal mistakes mean the end of Yassin’s life.”

Just last week, she continues, the government brought in an Urdu expert. Urdu was the language used in much of the discussion between the FBI’s informant and Hossain. Urdu is spoken in Pakistan. Hossain has a working knowledge of Urdu. Aref, a Kurd, speaks Kurdish, and his conversations with Malik were mostly in English.

“She was a witness for the government, and the government asks her what the word ‘jihad’ meant. And she said, ‘holy war.’ Wait a minute,” Saffar says, raising her voice. “Jihad is an Arabic word. It does not mean ‘holy war.’ Jihad means to strive or struggle. She is an Urdu translator. And she had no right, whatsoever, to translate such a word in this case.”

These are dangerous times, Saffar says. Being an Iraqi, having lived under a dictatorship, she has seen firsthand what happens when people surrender to their government, when they blindly go along with whatever a government says.

“We, as Iraqis, allowed Saddam to become the monster he became,” Saffar says. “We never questioned him. We let go. Look at what he did to us. After he gained our trust, he crushed us, one after the other. He basically destroyed us. He fed on our blood, and that is what kept him in power. I am not saying this is what I foresee here, but this is the lesson that I learned. I question the government. I don’t trust the government to do the right thing.”

Since becoming involved in the case, Saffar has visited Aref two times. Unlike Hossain, who was released on a $250,000 bond, Aref, a 36-year-old father of three, was denied bail. He is being held in near-solitary confinement in Rensselaer County Jail.

“When I saw him in jail,” Saffar says, “my first impression was, ‘Wow, this man really fits the stereotypes of a Muslim, a Middle Eastern.’ Perhaps you can dovetail a terrorist with that. The dark hair, the dark complexion, the dark eyes, the thick beard, OK?”

Aref was eager to talk to her, she says, and he was desperate for help.

“He told me, ‘May, of course I had no idea that this man was an FBI informant, but I remember vividly when he brought up terrorism, questions about bombing places and suicide bombers, and I told him that this is against Islam. This is barbaric.’ You know, he was basically being an imam. A leader of a Muslim community.”

“When I visited him,” she continues, “he said to me, ‘I can’t understand how I became such an important person all of a sudden. The first time I walked into court, I looked around and I saw all these people from the media, and I asked myself, How did I become such an important person?’ ”

“He is a true Muslim,” Saffar says. “Do you know what the word Muslim means? It means to submit to God. You submit to God, you surrender to God. That is the state Yassin is at.”

In the small backroom of Masjid As-Salam where children’s lessons are taught, the marker board still poses its questions, printed in clean, steady letters, from the previous Sunday studies.

“How many times a day do we pray? We pray 5 times a day.”

“Who do we worship? We worship Allah.”

“Who am I? I am a Muslim.”

Dr. Shamshad Ahmad, president of the mosque, sits uncomfortably in a child’s desk. He says it has been very difficult for everyone at the mosque since they lost their imam. Especially now, during the holy month of Ramadan.

He points to the door of the cramped room. It still bears damage from the FBI raid that captured Aref as he prepared for morning prayer two years ago.

“All the doors were kicked in, even though they heard the keys in their hands, they kicked in all the doors in the mosque,” Ahmad says. “The mosque was assaulted.”

“Mosque is a place where people come and worship,” he continues, “where they connect with God, and they fear God, and they obey the laws. They have nothing to do with violence.”

Why did the FBI have to invade the mosque? Ahmad asks. They obviously knew where Aref lived. Was it, perhaps, he wonders, to send a message?

“Two days later, we had the Friday meeting,” Ahmad says. “Only two-thirds of our regular congregation showed up. Two hundred out of the 300. One hundred people were not even willing to come to pray, they were so frightened.”

Will all the stories about wiretapping, about innocent men being accused of terrible crimes, “like our case here, no Muslims feel comfortable,” he says. “They want to avoid. My understanding is that everyone who is visible in the Muslim community of this area has been contacted by the FBI, whether interviewed or not. But many people were called by the FBI and went to their offices.”

He says that people used to come to him and mention that they had seen people writing the license-plate numbers down of the cars parked in the back of the mosque.

“The bulk of Muslim people don’t want to express themselves,” Ahmad says. “They don’t want to expose themselves. But I want this expression. From the very earliest stages, I have been appreciative of the Western society, of the laws, of the legalities, of the court system. But, it is eroding. We see it.”

But so what? We are in a war on terrorism, right? Many of these terrorists have been Muslims. Shouldn’t the Muslim community just learn to deal with this inconvenience? These are all arguments that Ahmad has heard.

“This is the attitude of the Bush-supporting people,” he says. “ ‘If my telephone is tapped, so what? I am not a terrorist. If my privacy is invaded, so what? It doesn’t matter much. If I am stopped on Central Avenue and two policeman come and search my car, what’s the big deal?’ It is a big deal. You are a private citizen. Perhaps this is how you are treated in a Third World country or by dictators. This is what we call privacy. This is what we call freedom. Freedom means I can criticize President Bush. I can oppose President Bush. Without any punishment or fear.”

Aref, Ahmad believes, was targeted because he was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration.

“It was nothing to do with terrorism” Ahmad says. “It was a phony case. It was a fabricated case. It was a manipulated case. If there are really terrorists, you go and catch them. Everyone will appreciate. So here, people feel that it was specifically targeted. Everyone in the Muslim community is scared that I am the next target.”

“He tried to take advantage of the freedom of this country,” Ahmad continues. “And everyone says . . . that he never talked about violence, never supported violence, always he talked about religious values. But he criticized the government and the Bush administration. . . . If he could have kept his mouth shut and not talked about the many evils of society perhaps he would not have been targeted.”

“The image here that we are living in a free society,” Ahmad says, “and that we can practice religion freely, is very much on the line.”

chardin@metroland.net

Schenectady Gazette : View From Here

The View From Here

Carl Strock | November 7, 2006

Following the convictions last month of the two Albany Muslims, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, on charges of money-laundering in support of terrorism - convictions that in my opinion were an insult to justice - a number of you wrote or called to ask how you could help the families of the two, having in mind that Aref has a wife and four young children and Hossain a wife and six young children.

I can now report that a fund has been established for that purpose, thanks to the efforts of some 50 people who got together at the Friends Meeting House on Madison Avenue in Albany a couple of weeks ago. If you wish to contribute you can make a check payable to the Aref-Hossain Family Fund and send it to Steven Downs, 26 Dinmore Road, Selkirk, NY 12158.

Downs is former counsel to the Commission on Judicial Conduct who worked as a volunteer on the criminal case. The money will be deposited in a dedicated account at Trustco Bank.

I am assured there are no expenses associated with the fund and that all the money will go to the families.

Mohammed Hossain owned and operated the Little Italy pizza shop on Central Avenue, and his family still has that, though the federal government took the deeds to two dumpy rental properties that he also owned.

Yassin Aref was the prayer leader, or imam, at a storefront mosque a few blocks away on Central Avenue, which was his only source of income. Before that, having arrived in this country as a refugee, he worked as a janitor at Albany Medical Center. Efforts are under way to try to find lodging for his family.

Aref is Kurdish, from Iraq, and had refugee status in the United States, along with his wife. Three of their children were born in Syria, and the youngest was born here.

Aref is 37 years old, Hossain is 51. They face decades in prison when they are sentenced in February, though I have conflicting information as to the exact sentencing guidelines.

The people who established the support fund - Quakers, Unitarians and others who count themselves as progressives - also formed a group called the Muslim Defense Committee to work on building long-term relations between the Masjid As-Salam mosque and the surrounding non-Muslim community. "The big thing we're trying to do is organize events on a regular basis to bring the larger community in to meet and get to know the families at the mosque, so the mystique is kind of eradicated," said Cathy Callan, one of the people involved in the effort. "These are our neighbors."

You can contact the committee at callanca@gmail.com or jlombardo@nycap.rr.com. They have also started a Website: nepajac.org/aref&hossain.htm.

I do take heart from this compassionate coming-together of ordinary people in Albany, though to my mind there remains a huge imbalance between the good that can be done by 50 or even 100 concerned citizens and the evil that was perpetrated by our government in tricking two otherwise law-abiding men into a deal that could be construed as supporting terrorism, just as there remains a huge imbalance between the $1,000 or so that has so far been raised and the need. How far can $1,000 go in getting two immigrant families redirected without their husbands and fathers?

I should mention, by the way, that I received a letter from Aref, the more intellectual of the two victims, in response to a column I wrote in which I said I hung my head in shame, apologized on behalf of my country, wished the two of them luck, and mentioned in passing that I did not share their faith. The letter was written from the Rensselaer County Jail, where the two men are kept in isolation while they await sentencing.

I quote exactly, so please allow for Aref's imperfect English, which is his third language: "You wrote the faith you are not sharing it with me but you are! Speaking the truth and supporting it. Care about your family and had mercy on weak, sick and children. Hate unjust and tricky. Believe me that exactly my faith so I am going to share this faith with you. Only I will believe in God to it!"

That's the kind of guy he is. and that's the kind of guy our government is going to put in prison for much of the rest of his life, leaving his family in the lurch.

As opposed to say, Shahed Hussain, known as Malik, the Pakistini hustler who was running a scam at the Department of Motor Vehicles where he had a contract to do translating and instead was actually taking drivers-license exams for people, so they could pass them, and charging up to $1,000 for his crooked services.

He's the character the FBI recruited to deceive Aref and Hossain into exchanging cash for checks, by playing to their religion and coming onto them as a brother, and who for his duplicitous services won a recommendation from the U.S. attorney's office that he be allowed to stay in this country without going to jail.

Thanks a lot, U.S. attorney's office, I want to say. Thanks a lot, FBI. You did a swell job of making the United States a better, safer country.

Meanwhile, thanks sincerely to the people who came together to form the Muslim Defense Committee and establish the Aref-Hossain Family Support Fund. Keep your head high," Aref urged me in his letter, and I urge you the same.

Daily Gazette (Schenectady) : Verdict is in, but who is really guilty?

Verdict is in, but who is really guilty?

Carl Strock | October 12, 2006

I hang my head in shame.

Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, two local Muslim men who were minding their own business until the FBI came into their lives, have been convicted of supporting terrorism, of all things.

Convicted by a jury of my peers. Not necessarily their peers, but my peers, meaning ordinary middle-class people from upstate New York, who sat patiently for 12 days and listened to evidence that in my opinion was an embarrassment to our country, or should have been an embarrassment to our country, and then sat for another 3 1/2 days and discussed that evidence before arriving at their verdict.

Guilty.

Guilty of conspiring to do something that the two probably did not understand, that in any event they never dreamed of doing until an FBI undercover operative tricked them into it (an exchange of checks for cash) and that they were so sure was OK they insisted on putting it in writing.

They were even found guilty of providing support to a terrorist organization fighting in Kashmir that one of them kept telling the FBI's snitch, who was secretly recording everything, that he didn't know anything about and that the other one thought was a musical group.

Such is the fear of Muslim terrorism, I guess. Such is the irrationality that has seized us since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Such is the determination not to take any chances.

That we expend God knows what resources - in FBI agents, translators, hidden recorders, missile experts - to play what amounts to an elaborate prank on two unsuspecting Muslim men just to see if they will fall for it, which they only partially did.

The bizarre thing is that the two, far from being terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, are not even radicals within the Islamic universe. They are altogether moderate. In 50 hours of secretly taped conversation that the FBI produced for our delectation (and we don't know how many more hours that didn't mate the cut), not once did they advocate violence, not once did they express admiration or support for al-Qaida.

On the contrary, one of them counseled the FBI's snitch, a Pakistani con-man, to stay away from the people with whom he was supposedly dealing "ammunitions," including a shoulder-fired missile, which was an FBI prop deployed in this prank. He argued that Islam would spread by Muslims doing good.

The other urged support for refugee women and children in Kashmir, if the snitch wanted to help Kashmir, and in an old diary that the FBI confiscated and translated he supported parliamentary government as against Islamic extremism.

And yet a jury convicted them. Of course I wanted to talk to the jurors after they were discharged, to ask them what went through their heads, and I pursued them out through the parking garage next to the courthouse, down on Broadway in Albany, for that purpose, but they wouldn't talk. They got in their cars and drove off, so I got no satisfaction in that department.

But I will say this: Our president is very free in his use of the word "evil" to describe the forces that threaten the United States, and I don't disagree with him on that, but what would you call a three-year effort by our own government to dupe two humble law-abiding immigrants and devastate their families, if not evil?

Yassin Aref, a Kurdish refugee from Iraq, has a wife and four children, ranging in age from 11 down to just under a year, all of them dependent on him for support.

Mohammed Hossain, an American citizen originally from Bangladesh, has a wife and six children, ranging in age from 13 also down to just under a year, and all of them likewise dependent on him and on his hole-in-the-wall pizza shop.

Neither of the men, I repeat, was doing anything whatsoever to threaten this country or to support other who might threaten this country.

But the FBI tricked them, a jury bought the trick, and they now face some 20 years of incarceration each. And not in the county jail but most likely in a maximum-security federal prison in Illinois or Colorado, as supporters of terrorism.

What do you think will become of their wives and children? How will they support themselves? How will they live? Some of the children are quite Americanized, I understand, but the wives are not. Not at all.

Think about it. Think about yourself in that position. Living in a foreign land, trying to function in a foreign language, facing what they face.

I have spent a little time with the two men, and they both strike me as decent - Aref religious, thoughtful and scholarly, Hossain, self-effacing, unsophisticated, hard-working.

They came to this country full of hopes, and they broke no laws until the FBI very elaborately led them to do so, if you think they broke laws at all, which I really don't.

So if we're going to talk about evil, is it evil what the FBI did to these men and their families? Is it evil what the U.S. attorney's office did in prosecuting the case? I don't have to tell you what I think. If evil means anything, it has to mean smashing people's lives for no legitimate reason.

I would like to say something to them, if by chance they get to read this in their solation cells in the Rensselaer County Jail, where they await sentencing.

Yassin and Mohammed: I hope you have the strength to endure what you now face. I suspect you do, that you will find the strength in your religious faith, a faith that I do not share, but that is obviously a large part of your lives.

The time may come when Congress will pass a resolution apologizing to you and others like you who got swept up in the fear that followed 9/11, just as it passed a resolution apologizing to the Japanese-Americans who got swept up in the fear that followed Pearl Harbor, but that will probably come too late to do you any practical good. Your lives will have inched away by then, and your children will be long grown.

I hope they grow up able not to hate America, just as I hope you too are able not to hate America.

It is just your great misfortune that you were who you were at this time and in this place, that you were brown-skinned, bearded Muslim men speaking in foreign accents, in Albany, after the attacks of 9/11. The local FBI office needed to prove itself in the new War on Terror, and you were it. As simple as that.

I am very sorry for you and your families, and as presumptuous as it may be, I apologize to you on behalf of my country.

Good luck.

Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com

Albany Times-Union : Suspects raise domestic spy issue

Suspects raise domestic spy issue

2 Albany Muslim men accused in FBI sting seek information

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer | January 5, 2006

ALBANY -- The first formal challenge of a controversial national spying program has been raised in the case of two Albany men who were ensnared last year in an FBI counterterrorism sting.

Attorneys for the Muslim men, Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, recently filed motions in U.S. District Court asking the government to disclose whether the pair were subjected to the domestic surveillance measures, which triggered a national debate when the activity was first exposed last month in a report by The New York Times.

The National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program relied on a secret directive issued by President Bush more than three years ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, that allowed the cryptic NSA to circumvent court-authorized wiretaps in the hastened hunt for terrorists here and abroad. The Bush administration has defended the practice, contending it was a matter of national security, and not unlawful, to sift through thousands of phone calls and e-mails without a warrant or court order.

Bush said last week that the measures, implemented to monitor conversations between Americans and terror suspects abroad, are "consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities."

But the Albany investigation is a sting case, which means the government will likely be compelled at trial to show the men were predisposed to take part in a terrorism plot without any urging from an FBI informant. However, if it turns out they were targeted because of information secretly gleaned from their e-mails or telephone calls, the entire case could be jeopardized if its foundation was based on an unlawful act, according to their attorneys.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI reshaped its mission to focus on counterterrorism. But many of their sting cases have drawn controversy.

The Albany-based sting began in July 2003 when the FBI sent an undercover informant, a Pakistani immigrant and Muslim, into Hossain's pizza shop to lure the men into a plot to make money from the sale of missile launchers to terrorists.

Federal authorities have admitted Aref was the "ultimate target" of their lengthy operation. Aref's name, phone number and Albany address were found in a notebook recovered from a bombed-out Iraqi encampment -- about two months before the sting began -- that the government contends was occupied by "terrorists."

It's not clear when the FBI learned of the notebook entry or if it triggered the sting. His lawyer said it's possible Aref was being monitored before the government collected any information tying him to terrorist figures.

Hossain's and Aref's confidential criminal history reports, which prosecutors have turned over to their lawyers, show no arrests outside of their Aug. 5, 2004, arrests in the sting case.

However, their criminal history reports, which are normally not public, refer to a U.S. attorney general's directive on April 11, 2002, regarding "known or suspected terrorists."

It's not clear why the entry is listed in their criminal history reports.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Pericak, who is prosecuting the case, declined comment. Hossain's attorney, Kevin Luibrand, and Aref's attorney, Terence L. Kindlon, also declined to discuss their motions, citing judge's orders not to discus the case.

The 2002 directive from former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the FBI, the newly formed Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force and other federal agencies to begin coordinating their activities to fight terrorism. Ashcroft's memo also noted an Oct. 30, 2001, directive from Bush in which the President ordered that the task force should have access to electronic surveillance and other intelligence information "to keep foreign terrorists and their supporters out of the United States."

Even if Aref and Hossain were secretly monitored by the NSA, it's not clear whether their attorneys, or, the public, will ever know. So far, U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy, who is presiding over their case, has not granted any requests by defense attorneys for access to classified information gathered by the government.

Much of the material has been reviewed by McAvoy under seal, and not turned over to the defense teams.

The new request for access to any NSA surveillance records, if they exist, is scheduled to be addressed at a status conference slated for Monday in U.S. District Court in Albany.

Aref and Hossain were arrested last year on a 19-count indictment charging them with money laundering in connection with a plot to sell grenade launchers to terrorists. The government has since added more charges, including allegations the men conspired to provide material support to a Pakistani terrorist group, although the support was in the form of taking part in the FBI sting. There was never any real terrorist plot.

Hossain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who has lived in Albany for more than two decades, claims he was lured into the plot by an overzealous FBI informant.

Aref, 35, is an Iraqi-born religious scholar who was hired as imam at the Masjid As Salam mosque on Central Avenue soon after he arrived in the United States seven years ago. Aref and Hossain had been free on bond while their case is pending, but Aref's freedom was revoked by a federal judge on Sept. 30 when federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment that contained allegations of Aref's past ties to terrorist organizations.

The case is expected to go to trial in the coming months.

Albany Times-Union : Terror suspect wants own trial

Terror suspect wants own trial

Albany pizza shop owner says case against imam hurts his chance with jurors

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer | December 10, 2005

ALBANY -- A pizza shop owner who was ensnared in an FBI counterterrorism sting has requested a separate trial from his co-defendant, Yassin M. Aref, arguing that government allegations linking Aref to Middle Eastern terrorist figures would prejudice a jury.

In a 64-page motion filed late Friday in U.S. District Court, Mohammed M. Hossain, a Bangladesh immigrant who has lived in Albany for more than two decades, also asked a federal judge to dismiss the case against him, claiming he was coerced into taking part in a money laundering scheme by an overzealous informant for the FBI.

Hossain's attorney, Kevin Luibrand, declined comment on the motion. The motion is a two-pronged tactical move that is apparently intended to distance Hossain from Aref, whom federal authorities have admitted was the "ultimate target" of their lengthy sting operation.

"The severance motion is rarely granted and the fact is he's accused of conspiring with the other guy," said Donald T. Kinsella, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Albany. "If he's accused of conspiring with him, it's unlikely the court is going to make the government go through two trials with the same proof."

Aref, 35, is an Iraqi-born religious scholar who was hired as imam at the Masjid As Salam mosque on Central Avenue soon after he arrived in the United States six years ago. Aref and Hossain had been free on bond while their case is pending, but Aref's freedom was revoked by a federal judge on Sept. 30 when federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment that contained allegations of Aref's past ties to terrorist organizations.

Aref's attorney, Terence L. Kindlon, has disputed the government's claims, calling them "artfully woven" and based on journal entries about people Aref met while he was a young, displaced Iraqi refugee living in the Middle East. Kindlon said Aref had met many people in his travels, including men who were connected to terrorism. But meeting them does not mean Aref supported what they were doing, Kindlon has said.

Meanwhile, Luibrand, in seeking to bolster his motion on the entrapment defense, has attacked the government's claim that Hossain was "predisposed" to become involved in a crime supporting terrorism. He said their assertion is based on the fact Hossain didn't report income he made from tips while delivering pizzas, and because he had tried to help his brother, who is mentally retarded, obtain a state identification card with the help of the FBI's informant.

Luibrand argues Hossain is heard on FBI tapes telling the informant he did not believe it was illegal to hide his tip income from the Internal Revenue Service because he did not declare deductions for the wear on his car. He also believed it was not illegal for his brother to obtain a non-driver identification card, according to the motion.

At one point, the informant can be heard telling Hossain that what they are doing to get his brother an ID is "not illegal." The informant's role in obtaining the ID was to serve as an interpreter for Hossain's brother, according to court records.

Still, it's clear in Luibrand's motion he is concerned about the regarding Aref's background, and he contends a jury could be poisoned if government prosecutors begin talking about "jihads" and "religious wars."

"The alleged 'bad acts' of defendant Aref all have alleged 'terrorist' messages in language and action, and will have an unavoidable 'spillover' effect upon defendant Hossain," the motion said.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has reshaped its mission with a focus on counterterrorism. But many of their sting cases, usually involving enlisting Middle Eastern informants to penetrate mosques and other Muslim circles in search of people who might support terrorism, have been controversial.

The Albany-based sting began in July 2003 when the FBI sent an undercover informant, who is a Pakistani immigrant and Muslim, into Hossain's pizza shop with the intention of luring the men into a plot to make money from the sale of missile launchers to terrorists.

Aref was not approached by the informant. Rather, he was enlisted by Hossain to witness the transactions under Muslim tradition, according to court records.

Aref and Hossain were arrested Aug. 5, 2004, on a 19-count indictment charging them with money laundering in connection with a plot to sell grenade launchers to terrorists. The government has since added more charges, including allegations the men conspired to provide material support to a Pakistani terrorist group, although the support was in the form of taking part in the FBI sting. There was never any real terrorist plot.

No evidence connects Hossain to terrorism other than his alleged participation in the FBI sting, and Hossain remains free on $250,000 bond.

Federal prosecutors have targeted Aref's background in their criminal case, meticulously retracing his Middle East contacts, telephone records and personal journal writings.

The FBI claims entries in Aref's personal journals, seized 16 months ago during raids at his mosque and home, link him to Mullah Krekar, founder of Ansar al-Islam, a violent terrorist group that U.S. authorities contend has ties to al-Qaida and has been responsible for much of the attacks on coalition forces.

The journals also show Aref allegedly met in Syria with a top official with Hamas, another group designated a terrorist organization by the Department of State, according to the government.

If convicted on all counts, both face sentences of more than 400 years.

WSWS : FBI’s Albany terror “sting” begins to unravel

FBI’s Albany terror “sting” begins to unravel

By Bill Van Auken | August 19, 2004

The prosecution on terrorism charges of two Muslim immigrants in Albany, New York, has begun to unravel with the revelation that the principal piece of evidence used to justify their entrapment in an FBI sting operation was falsified.

The two men—Yassin M. Aref, 34, a Kurdish immigrant, and Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, 49, a Bangladeshi immigrant—were arrested in pre-dawn raids on August 5. They have been charged with providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, importing firearms without a license, money laundering and conspiracy.

The conspiracy, however, was entirely an invention of the FBI. Using a confidential informer—another immigrant promised leniency on a criminal charge in return for cooperation—the FBI reportedly drew the two defendants into a fictitious scheme that involved the selling of a shoulder-fired missile to someone plotting to assassinate the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations.

Hossain had approached the FBI informant earlier, asking for a loan to bail out his business, a pizza shop. It was then that the FBI set the sting into motion, inventing the story about the sale of the weapon and having the informant ask Hossain to hold the proceeds in return for a portion of the money. The only alleged role played by Aref, the spiritual leader at an Albany mosque, was to serve as a witness to the financial transaction.

The key evidence used in FBI affidavits seeking the search warrants that allowed the sting to go forward was a notebook said to have been recovered by the US military at a “terrorist training camp” in Iraq. It was claimed that the notebook included Aref’s name, together with an out-of-date telephone number. The FBI said the notation, written in Kurdish, referred to Aref as “commander.” This suggested, according to the FBI, that Aref was associated with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamic fundamentalist movement alleged to have connections with Al Qaeda.

Earlier this week, however, federal prosecutors were compelled to admit that this evidence, like the plot itself, was fabricated. In a letter sent to Judge David Homer on Monday, the US Attorney’s office acknowledged its “error.”

“After obtaining a copy of the original entry late yesterday,” the prosecution wrote, “FBI translators who reviewed it concluded that the Kurdish-language word that precedes Aref’s name in the second-to-last line of the entry is ‘brother,’ not ‘commander,’ as indicated in the [Army] teletype.”

Other Kurdish speakers have said that the word used in the notation—”kak”— could also be translated as “mister.”

In a bail hearing last week, Judge Homer refused to release the two men, citing, in particular, the use of the word “commander” in the notebook. “If true,” the judge said, “that evidence carries significant weight to Mr. Aref’s ties to terrorist activities.”

Lawyers for the two men said that a new bail hearing has been set for next week, based on the debunking of the prosecution’s claim.

Equally spurious is the prosecution’s claim that the US Army found the notebook following an attack on a “terrorist camp” in Rawah, Iraq, near the Syrian border, in June 2003. Using helicopter gunships and tanks, the US attackers slaughtered approximately 80 people. Some of those killed were said to have come to Iraq from Syria and other neighboring countries on the eve of the war to resist the US invasion. No proof was ever offered by the military that those killed were linked to Ansar al-Islam, Al Qaeda or any other terrorist network.

Following the attack on Rawah, the US military conducted extensive raids in the town itself, rounding up hundreds of people and ransacking homes. Yet no evidence has been presented on precisely where the notebook was found, whether it was on the person of one of those killed, or in one of the many houses that were searched.

Aref, who came to the US as a political refugee several years ago, has many relatives still in Iraq, including three brothers.

After the exposure of the government’s phony claim concerning the notebook, the Justice Department filed a motion Tuesday invoking the Classified Information Procedures Act, a little-used government secrecy law, claiming that disclosure of further evidence against the defendants could jeopardize “national security.” The law allows prosecutors to withhold evidence from defense attorneys and the court, submitting merely a summary of what the evidence allegedly shows.

Attorneys for the two Muslim immigrants responded angrily to the government’s motion. “It’s kind of shocking,” said Terence Kindlon, who is representing Aref. He told the Albany Times Union: “They had three press conferences announcing the arrests, one in Washington, D.C., and two in Albany. They put out all this prejudicial damaging information, much of which turns out to be based upon demonstrably false information, and now they want to shut everything down so we can’t respond.”

As for the government’s claim that it made a “mistake” in claiming that the notebook referred to his client as “commander,” Kindlon remarked, “This is the point where the whole thing starts to sound like a two-bit frame-up.”

The government has presented no other evidence tying the two defendants to terrorism. Reportedly, federal prosecutors included the claim in their affidavits for search warrants that Hossain had voiced support for an Islamic extremist group. However, the group—Jamaat el-Islami—is a political party with cabinet members in the Bangladeshi coalition government.

In addition to invoking the state secrecy law, the government has filed a motion to push back deadlines for trial proceedings, indicating that it has yet to translate evidence from a year’s worth of surveillance tapes. This includes discussions between the defendants and the informant in both Arabic and Urdu. Apparently, Aref does not even understand the latter language.

There is every indication that the case in Albany is a politically inspired frame-up, timed to coincide with the Bush administration’s ratcheting up of terrorist alerts. That no terrorist conspiracy existed besides the one invented by the FBI itself was largely obscured in the government’s trumpeting of another success in the “war on terror.”

Now that the scheme is falling apart, the invocation of “national security” is meant to hide this state conspiracy from the general public.

[snip]

Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

CBS : Error In Albany 'Terror' Case

Error In Albany 'Terror' Case

Terror Camp Document Said Defendant Was 'Brother,' Not 'Commander'

by Jarrett Murphy | August 18, 2004

ALBANY, N.Y. (CBS/AP) A key piece of evidence against a jailed mosque leader accused of supporting terrorism has come into question, with federal prosecutors acknowledging that a note found in a terrorist camp may have been mistranslated.

Yassin Muhiddin Aref is charged with aiding a government informant in a sting operation involving a fake plot to buy a shoulder-fired missile to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat.

The translation discrepancy stems from a notebook that the FBI said was found in a terrorist camp in northern Iraq last summer. The indictment said an entry in Arabic script referred to Aref as a "commander" and listed his former address and phone number in Albany.

However, FBI translators now have a copy of the original entry and disagree with the earlier conclusion, saying the word was in the Kurdish language, not Arabic, and actually means "brother," prosecutors told the judge in a letter.

Aref is the imam of the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany. Also charged earlier this month in the sting operation was Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, 49, one of the mosque's founders.

The notebook was cited last week by Magistrate David Homer as part of his rationale for refusing to set bail for Aref.

Defense attorneys say the translation error undermines the entire government case, and that both men should get out on bail. "It's a travesty," lawyer Terence Kindlon said.

U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby said authorities are not yet sure which translation is correct, but said it doesn't change the case.

"It doesn't change their behavior. It doesn't change the significance of where this notebook was found," he said Tuesday.

Aref, a native of Kurdistan, and Hossain, who is from Bangladesh, face up to 70 years in prison if convicted.

Also Tuesday, prosecutors said they would try to restrict the release of some information relating to the case.

"The United States believes that disclosure of this material would raise issues of national security that the court should address before any of this material is provided to the defense," Suddaby said in a court filing.

Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, the government can ask to submit only summaries of classified evidence. If the court refuses but the attorney general insists, the government can keep the material secret.

According to an FBI affidavit, the men laundered money for the purchase of the launcher they were told would be used to assassinate the ambassador at the Pakistani consulate across from the United Nations in New York. The murder supposedly was meant to punish the Pakistani government for cooperating with non-Muslims.

In fact, there was no such plot. The purchase of the RPG-7 grenade launcher and the assassination scheme were fabrications put forth by a convicted felon who was secretly cooperating with federal prosecutors to reduce his prison sentence on document fraud charges.

The arrests in Albany were unrelated to the Bush administration's recent terror alerts indicating al Qaeda may be plotting attacks against U.S. financial buildings, federal officials have said.

According to the FBI affidavit, Hossain approached the FBI informant in the summer of 2003 about getting a fraudulent New York driver's license. In subsequent meetings, the informant told Hossain that he imported weapons from China, the affidavit said.

At a videotaped meeting on Nov. 20, the informant showed Hossain a picture of an RPG-7, a fairly rudimentary anti-tank weapon developed by the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. The two discussed using such a weapon, according to the affidavit.

The FBI said its informant, who wasn't identified except as a non-U.S. citizen, told the men he was affiliated with Jaish e-Mohammed, an Islamic extremist group in Pakistan that the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization.

Authorities said the men were paid $65,000 in checks and cash to purchase a missile and disguise the source of the money involved.

Two U.S. law enforcement officials who spoke only on condition of anonymity said Hossain and Aref have ties to a group called Ansar al-Islam, which has been linked to al Qaeda. Prior to the March 2003 U.S. invasion, Ansar was based in an area of northern Iraq that may have been outside of Saddam Hussein's control.

©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Albany Times-Union : Mosque welcomed in informant

Mosque welcomed in informant

Albany -- FBI saw Shahed Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant who faced charges, as a person who could infiltrate group and root out terror

By BRENDAN LYONS, Staff writer | August 8, 2004

Correction: Shahed Hussain, involved in an FBI sting that led to arrests in Albany last week, was incorrectly identified as Middle Eastern in an earlier edition of this story. Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant, is from Southeast Asia.

Three days into 2002, Shahed Hussain was a mini-mart entrepreneur on the crest of realizing the American dream.

The 48-year-old Pakistani immigrant was about two weeks away from being sworn in as a naturalized U.S. citizen. He ran gas stations, a beverage center and a retail distribution business in Latham, and shared a modest home in Loudonville with his wife and children.

But Hussain made a major mistake: He participated in a scam to get illegal driver's licenses for other immigrants who couldn't get them on their own. He was arrested, and on Jan. 23, 2002, a grand jury in Albany indicted him on one felony count of engaging in the production and transfer of false government identification documents.

His subsequent guilty plea seemed to dash his hopes of remaining in the United States. But like others who face prison or deportation, Hussain was offered a way out. He went to work as a government informant.

This week, following the arrest of the spiritual leader and a member of a Central Avenue mosque on charges related to aiding terrorism, Hussain's undercover work ended with a flourish of national attention.

Court papers identify Hussain only as a confidential informant, and the FBI initially asked the Times Union not to publish his name, saying he would be endangered. He is now in protective custody, and his identity has become widely known in Albany.

For the FBI, Hussain was a perfect undercover agent. A Muslim from Southeast Asia, he had a kind of street savvy that would prove invaluable. The bureau saw him as someone who could do what FBI agents could not -- infiltrate the inner circle of Masjid As-Salam, a storefront mosque that had drawn their attention in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"He could get inside places they never could," said his attorney, James Long. "But when most of this was happening, he was in conflict with himself about what he was doing for them."

Hussain first helped the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Albany make a series of arrests in at least two criminal cases involving fraudulent driver's license applications made by immigrants, including some from China.

Those cases alone were supposed to square him with the FBI, to reduce his chances of going to prison and to prevent deportation. But even afterward, he continued to work for the government, Long said.

Last summer, Hussain told his FBI handler, counterterrorism Special Agent Tim Coll, about a conversation with the owner of a downtown Albany pizza shop. In an affidavit filed in federal court, Coll recounted that Hussain told him that Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, a 49-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh, wanted help getting a driver's license for his brother.

The FBI wired the informant with recording devices as he met with Hossain. Eventually, the informant went with the brother to take the license examination, helping him deal with difficult questions by "translating" the correct answers as an oblivious Department of Motor Vehicles worker looked on.

For the FBI, that small fraud was the first step in a much bigger case.

Federal agents had been watching the Central Avenue mosque and its 200 members for almost two years. One of its founders, Ali Yaghi, 33, had been deported following the terrorist attacks -- after he was interrogated extensively about possible connections to the hijackings, his lawyer said at the time. Other mosque members also had been questioned. Among them was Yassin Muhiddin Aref, 34, a Kurd who emigrated from Iraq and serves as the mosque's imam, or spiritual leader.

Under the FBI's direction, Hussain, the informant, fostered a friendship with Hossain, the pizza store owner. He also began visiting the mosque and occasionally praying there. Last October, he was again wearing a wire when he struck up a conversation with Hossain about jihad, and whether it was possible to make money from the holy war.

That same month, on Oct. 15, a fire at Hussain's house in Loudonville triggered an intense investigation by the FBI, ATF and Colonie police. The FBI apparently was concerned that someone was trying to kill their informant, but those fears were eased when investigators determined the fire was an accident involving a space heater.

The investigation resumed with the informant directed to press Hossain about making money from activities that might be related to terrorism.

Hossain's friends say he's no terrorist, but they acknowledge that he has money problems stemming from his struggling pizza business and the cost of renovating a rental property. The FBI in court papers says Hossain asked the informant, a man he knew as a successful businessman, for a loan.

The FBI sting went into high gear.

A month later, Hossain was summoned to the informant's business, where agents had installed surveillance devices and video recorders. The men talked about jihad, and the informant displayed a shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missile. He told Hossain that he imported the weapon and others like it from China, and that his "Mujahid brothers use the equipment to shoot down airplanes."

Similar fictitious-missile stings have been staged by the FBI in New Jersey and Texas in recent years.

Hossain, according to federal authorities, smiled when he saw the missile and stated "he had never seen such a weapon before." They continued talking about the illegality of the missiles, the money they could make from them, and religion, according to federal court records.

Authorities contend Hossain and the informant spent several weeks outlining a plan by which the informant would launder money through Hossain's shop and real estate holdings. In return, Hossain would make $5,000 from the $50,000 sale of the missile, according to the FBI.

In early December, Hossain told the informant he wanted to bring in a third party to witness the deal, which is custom for Muslims. Hossain invited in Aref, the Kurdish refugee imam.

The three men met often over the following six months as the informant divulged more details of his fake terror plot, telling Aref and Hossain that missiles would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York City. Federal authorities contend neither man balked at taking part in the scheme, even when they were told that an attack was imminent.

In predawn raids Thursday, Hossain and Aref were arrested, their mosque and homes raided by federal agents. They are each charged with felony counts of money laundering and conspiracy to conceal material support for terrorism, charges that carry maximum prison terms of 20 and 15 years, respectively, and fines of up to $250,000. Both are due in court Tuesday for a bail hearing where prosecutors are expected to unseal an indictment and ask a federal judge to keep them in jail while the case is pending.

In announcing the case at a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Deputy Attorney General James Comey seemed to downplay the significance of the arrests, describing the investigation as "not the case of the century." He took pains to say that neither man was actively involved in any plot to do violence -- their alleged crime involved only money laundering.

But Comey and other law enforcement officials said more details about the case will be revealed Tuesday, including a reported link between Aref and a suspected terrorist group in Iraq.

The Associated Press has reported that American soldiers in northern Iraq last summer found an address book at a camp used by Ansar al-Islam, identified by U.S. authorities as a terrorist group linked to the al-Qaida network. The book reportedly included Aref's name, address and telephone number in Albany and referred to him as "The Commander."

Albany attorney Terence L. Kindlon met with Aref for several hours late Friday at the Rensselaer County Jail and afterward described his client as "ethereal" and deeply religious.

"He's a spiritual guy, and he has this aura of calm about him," said Kindlon, who was hired by friends of the jailed man.

Kindlon expressed skepticism about the significance of an address book found in a region where Aref has many relatives and friends.

"I want to see it and get it translated myself and see what the hell it means and see if this group was really a terrorist group," Kindlon said. "I understand it might be a cultural study group.

"My experience with the government, when they've got all the cards and they're telling you what the cards say, is that it's a good idea not to believe them," he said.

Like many Kurds, Aref fled oppression by Saddam Hussein's regime, eventually reaching Syria and being sent on to the United States, Kindlon said.

"This country was chosen for him, he didn't choose this country," Kindlon said. "He was sent here through a combination of (the United Nations) and church ... machinery that was in place to move refugees around."

In Albany, Aref settled into a simple life, scraping by driving an ambulette and serving as the imam at the Masjid As-Salam mosque.

"He told me he was so grateful to get here (United States)," Kindlon said. "He's got a regular job. He studied comparative religions in college. ... He told me if he were under Saddam, they would just job his head off. He knows that here he would be treated fairly."

Kindlon said he expects the "wheels are going to come off" the government's case as the national spotlight on the arrests fades.

"We've seen so many of these supposed terrorist cases begin with a bang and end with a whimper," he said, adding that it's likely that his client and Hossain will argue that they were entrapped.

Shahed Hussain, meanwhile, is hiding. Long said he can contact his client only through the FBI.

Like the two men he helped investigate, Hussain's future is in doubt. He has not yet been sentenced; his criminal case remains pending in federal court.

Long said it's time to close the books.

"They liked his cooperation," Long said. "They knew he was the kind of guy they could get to infiltrate. ... Now, they ought to withdraw his charges."