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Naturalized citizens pose problem for investigatorsBy MARY JACOBY
© St. Petersburg Times, When a Texas flight school instructor named Essam al Ridi delivered a used cargo jet to a dusty airfield in Sudan in 1993, a friend took him to see the man who had bought the plane. It was Osama bin Laden. "We just had dinner and chatted," al Ridi testified in federal court last March. "I gave the keys of the plane to Osama bin Laden." Al Ridi and his friend, a former Texas tire shop employee and bin Laden personal secretary, Wadih El Hage, are naturalized American citizens. And both have been deeply implicated as operatives in bin Laden's terrorist activities. As naturalized citizens, they could not have been rounded up on immigration violations the way federal authorities are holding dozens of Muslim foreigners for questioning after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "There is a gap between someone who's violated their immigration status and a naturalized American citizen," said Juliette Kayyem, a member of the National Commission on Terrorism and former Justice Department lawyer. While immigration violators can be detained with relative ease, officers have to meet a higher standard of evidence to hold American citizens for any length of time. "We've always viewed naturalized citizens as having the same rights and guarantees as any American citizen" unless they have been charged, Kayyem said. If the past is any guide, American citizens are likely to be found among bin Laden's foot soldiers. In May, for example, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted four men in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. One of them was El Hage, a naturalized American from Lebanon. During his trial, two other naturalized citizens testified about their extensive roles in the bin Laden network. They were al Ridi, the Egyptian-born flight instructor who had settled in Texas, and Ali Mohamed, another Egyptian native who was convicted in October 2000 on five counts of plotting terrorist attacks for bin Laden. Mohamed, a former U.S. Army sergeant, is cooperating with the government in hopes of reducing his sentence. Al Ridi gave his testimony under a grant of immunity from prosecution. Citing a threat to domestic security, Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday announced expanded federal powers for holding people on immigration violations. The rules allow authorities to constitutionally cast a wide net in the hunt for terrorists. Before that, the government had to release suspects after 24 hours if they had not been charged with a crime or violation, such as staying in the United States beyond the terms of their visas. Now, people picked up on immigration violations can be held indefinitely "in the event of emergency or other extraordinary circumstance" without being charged, the rules say. Federal authorities investigating the attacks have arrested 115 people on immigration violations, Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said Wednesday. Investigators "want to talk to" about 190 other people, she said, declining to say whether U.S. citizens were in that group. On Thursday, Tucker said the department would no longer release information on the subject. If there are naturalized citizens whom law enforcement wants to question, the challenge will be rooting them out in a constitutional manner. That task is all the more urgent because more lives could be lost if future terrorist plots are not quickly upended. "If there's no legal means to hold you, there's no legal means to hold you," said Jonathan Weiner, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law. "It's potentially a problem. You can't arrest somebody without probable cause."
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From the Times wire desk
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