NEW YORK, 15 June 2005 — I read in the papers that the FBI has charged two more US citizens with conspiring to provide material support to Al-Qaeda. The two, it is alleged, were enthusiastic followers of Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Dr. Rafiq Abdus Sabir, 50, of Boca Raton, Fla., and Tarik Shah, 42, of New York, a martial arts expert and jazz musician, are currently being held without bail. They got busted as the result of an FBI sting, and the Feds say they have it all on tape.
Now, I haven’t a clue whether these two are bad guys, but since they haven’t had a trial yet, the US Constitution says they’re presumed innocent.
Beyond that, though, you’ll pardon me if I approach this with just a tad of skepticism.
The reason is that the track records of the FBI, the immigration guys at the Department of Homeland Security, the “few bad apples” who brought us Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and the sometimes overzealous lawyers in the Justice Department, aren’t all that reassuring.
In a previous column I mentioned the case of two 16-year-old Muslim girls arrested in New York and detained in Pennsylvania for six weeks as would-be suicide bombers. The government last week quietly released one of the girls pending deportation to Guinea and allowed the other one to return to Bangladesh with her family. Yet, media reports at the time of their arrest cited a government document that said the FBI believed the girls posed “an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers.’’
In another strange case, this one involving domestic defendants, prosecutors have not yet let go.
A year ago, Hope Kurtz died of a heart attack in the northern New York State city of Buffalo. Her husband, Steve, an art professor at the University of Buffalo, called police and the emergency medical services.
What the police saw when they got to the Kurtz home, aside from Hope Kurtz’s body and a distraught husband, were vials, bacterial cultures, and an assortment of laboratory equipment including a mobile DNA extracting machine used for testing food products for genetic contamination.
Kurtz explained to the police that these were some of the materials for an art exhibit he and his wife had been preparing on genetic modification. The police did not buy his story. They called the FBI. A hazardous materials team carried out testing. County health officials declared the Kurtz home a potential health risk and sealed it for two days while a state lab examined the bacterial cultures found inside.
They confiscated Hope’s body and Steve’s computer, notebooks, and art supplies. They cordoned off part of the street, quarantined the Kurtz home, and took Steve to a hotel, where the FBI questioned him for two days.
Meanwhile, the special agent in charge of the Buffalo FBI office gave interviews to the press. Officials eventually made it known that there was no danger to public health, and Kurtz was allowed to move back to his home. But he was indicted for mail and wire fraud, charges normally used against those defrauding others of money or property, as in telemarketing schemes.
Also indicted was Robert Ferrell, head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health, for allegedly helping Kurtz obtain $256 worth of bacteria for one of his art projects.
No trial date has yet been set. But while the case is pending, FBI agents have been talking with people connected with Kurtz — museum curators in Massachusetts and the state of Washington, colleagues in New York and California, and current students at Buffalo.
The DOJ has brought several other high-profile prosecutions. Among them is the case of “The Lackawanna Six”. Arrested in the Yemeni community of this old steel town in upstate New York, the six young men were charged under the federal anti-terrorism statute with providing material support to Al-Qaeda. Specifically, the men were charged with providing “material support” in the form of training. The training consisted of paying for a uniform, attending the training camp where they learned to use weapons, and standing guard duty. The charges against them also specified viewing videotapes of the bombing of the USS Cole and speeches by Osama Bin-Laden.
None of the defendants engaged in acts that were, at the time, obviously criminal in nature. It was not until several months after their return from Afghanistan that planes crashed into the World Trade Center. The six young men agree to plead guilty to providing “material support” to Al-Qaeda. Prosecutors said the defendants belonged to a terrorist “sleeper cell.” The defendants claim they pled guilty because the FBI threatened to send them to Guantanamo Bay.
So, as to the most recent arrests, watch this space for further news of Dr. Sabir and Mr. Shah.
