PART TWO....
Hady Hassan Omar's Detention
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But as time passes since the trauma of Sept. 11, the cost to individual rights is beginning to come into focus. David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, argues that ''the policy of keeping people in jail until the F.B.I. clears them is essentially 'guilty until proven innocent.'''
Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, agrees. ''It's fundamentally un-American,'' he says. ''What's most troubling is that the American public is being kept in the dark about what is being done in the name of the war on terror.'' The A.C.L.U. has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the names of some of the detainees.
In New York, a class-action suit filed in April on behalf of at least 87 detainees, separate from the A.C.L.U. suit, accuses the Justice Department of wholesale violations of the constitutional rights to which both American citizens and noncitizens in the United States are entitled. Several rulings by federal judges over the past few months indicate that the detainees could get a sympathetic hearing.
There are many who believe that the necessity of preventing future terrorist attacks supersedes the rights of any individual, that standards of due process must be amended to suit extreme circumstances. ''Human rights norms recognize that in times of grave emergency, governments can take steps that are different from peacetime so long as they are strictly necessary and proportional,'' says Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at Yale and a former federal prosecutor. ''On Sept. 11 no one knew the extent of the threat, whether Al Qaeda succeeded in finding fissile materials, so there was great concern that the other shoe might drop.''
Ultimately, the issue will be for the Supreme Court and historians to decide. With Al Qaeda sleeper cells still possibly in the United States and Osama bin Laden still possibly at large, officials in Washington are reluctant to reveal tactics or discuss specifics or even to answer the charges leveled against them in particular cases. For now, what little is known about the methods used on the domestic front of the war on terror comes largely from the personal accounts of former detainees like Omar.
is trouble began on Sept. 12 with a knock at the door of the house in Fort Smith, Ark., that Omar was staying in with his second wife, Candy (his first marriage, also to an American, ended in divorce), and Jasmine. The visitor was a man wearing jeans and a white polo shirt. A service revolver hung from his belt, and he carried a gold shield identifying him as a deputy from the nearby sheriff's office. Two other men were waiting outside, next to an unmarked S.U.V. parked in the driveway.
''They just want to ask me a few questions,'' Omar told Candy. She remembers that Omar didn't look especially worried, just a little tired. The day before, he had spent 14 hours at the Houston airport after his Sept. 11 flight from Florida was grounded, along with all air traffic in the country. ''I'll be home soon,'' he promised, with only a hint of the Egyptian accent that Candy had found exotic when he first asked for her phone number at the Electric Cowboy club some 16 months back.
Candy might have been more concerned had she seen the F.B.I. agent handcuff her husband. But even when she went to the small F.B.I. office in Fort Smith to answer questions later that afternoon, the gravity of the situation had not yet dawned on her. ''I wasn't scared or anything,'' she recalled.
The F.B.I. agents, after all, were relaxed and friendly, she remembers, and assured her that they simply needed to ask routine questions about a concealed-weapons permit Omar had applied for after joining a local gun club. Still, the line of questioning seemed somewhat incongruous. ''One kept asking if Hady was a good Muslim,'' she says. ''I said not really.'' It was true that Omar would not eat pork. But he didn't pray five times a day, go to mosque or deny himself the occasional vodka or Marlboro Ultra Light. An affable federal agent named Ed sat next to Candy in the waiting room, passing the time watching the television news. He would periodically point at the photos of the 19 hijackers that the networks showed and ask Candy if she'd ever seen any of them before. Candy didn't have a clue how the F.B.I. could possibly have linked her husband to the lead hijacker.
Hady Hassan Omar's Detention
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"Am I here because I'm Egyptian?'' Omar asked once as he was being taken into the F.B.I. interrogation room, where he was joined by another agent who introduced himself as Mike. The F.B.I., he says, had taken his weapons permit, his driver's license, Social Security card, work permit and the 13 credit cards he accumulated during his two years in America. ''I'll need those back,'' Omar said. He had an interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get a green card in a few days, and he was going off on holiday with Candy to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Don't worry, he was assured, just tell us about your friends. The F.B.I. wanted names and numbers, and whenever Omar gave them one, an agent would scribble it down on a piece of paper and leave the room. (The Fort Smith F.B.I. branch office declined to comment on this account, as did Brian Marshall, a spokesman for the Bureau's Arkansas headquarters in Little Rock.)
Candy, meanwhile, had signed a consent form allowing the search of their apartment; agents removed their home computer, documents, credit-card statements and correspondence, his collection of Arabic-language videos and a copy of ''Scarface,'' the Al Pacino gangster movie.
At that point, Omar says, he was still most worried that all this would somehow affect his credit rating. He had signed up for all those credit cards and even taken a few small bank loans because he was told that was how one built a credit history in America, and he dreamed of owning his own business someday. On Sept. 11, he had been in Florida, working out the details, he says, of an Egyptian antiques store he was hoping to open with a friend who worked for Lucent Technologies in Cairo.
Candy stayed at the F.B.I.'s Fort Smith office answering questions until just after 11 p.m. Then she was told she could leave. Her husband, though, would not be coming with her.
The next morning, Candy Omar woke to find the banner headline ''Terror Strikes Home'' blazing across the front page of the Fort Smith newspaper, The Times Record, over a four-column photograph of her handcuffed husband being led away to the county jail.
His arrest was on all the local stations as well, as were neighbors and former co-workers expressing varying degrees of shock, disbelief and outrage. Omar had not, in fact, been charged with any crime, but the media accounts glossed over that. On his papers, the line reserved for charges read vaguely: ''Hold for I.N.S.''
The F.B.I., it turned out, did have some potentially damning evidence: Omar bought his Sept. 11 plane tickets from the very same computer terminal in the same Boca Raton, Fla., Kinko's outlet that Mohamed Atta had used, around the same time too. And he fit the hijackers' profile perfectly: young, from a well-to-do background -- his father was an engineer working in Qatar - computer-literate, with a taste for vodka and nightclubs, just like Atta. It made sense that the F.B.I. would want to talk to him. But was his ticket purchase merely a coincidence? Or was Hady Hassan Omar part of the plot?
At Candy's apartment, the phone rang incessantly. Omar's friend Gary called to say she should forget about her husband and move on with her life. Omar called, too, from jail. ''He sounded hysterical,'' Candy says. ''He begged me to believe that he wasn't a murderer or involved in any way.''
Around noon, the F.B.I. agents returned to Omar's holding cell in the county jail, this time in suits and ties. They had with them another agent flown up from Little Rock who asked Omar if he knew what a lie-detector test was. ''Yeah,'' Omar said. ''Like in 'Meet the Parents''' -- the comedy where Robert DeNiro plays a retired C.I.A. officer who subjects prospective sons-in-law to polygraphs.
After the electrodes were strapped to his chest and index and ring fingers and a blood-pressure gauge was wrapped around his bicep, a series of seven questions began -- repeated three times in different order. Some were innocuous: Is your date of birth Jan. 19, 1979? Others less so: Were you planning on hitting U.S. targets or hurting Americans?
The test lasted 90 minutes, then Omar waited. Good news, said the agent from Little Rock when he finally returned, all smiles now and patting Omar on the back. Omar was told he had passed. ''I was so relieved,'' he recalled. He would make his green-card hearing after all, and in a few days he'd be celebrating his wedding anniversary with Candy at a spa in Hot Springs, all this a bad memory. ''I can go now, right?'' he asked eagerly.
