Hamid Hayat, 23, a United States citizen of Pakistani descent is arrested in Lodi, California and alleged to be part of a terrorist sleeper cell. His father, Umer Hayat, a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, is also arrested. The indictment contains Hamid’s admission to attending an Islamist training camp in Balakot, Pakistan, in 2000 for a few days, and again in 2003-2004 for approximately three to six months. He further admits to training for jihad, that he came to the United States for jihad, and that he was prepared to wage jihad upon the receipt of orders. The indictment says that literature extolling violent Islamist activities was discovered at Hamid’s home, including a magazine from Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistani extremist group. Umer is arrested for making false statements to the FBI on unrelated charges. [Department of Justice, 4/25/2006] On April 19, 2003, the two, on their way to Pakistan, were stopped outside of Dulles International Airport with $28,093 in cash. They were allowed to continue with their journey. To make bail after their 2005 arrests, the Hayats put their two-house compound up on bond and declare it to be appraised at $390,000 with no outstanding debt. US District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. writes that Umer, an ice cream truck driver, “appears to have access to a significant amount of cash from an unexplained source.” Umer is charged with making false statements to the FBI when questioned about the cash he had at Dulles. Umer is later released and credited with time served. [News10, 8/25/2005] On April 25, 2006, Hamid is convicted with one count of providing material support or resources to terrorists and three counts of making false statements to the FBI in matters related to international/domestic terrorism. The announcement of the conviction states that Hamid confessed in interviews to attending an Islamist training camp and receiving training in order to carry out attacks against the United States. The announcement further states that Hamid initially made false statements to the FBI in regards to this training, and was discovered to have been in possession of the Pakistani magazine, a “jihadi supplication,” and a “jihadi scrapbook.” The announcement indicates that the main was gathered between March 2003 and August 2003 and consists of several recorded conversations with a cooperating witness, in which Hamid “pledged his belief in violent jihad, pledged to go to a jihadi training camp and indicated that he, in fact, was going to jihadi training.” [Department of Justice, 4/25/2006] Hamid will be sentenced to 24 years in prison on September 10, 2007. His defense lawyer, Wazhma Mojaddidi, says Hamid’s statements were the idle chatter of an uneducated, directionless man. She says the government has no proof her client had ever attended a terrorist training camp. Hamid says that he made the claims to end the interrogation. Umer says “We were expecting justice. We did not get justice. My son is innocent.” [KCBS, 9/10/2007] The request for a new trial will be rejected by Judge Burrell on May 17, 2007. He says that there is evidence that jurors “thoroughly and thoughtfully deliberated regarding Hayat’s guilt or innocence.” He also rejects defense objections that the jury was misled by an FBI undercover witness who apparently incorrectly testified that he saw a top leader of al-Qaeda in public in Lodi. No further information is made available to the public on the source of the Hayat’s wealth. [Associated Press, 5/17/2007]
June 9, 2005: Justice Department Report on FBI’s 9/11 Failures Is Finally Released
The report by Justice Department’s Inspector General Glenn Fine, completed in July 2004, is finally released (see July 2004). It states that the inability to detect the 9/11 hijacking plot amounts to a “significant failure” by the FBI and was caused in large part by “widespread and longstanding deficiencies” in the way the agency handled terrorism and intelligence cases. In one particularly notable finding, the report concluded that the FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers—Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar—after they first entered the United States in early 2000. The report states, “While we do not know what would have happened had the FBI learned sooner or pursued its investigation more aggressively, the FBI lost several important opportunities to find Alhazmi and Almihdhar before the September 11 attacks.” [US Department of Justice, 11/2004 
; Washington Post, 6/10/2005]
June 14, 2005: Terror Watch List Incomplete and Inaccurate
A Justice Department review of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center discovers that the terrorist watch list used to screen people entering the US is based on incomplete and inaccurate information. The report also criticizes the poor technical performance of the facility. In the report, Inspector General Glenn Fine writes, “While the [Terrorist Screening Database] is constantly evolving, we found that the management of its information technology, a critical part of the terrorist screening process, has been deficient.” The Justice Department also warns that missing or duplicate information hinders the usefulness of the lists. Fine states that: “We found instances where the consolidated database did not contain names that should have been included on the watch list. In addition, we found inaccurate information related to persons included in the database.” [The Register, 6/14/2005] The problems will not be corrected by 2006 (see March 2006).
August 9, 2005: New York Times Reveals Able Danger Unit that Identified Four 9/11 Hijackers Before Attacks
A front page article in the New York Times reveals the existence of a highly classified military intelligence unit called Able Danger, which had identified Mohamed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as likely members of an al-Qaeda cell operating in the United States more than a year before the attacks. [New York Times, 8/9/2005] Members of the unit had recommended that the FBI be called in to take out the cell, but Pentagon lawyers had blocked their request (see September 2000). The incident was first described in a June 2005 speech on the House floor by Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA), and in an interview with Weldon around the same time in the Norristown Times Herald, neither of which had garnered much attention. [Norristown Times Herald, 6/19/2005; US Congress. House, 6/27/2005] Weldon, who is vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee, claims he only recognized the significance of the incident after contacting members of the Able Danger unit during research for a book about terrorism. [New York Times, 8/10/2005]
Autumn 2005 or Before: Fears Over CIA Evidence Cause FBI to Build Cases against Guantanamo Detainees
The FBI begins to build cases against high value detainees held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, due to Defense Department fears that evidence obtained from the detainees by the CIA will be inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals. The investigation, which involves up to 300 agents in a “Guantanamo task force,” runs for at least two years and FBI agents travel widely to collect evidence. According to former officials and legal experts, “The [FBI] process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a US court of law—and might not be allowed in their military commissions….” In fact, the techniques used to extract the confessions even cause some CIA officials to question whether they are believable, much less sustainable in court, particularly as CIA officers are not trained to obtain evidence that can be used in such a setting. In addition, if the information is used, this may focus the trials on the actions of the CIA and not the accused. The detainees will be designated enemy combatants in 2007 in preparation for military commissions (see March 9-April 28, 2007 and August 9, 2007), but this process will be questioned by a judge (see June 4, 2007). The Los Angeles Times will also comment, “The FBI’s efforts appear in part to be a hedge in case the commissions are ruled unconstitutional or never occur, or the US military detention center at Guantanamo Bay is closed. Under those scenarios, authorities would have to free the detainees, transfer them to military custody elsewhere, send them to another country, or have enough evidence gathered by law enforcement officials to charge them with terrorism in US federal courts.” [Los Angeles Times, 10/21/2007]
October 2005: Theories of 9/11-Iraq Connection Disproven by Investigations, Authors Write
In their book The Next Attack, Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and co-author Steven Simon write that neoconservative Laurie Mylroie’s theories about Iraq being behind every terrorist attack on the US since 1993 (see October 2000 and September 12, 2001) are simply unbelievable. They write: “Mylroie’s work has been carefully investigated by the CIA and the FBI.… The more knowledgeable analysts and investigators at the CIA and FBI believe that their work conclusively disproves Mylroie’s claims.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 216]
October 3, 2005: FBI’s Criminal Cases Down by Half Since 9/11 Due to Focus on Terrorism
The Justice Department’s inspector general says that the number of criminal cases opened by the FBI has dropped by nearly half since 2000. Inspector General Glenn Fine says this is a reflection of the FBI’s new focus on preventing terrorist attacks. Drug cases have declined by 70 percent, and organized crime, bank robberies, civil rights, health case fraud, corporate fraud, and public corruption have also dropped. State and local law enforcement have tried to fill the void, but they aren’t always able to do so, especially in complex financial fraud cases. [Associated Press, 10/3/2005]
October 4, 2005: Book Describes Scientific Effort to Identify 9/11 Victims
Robert Shaler, the scientist who led the forensic examination by the New York City medical examiner’s office to identify 9/11 victims, releases a book about this investigation, called Who They Were: Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story: The Unprecedented Effort to Identify the Missing. According to Shaler the investigation eventually identified three of the 9/11 hijackers. However, he writes that they were not identified by name because the ten DNA profiles supplied by the FBI had no names attached. Shaler writes, “No names, just a K code, which is how the FBI designates ‘knowns,’ or specimens it knows the origins of. Of course, we had no direct knowledge of how the FBI obtained the terrorists’ DNA.” He also believes the three hijackers they identified were in the backs of the planes, stating, “I still doubt the pilots have anything remaining to collect or analyze.” [Publishers Weekly, 8/22/2005; New York Daily News, 10/12/2005] The medical examiner’s office concluded its efforts at identifying the remains of those killed at Ground Zero in February 2005, having been able to identify 1,588 of the 2,749 victims. [Shaler, 2005; New York Daily News, 2/23/2005]
October 6, 2005: New York Subway Terror Alert Is Reportedly Unnecessary
On October 6, 2005, the FBI warns of al-Qaeda subway bombings in New York City. It is alleged that a terror plot will be put into motion “on or about October 9, 2005.” A counterterrorism official states that the warning is unnecessary: “There was no there there.” [Rolling Stone, 9/21/2006 ] It is later confirmed that New York City authorities had been aware of the threat for at least three days and had responded accordingly. Local TV station WNBC had been asked by federal authorities to hold the story back. [MSNBC, 6/4/2007] Meanwhile, Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is failing (see October 3-27, 2005). [Rolling Stone, 9/21/2006 ]
December 3, 2005: FBI Whistleblower Exonerated by Justice Department Report
A report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General is leaked to the New York Times. The report largely backs the allegations made by whistleblower ex-FBI agent Mike German (see September 2002 and August 2, 2004). It finds that FBI officials mishandled a terrorism investigation German was involved in, falsified documents in an effort to cover up agency mistakes, and retaliated against German. In one instance, someone altered dates on three FBI forms using correction fluid to conceal a violation of federal wiretap law. After German tried to complain directly to FBI Director Robert Mueller, other FBI agents distanced themselves from him. For instance, the head of the FBI undercover unit, Jorge Martinez, froze German out of teaching assignments and told another agent that German would “never work another undercover case.” [New York Times, 12/3/2005] Notwithstanding, German is critical of the inspector general’s report. He says the authors of the report distorted some facts and failed to fully investigate whether the investigation he was working on was a genuine terrorist conspiracy. [Government Executive, 12/12/2005]
