subgenius
26th February 2003, 12:04 PM
The day before, on Dec. 17, New York police got a call saying Alajji was plotting a "bin Laden al-Qaida" terrorist attack.
The FBI searched his home and truck, seized his computer and spent hours retrieving deleted e-mails. He spent 10 days in the Wayne County Jail, while reporters and federal agents staked out his home.
Alajji was freed Dec. 27 by a federal magistrate who dismissed the government's charges and later severely criticized the government's case in a confidential memo to other federal magistrates and judges that was obtained by The Detroit News.
But Alajji lost his job anyway.
Now, without an apology from the government and still officially under investigation, Alajji is going home to Yemen. The 31-year-old who came to Dearborn in 1995 is to fly home Saturday on a Royal Jordanian flight. An FBI agent will meet him at the airport to give him his passport and watch him leave Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
"I don't feel safe anymore. I think all Muslims are under suspicion," Alajji said in an hourlong interview Tuesday. "These accusations were totally false."
On his way to Indianapolis to make a delivery, truck driver Mohamed Nasser Alajji got a flat tire and pulled into a rest stop in Springfield, Mich., where he was promptly arrested.
Federal investigators say they were simply doing their job in the post-Sept. 11 world of investigating all allegations of terrorism. But critics of the war on terrorism point to the Alajji case as an example of the government trampling on civil rights and hastily prosecuting Arabs and Arab-Americans for technical violations that it wouldn't normally pursue.
In the Alajji case, federal magistrate Steven Pepe agreed with that criticism. He sent the confidential memorandum to federal judges and magistrates in the eastern district of Michigan explaining why he threw out the charges. He called the government's case Orwellian (a reference to George Orwell, author of such chilling social critiques as "Animal Farm" and "1984").
"Our values could stand up to terrorism and not hobble effective law enforcement," Pepe said. "To abandon them would give the terrorists an undeserved victory."
...
The government accused Alajji of committing fraud by failing to tell the Social Security Administration that he had been issued a second Social Security number in 1995.
The government's case came down to whether minor mistakes on a Social Security form -- he left a question blank and used a hyphen in his last name in one place -- constituted fraud, said Alajji's attorney, Corbett O'Meara.
Pepe drew a parallel with Orwell's work.
"In "Animal Farm," Orwell writes about certain laws that are written so high on the barn that most of the animals cannot read them," Pepe wrote in the memo. "To me, this last theory of the government's case -- the implied misrepresentation by omission -- on these facts seemed like such an Orwellian law."
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0302/26/a01-94870.htm
We cannot fight our enemies by becoming like them.
The FBI searched his home and truck, seized his computer and spent hours retrieving deleted e-mails. He spent 10 days in the Wayne County Jail, while reporters and federal agents staked out his home.
Alajji was freed Dec. 27 by a federal magistrate who dismissed the government's charges and later severely criticized the government's case in a confidential memo to other federal magistrates and judges that was obtained by The Detroit News.
But Alajji lost his job anyway.
Now, without an apology from the government and still officially under investigation, Alajji is going home to Yemen. The 31-year-old who came to Dearborn in 1995 is to fly home Saturday on a Royal Jordanian flight. An FBI agent will meet him at the airport to give him his passport and watch him leave Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
"I don't feel safe anymore. I think all Muslims are under suspicion," Alajji said in an hourlong interview Tuesday. "These accusations were totally false."
On his way to Indianapolis to make a delivery, truck driver Mohamed Nasser Alajji got a flat tire and pulled into a rest stop in Springfield, Mich., where he was promptly arrested.
Federal investigators say they were simply doing their job in the post-Sept. 11 world of investigating all allegations of terrorism. But critics of the war on terrorism point to the Alajji case as an example of the government trampling on civil rights and hastily prosecuting Arabs and Arab-Americans for technical violations that it wouldn't normally pursue.
In the Alajji case, federal magistrate Steven Pepe agreed with that criticism. He sent the confidential memorandum to federal judges and magistrates in the eastern district of Michigan explaining why he threw out the charges. He called the government's case Orwellian (a reference to George Orwell, author of such chilling social critiques as "Animal Farm" and "1984").
"Our values could stand up to terrorism and not hobble effective law enforcement," Pepe said. "To abandon them would give the terrorists an undeserved victory."
...
The government accused Alajji of committing fraud by failing to tell the Social Security Administration that he had been issued a second Social Security number in 1995.
The government's case came down to whether minor mistakes on a Social Security form -- he left a question blank and used a hyphen in his last name in one place -- constituted fraud, said Alajji's attorney, Corbett O'Meara.
Pepe drew a parallel with Orwell's work.
"In "Animal Farm," Orwell writes about certain laws that are written so high on the barn that most of the animals cannot read them," Pepe wrote in the memo. "To me, this last theory of the government's case -- the implied misrepresentation by omission -- on these facts seemed like such an Orwellian law."
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0302/26/a01-94870.htm
We cannot fight our enemies by becoming like them.