It could have been a disaster. But the bureau’s dragnet of young Middle Eastern men went better than anyone expected
At about 10:30 on the night of Sept. 20, Ali Erikenoglu heard rustling in the bushes below his bedroom in the small, three-family home he owns in Paterson, N.J. He got up, leaned out the window and saw, he says, “four or five men with flashlights” in his backyard. The men identified themselves as the FBI and told him they needed to ask him some questions. Change his name to Al Erikson and Ali Erikenoglu’s nighttime encounter with his government becomes hard to fathom. A graduate of Rutgers University, Erikenoglu is a 40-year-old industrial electrician who was born in the United States (his parents are from Turkey), went to the local high school and married an Irish woman named Connelly. Except for a speeding ticket as a teenager, Erikenoglu says he had never had a conversation with a police officer, let alone been in trouble with the law.
Erikenoglu says that while two agents roamed the apartment (except for the bedroom, where his wife remained sleeping) examining books, videos, religious plaques and papers, two others made him produce his license and passport, and his wife’s passport. They spent about an hour asking a series of questions about how often he prays, what tourist sites he had visited, how often he had traveled abroad, “what kind of American are you” and “what is it about your religion that allows people like these terrorists to do what they did?”
Erikenoglu says the agents finally told him that someone from one of the construction jobs he had worked on had called and said that he had expressed sympathy for the terrorists after the bombing of the USS Cole. “I told them I never said anything like that,” says Erikenoglu. “I complained that this is like McCarthyism-some anonymous person calls up, or maybe doesn’t call up, but you have a Muslim name and there’s the knock on the door asking who you voted for.” Erikenoglu says that while two agents roamed the apartment (except for the bedroom, where his wife remained sleeping) examining books, videos, religious plaques and papers, two others made him produce his license and passport, and his wife’s passport.
On the way out, Erikenoglu claims, one agent promised: “We’ll be back to take you in cuffs if we find that one thing you told us is a lie, or if we find that any of your phone numbers got a call to or from a terrorist.”
Stories like Erikenoglu’s-plus the detentions of hundreds of Middle Eastern immigrants on visa violations after September 11-led civil-liberties advocates and Arab-Americans to scream in early November when word leaked out that federal agents, assisted by local police, planned to question more than 5,100 males between the ages of 18 and 33 who entered the United States on visas from countries having Al Qaeda operations. This was racial profiling at its worst, the critics howled.
The interviews are now mostly over. And the surprise is that despite earlier encounters such as the one with Erikenoglu, the mass dragnet was handled well. In fact, the FBI seems to have learned from the backlash generated by its earlier tactics. “In the days right after 9-11, we were not as sensitive to these situations as we should have been,” says Sherri Evanina of the bureau’s Newark, N.J., office, who acknowledges that agents questioned Erikenoglu. As a result, we’re all better off for the exercise, thanks not only to the cops, but also to the lawyers and community leaders on the other side who mobilized to defend and prepare those who were questioned. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s press office claims the sweep produced “several leads.” But more important, the questioning seems to have yielded a new relationship between those trying to catch terrorists and the law-abiding members of the communities where the terrorists are suspected of hiding.
Before the questioning began in New Jersey, the FBI invited Sohail Mohammed, a lawyer active in the Muslim community, to conduct what he says was “a sensitivity training session” for federal agents and local police. “It was standing room only,” he recalls.
For example, agents learned to offer to remove their shoes when entering a Muslim home, something Erikenoglu bitterly recalls they refused to do in September. In the Detroit area, which has the country’s largest concentration of Arab-Americans, local federal prosecutor Jeffrey Collins “reached out to us and made all of this tolerable,” says Imad Hamad of the Midwest chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Collins decided that his office would send letters to the 640 names on the list in his jurisdiction and invite them to arrange the sessions at the FBI office or some neutral site of their choosing. Agents would make home visits only if people did not respond to the letters. His approach worked: of the letters that had the right addresses, Collins’s office received calls from “the vast majority, maybe even 90 percent,” says a lawyer familiar with the results. All but a handful agreed to be interviewed. “We told people they did not have to cooperate, but they pretty much all wanted to,” says Michael Steinberg of the American Civil Liberties Union in Detroit. “So we helped them.”
According to lawyers who sat in on 220 interviews across the country and nine people who were interviewed without lawyers, the sessions were polite, even solicitous. Gone were the grillings about prayer habits or votes cast. The agents asked the young immigrants 21 relatively benign questions from a script. Among the questions: Do you know anybody who might know anything about the terrorist attacks? Who acted strangely after the attacks? Who might advocate violence against the United States? Who might know how to make anthrax?
Cops, like reporters, always have to question lots of people in hopes of finding someone who might know something or someone-or who might later hear about someone who knows someone. The only thing that has to be justified is the decision to target people coming from particular countries, and that kind of “profiling” becomes a lot less controversial once the mind-set-and the articulated goal-has to do with getting information, not grilling suspects.