The Rights of the People (49 page)

Never out of Morocco before getting on a plane to New York, “I just flew. I don’t know nobody. I don’t know where I’m going, just take the plane.” It was October 2000, when America still stood on the better side of the dividing line drawn by September 11, 2001.

Koubriti traveled on the hard, familiar ground walked by legions of immigrants before him: a room in Harlem rented from a Moroccan woman he met on the flight, a threadbare job handing out leaflets in the cold, then a temp agency’s referral to a place called Ohio—“I thought it was like another neighborhood or something, and I find myself taking the
bus for twelve hours.” In Canton, he was paid six dollars an hour in cash to hang newly slaughtered chickens on a conveyor of hooks speeding by. “It was cold inside,” he said, the chickens wet and slippery. “There are people working with the live chicken—I’m not gonna work there, the chicken is yellin’ and stuff. I work with the dead one, all the day, ten hours. And I never work in my life!” He smiled and laughed all the way through the telling, as if the joke were on him.

He worked during the week, blew his money in bars and nightclubs on weekends, “and then when I’m broke I come back and work over again.” Without the English that he later learned in prison, Koubriti gravitated to another Moroccan, Ahmed Hannan, the two of them practically alone as legal immigrants among the factory’s battalions of undocumented aliens from Africa and Latin America. After five months in the hellish slaughterhouse, they followed a rumor that the Arab community in Dearborn, Michigan, could “help you out, especially the language—you don’t speak the language, they may sympathize with you and give you a job.”

They headed there with a third man, from Tunisia, but found few doors open. “No jobs, no English,” was Koubriti’s summary. “Go, look around, find a job. I was working busboy and dishwasher for seven-fifty. I’m working two jobs. I don’t even have my lunchtime. I smoke my cigarette up. I eat up. Then he send me to clean the bathroom. I was pissed. He’s Arab, too.” Every position felt beneath him.

He and Hannan looked for something better through a community agency, which steered them to the midnight shift at Sky Chefs, a catering outfit at the Detroit airport. For months they washed trays and dishware from airliners, jobs that came with vague possibilities of promotion. More significantly, they came with employee ID badges. By the week after 9/11, when federal agents searching for terrorists were like prospectors delirious with gold fever, the ID cards glistened like nuggets of evidence.

Koubriti answered the knock at the door. He was about to learn some new rules: If you’re an Arabic-speaking Muslim trying to make your way in America in a time of terrorism, you’d better work a long distance from an airport, do background checks on your housemates, make sure previous tenants aren’t on watch lists, and scour your new apartment for any doodles and drawings and tapes left behind.

The places Koubriti and the others lived—first a basement apartment in Dearborn—had housed a rolling population of single young men, moving in and out as they struggled in one low-wage job after another. A couple of them left a faint legacy, the slightly sour whiff of something amiss. One, who had lived in the basement, was a mentally ill Yemeni,
Ali Ahmed, who had filled a day planner with demented scribbles and had committed suicide two months before Koubriti arrived. Another had taken videos of tourist sites in Las Vegas and Disneyland. A third, an Algerian, had bought audiotapes of sermons at an Islamic convention at a Ramada hotel; he was going to send them home to spread their message of nonviolence.

You don’t get to choose your bedfellows in that kind of hardscrabble subculture, and one of Koubriti’s fleeting housemates, a fraudster of many aliases, brought an air of discomfort into the basement. “His story didn’t fit,” Koubriti recalled. “In the beginning, he said he didn’t have any money—‘I need to live with you guys. I’m gonna find a job.’ ” Then he’d leave for most of the day, instruct them not to ask him any questions, and finally brag about “how he’s good on the computer, how he can make fake documents for everybody.”

Calling himself Yousef Hmimsa, he made the others nervous, and then downright hostile when he stole Hannan’s Moroccan driver’s license, they suspected, to duplicate in making forgeries. An interplay of mutual retaliation followed: They kicked Hmimsa out and moved to 2653 Norman Street in Detroit. Allegedly they pilfered some of his phony documents, either as leverage to retrieve Hannan’s license or, as an indictment later charged, to use for themselves and extract a blackmail payment. Hmimsa, indicted for document fraud, took his revenge on them as a government informant possessed with a juicy story.

There were more twists and turns in the labyrinth, but suffice it to say that when FBI agents knocked on the door at Norman Street on September 17, 2001, they did not know anything about any of the men inside. They were looking for someone whose name was on the mailbox but hadn’t lived there for two years: Nabil al-Marabh. He had surfaced in the frenetic investigation of the 9/11 attacks, in some piece of untested intelligence.
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The team at the door comprised six agents from the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the State Department.

“I was taking shower,” Koubriti recalled. “Knocking the door strongly, downstairs.… ‘Nabil! Nabil!’ They’re yelling, ‘Nabil!’ Come downstairs, he told me. ‘You know Nabil?’ ‘No know Nabil.’ They have a translator with them.”

In fact, Koubriti learned later, there had been two tenants between himself and Nabil. “An Egyptian man come after him, a family come after him, then we come.” An FBI agent flashed a picture of Nabil, Koubriti said he didn’t recognize the man, they didn’t believe him, and they demanded his driver’s license. As he turned upstairs to get it, they followed
him inside—uninvited, he insisted—failing to observe the bureau’s rule to inform him that he did not have to consent to a search. It never occurred to him that he had such an unimaginable right. “In my country you can’t tell the police don’t go to my house. They’ll kick your ass.”

Inside, the agents rudely woke Hannan and a third resident, Farouk Ali-Haimoud (at gunpoint, Koubriti said); inquired about Nabil; drew a blank, and asked the men where they worked. Technicolor, said Koubriti and Hannan. They had been fired by Sky Chefs for missing shifts after claiming injuries in a traffic accident, and were now packing videos for Technicolor. But in one of those random oversights that can mess up your life, they hadn’t thrown away their old Sky Chefs badges. The agents spotted them “in plain view” during an initial search without a warrant. So here were airport IDs for jobs they didn’t have. The men were handcuffed as the search continued.

The passes were nothing but fool’s gold. They did not permit entry into secure parts of the airport—not to the tarmac or the planes, only to the one-story Sky Chefs building of gray, corrugated metal near the parking lots, a healthy bus ride at least a mile from the terminal. Anybody could drive up to it.

Nevertheless, the agents and prosecutors “would always bring up this Sky Chefs badge without ever explaining that it didn’t allow access to the airport or to airplanes,” said Koubriti’s lawyer, Richard M. Helfrick. And the passes made the agents very interested in these three men, especially when Koubriti directed them to Hmimsa’s forged documents.
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Then they came across a few items left over from the basement apartment, whose landlord had insisted it be cleared out entirely: the day planner with crooked lines, circles, and Arabic writing; the videotape of Disneyland and Las Vegas; and the audiotapes of an imam’s sermons. Through the lens of suspicion, now polished and focused, these elements were arranged by investigators into “a covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks within and outside the United States,” according to the indictment, “as well as a ‘sleeper’ operational combat cell,” a “shadowy group” that “stayed in the weeds, planning, seeking direction, awaiting the call.”
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In shorthand, the three occupants of the Norman Street apartment, plus a fourth man, Abdel Elmardoudi, were dubbed the Detroit Sleeper Cell. American law enforcement was on the march.

The lead commando was Richard G. Convertino, a brash assistant U.S. attorney, a rising star among federal prosecutors. His investment in uprooting terrorism, shared with most Americans, came with the added depth of having lost a family friend in the 9/11 attack: a New York Fire
Department chaplain, Mychal Judge, who perished while helping a firefighter outside the World Trade Center. He was a Franciscan colleague of Convertino’s brother, also a priest. Judge’s family sent his ring to the prosecutor as a remembrance.

Convertino resented Washington’s micromanagement of the high-profile case, stopped responding to incessant demands for reports and updates, and got so exasperated that he invited one official to meet him alone in an alley to duke it out, he told a reporter. The man was Barry Sabin, counterterrorism chief at the Justice Department, who had traveled to Detroit carrying concerns about the indictment. “I want to know where you got this theory,” Sabin insisted.

“I pulled it out of my ass,” Convertino snapped. “Is that what you want me to say?”
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If so, Sabin would have been about right. The day planner, the linchpin of the case, seemed obscure and unconnected to the defendants. Leaf through its pages, and you see the Yemeni’s full name, Ali Mohammed Ali Ahmed; the words “American Airbase in Turkey under the Leadership of Defense Minister”; “Queen Alia Jordan,” a reference to the former wife of Jordan’s late King Hussein; and numerous lines that make ninety-degree turns to the right, then to the left, each ending in a circle. From some circles, shorter lines radiate like misplaced spokes—or symbols of explosions. There are lines that jump and jiggle like tracings of an electrocardiogram, curved lines, lines that cross like intersections, and little stick figures that could be idle doodling or chicken feet or birds—or aircraft.

They were aircraft, decided Convertino, supported by an air force counterterrorism specialist, Lieutenant Colonel Mary Peterson. Joined by a couple of FBI agents, they also chose to believe that a shape resembling a map of the Arabian Peninsula, flanked by the Persian Gulf on one side and the Red Sea and the eastern coast of Egypt on the other, actually depicted a hangar at a U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey—a hangar badly bent out of shape, apparently—and that the little chicken feet on one side were planes emerging and heading for a runway. Looking at this Rorschach test, Convertino also decided that some of the intersecting lines represented a diagram of the Queen Alia Military Hospital in Amman, Jordan—“casing sketches” that were part of the “tradecraft” of terrorists, in the lingo of the investigators. (Keith Corbett, a Justice Department cocounsel, conceded later that the drawings looked as if they’d been done by a three- or four-year-old child.)
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The films of Disneyland and Las Vegas were dubbed “casing videos” to prepare for attacks at the tourist spots. When the camera lingered on a
trash container, the FBI argued that it was “an ideal location” for a bomb. When it panned to a cave at Disneyland, the Tunisian taking the video was heard saying, “This is a graveyard,” according to the government translator, who was unfamiliar with the Arabic spoken in Tunisia. The defendants’ interpreter, who knew the dialect, translated the line as “Here is a cave.”
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The audiotapes, never translated fully, were summarized and allegedly mischaracterized by an interpreter who was later revealed to be a violent criminal, compensated by federal prosecutors with a hefty fee and a reduced sentence.

Intriguing and terrifying tales were spun by the informant Hmimsa and believed, although in trial he displayed difficulty discerning truth from falsehood, saying of his many aliases, “None of them are lies to me.” He claimed that the defendants were looking for vulnerabilities in security at Detroit and Chicago airports, that Koubriti wanted to poison food going onto airliners, that one defendant had called Las Vegas “the city of Satan,” that the group wished to buy Stinger missiles to shoot down planes, that they communicated in code using the names of Moroccan soccer players, and that they all expressed admiration for Osama bin Laden.

Koubriti was angry at this and wanted to testify, but Helfrick was afraid that he’d lose his temper on the stand. Perhaps, but his rough naïveté might have played convincingly. “I was never getting involved in politics,” he told me. “I used to ask my father, Why are you guys watching the news every day? I used to go find girls, drink, smoke hashish—honestly. I don’t give a fuck about these politics, about this one killing this one, this one. I don’t talk about religion. I wasn’t religious. I’m a Muslim, I was born a Muslim, I do fast Ramadan, ’cause I think that’s a big obligation.… I don’t attend mosque.… I never heard the name Osama bin Laden that I heard after September 11. As a Muslim man, I never heard the name, but when I saw the picture I remember one day me and my mother and brother, everybody sitting at lunch and watching TV, showing this man with white stuff on his head asking all Muslims for jihad. Then we start laughing. I was like, What is this guy talking about? Jihad against who?”

The reporters covering the trial were also laughing, in disbelief, as they watched the government roll out its case. “We were all waiting for that climactic moment when we all said, ‘Yes, that’s it.’ And it never happened,” said David Ashenfelter, a Pulitzer Prize—winning reporter for the
Detroit Free Press
. “All we had was ‘tradecraft.’ ” He pronounced the word in a conspiratorial whisper. “And we used to laugh in the back row about ‘tradecraft.’ There were so many things that we have in our homes that fall
under the category of what [the FBI] called ‘tradecraft’; we looked at that and said, ‘Man, we’re all guilty.’ ”

If the reporters could be so skeptical of the carefully sanitized case the government chose to put on, then perhaps the jurors would have been skeptical if they had seen what the government withheld. Behind each incriminating interpretation of the day planner and the videos ran a strong countercurrent of doubt, constituting exculpatory evidence required under the Supreme Court precedent in
Brady v. Maryland
to be turned over to the defense. Under that ruling, handed down in 1963, a conviction can be overturned if the prosecution fails to disclose information raising questions about the defendant’s guilt.
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And beneath Hmimsa’s fluent storytelling lay evidence impeaching his credibility, required under
Giglio v. United States
to be revealed.
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These are two pillars of criminal procedure, so Helfrick and the other defense attorneys appealed repeatedly to Judge Gerald E. Rosen, who was slow to recognize the prosecution’s defiance of the law.