By Zoë Carpenter

Three days before the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a Muslim cleric arrived at the airport in Portland, Oregon, with his four children, a brother, several thousand dollars in cash, and tickets to the United Arab Emirates. Inside the terminal, federal agents and local cops surrounded them and arrested the cleric, a Somali-born American citizen named Sheikh Mohamed Abdirahman Kariye. The following day, a customs inspector testified in court that two checked bags containing Kariye’s personal items tested positive for explosives. The judge ruled Kariye a flight risk and denied bail. The cleric would spend the next five weeks in custody.

Kariye leads Masjed As-Saber, a Portland mosque that had been infiltrated by an undercover informant months before his arrest. The operation was part of a case later known as the Portland Seven—one of the first major domestic terror prosecutions following 9/11. Kariye was never charged with a terrorism-related offense, but in the eyes of the federal government, he’s never been exonerated. Nearly 15 years after his initial arrest, both he and his Portland community continue to be the subject of intense interest from the government’s counterterrorism apparatus. In July, prosecutors moved to strip Kariye of his citizenship, claiming that he lied to immigration authorities about his alleged prior affiliations with terrorist groups.

Dig beneath the surface of the government’s portrait of Kariye, however, and it’s possible to see him not as a national-security threat but as an object of obsession—as well as a case study in the way that domestic counterterrorism operations since 9/11 have singled out Muslims for intrusive surveillance and selective prosecution, based on things they’ve said, people they’ve known, and things they could do in the future.

In the wake of the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, counterterrorism officials are recalibrating their strategy to better identify isolated threats. There have been calls for the increased surveillance of Muslim communities, based on an assumption that Islamic radicalism is more dangerous than other kinds. Kariye’s case presents something of a cautionary tale. It’s not clear that the relentless pursuit of the imam, as well as the seemingly lengthy surveillance of other worshippers at his mosque, has made Portland or the rest of the country any safer. Instead, it has alienated the Muslim community in Portland and discouraged it from cooperating with law enforcement.

“I don’t think there’s any room for debate that there’s been a disproportionate amount of attention paid to the Muslim community in Portland,” says Gadeir Abbas, an attorney at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) who has represented several Oregon Muslims. “As far as I can tell, there’s nothing particularly distinctive about that Muslim community compared to the thousands of others across the US. The difference is the FBI’s approach.”

Masjed As-Saber, a gray stone building trimmed in pink and encircled by a white picket fence, occupies a corner lot in a modest suburb a few miles southwest of Portland. I drove to the mosque early on a gray afternoon in August. It was raining, and the freeway was already clogged with traffic. The population of the metro area has grown by more than 5 percent since 2010, but in spite of the newcomers, it remains the whitest major city in America. High housing prices at its core have driven the majority of immigrants to the outskirts.

Men went in at the mosque’s main entrance; women entered through an unmarked door at the side of the building, ascended a staircase, and removed their shoes on the landing. It was still summer vacation, and the hall was noisy with children. The women greeted one another with hugs and a salutation in Arabic—“Peace be upon you”—then found seats facing a frosted-glass partition in the prayer room or in the hall outside. The service, delivered first in Arabic and then in English, focused on the subject of mercy. As-Saber is one of the largest mosques in the Pacific Northwest, and among the most conservative. Compared to other mosques in the area, it attracts more migrants from North Africa and the Middle East—people too easily profiled as being vulnerable to radicalization.

Kariye was traveling and did not lead the prayer. But one woman told me that a few weeks earlier, he’d spoken about the latest charges against him. “Of course we hear these”—she paused—“things. And, personally, I don’t believe it, because he is not that kind of man.” The whole thing saddened her: “He’s our leader, our imam. He’s the one holding the community together.”
The FBI sees something more sinister in Kariye’s influence. In October 2001, a worshipper at the mosque named Jeffrey Battle and five others traveled to China, hoping to make their way to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban. But they failed to cross the border, so Battle returned to Portland and to As-Saber. The FBI sent an informant to the mosque in the spring of 2002, and Battle and the others were indicted that October, part of a group that became known as the Portland Seven. Attorney General John Ashcroft crowed, “We’ve neutralized a suspected terrorist cell within our borders.”

At the time, the US Attorney for Oregon told the press that there was no known terrorism connection between the Portland Seven and Kariye. But several months later, prosecutors announced that Kariye was indeed a target in the investigation. According to an FBI agent’s affidavit, Battle and another of man had told the informant that the imam had fought with the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the late 1980s; that he had “spoken out very strongly for jihad”; and that he’d raised money for their trip.

Kariye is now barred from flying, and at least seven other people who have worshipped at As-Saber have also been placed on watch lists. But Kariye has never actually been charged with a crime related to terrorism—the latest complaint, though it paints him as a potential terrorist, is actually a civil immigration matter. The evidence marshaled against him in a variety of cases has turned on his associations and his religious beliefs—or has simply never materialized. After Kariye spent five weeks in jail following the airport arrest, a federal prosecutor admitted that further testing had invalidated the claim that there were explosives in his luggage. (Kariye pled guilty to two unrelated counts, for using a fraudulent Social Security number and for misstating his income in order to receive state health benefits. Both are crimes, but neither is terrorism.) The “direct evidence” that the feds said they had against him in the Portland Seven case didn’t hold up, either: Although the informant recorded many of his conversations, he failed to tape the one that supposedly implicated the imam as a financier of the Portland Seven trip.

Read more: Why Is the FBI Obsessed With This Portland Imam and His Mosque?

Source: The Nation