2 Lodi residents (U.S. citizens) refused entry back into U.S.

[Newsjock]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/26/LODI.TMP

The federal government has barred two relatives of a Lodi man convicted of supporting terrorists from returning to the country after a lengthy stay in Pakistan, placing the U.S. citizens in an extraordinary legal limbo.

Muhammad Ismail, a 45-year-old naturalized citizen born in Pakistan, and his 18-year-old son, Jaber Ismail, who was born in the United States, have not been charged with a crime. However, they are the uncle and cousin of Hamid Hayat, a 23-year-old Lodi cherry packer who was convicted in April of supporting terrorists by attending a Pakistani training camp.

Federal authorities said Friday that the men, both Lodi residents, would not be allowed back into the country unless they agreed to FBI interrogations in Pakistan. An attorney representing the family said agents have asked whether the younger Ismail trained in terrorist camps in Pakistan.

... "We haven't heard about this happening -- U.S. citizens being refused the right to return from abroad without any charges or any basis," said (Julia Harumi) Mass, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

... Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety and security program at USC, said the Ismail case appears to be unusual in the realm of federal terrorism investigations.

"You become what is called a stateless person, and that would be very unprecedented," Barr said.

[DRoseDARs]

1. Don't know about the 45yrold but the 18yrold as a citizen certainly has...

...a solid basis upon which to sue the government.

[Xipe Totec]

23. Let's be clear about this

Are you saying that naturalized citizens are second class citizens with fewer rights than native born citizens?

[DRoseDARs]

25. Thanks for putting words in my mouth.

:eyes:

[ljm2002]

35. Maybe you missed the fact...

...that the older one is a citizen also.

What you said seemed to imply that the younger one by virtue of being born here, had more rights. That would indeed translate into the assertion that naturalized citizens have fewer rights than citizens who were born here. If you did not mean that, fine -- then you must have not realized that the older one is also a citizen.

[AZCat]

36. Naturalized citizens do indeed have fewer rights than natives...

although the only one I know of is that they are unable to run for president.

It would be interesting to know if there are any other rights they don't have. I work with a number of naturalized citizens (or ones in the process of becoming naturalized) and my sister-in-law is working on her citizenship.

[Sgent]

44. Naturalized citizens

are also subject to investigation if its believed they may have taken their citizenship oaths under duress, or dishonestly -- they are subject to having their naturalization revoked under some circumstances.

[treestar]

46. The only difference between naturalized and native citizens is

that the naturalized citizen cannot be President of the US.

As for entry into the US, a US citizen must always be admitted to the US.

We CANNOT let them get away with refusing any of us entry into the US.

[DavidDvorkin]

37. In one respect, that's always been true

From the beginning, we naturalized citizens could not serve as president or vice president.

Other than that, we're supposed to be the same as a natural-born citizen.

[LeftyMom]

2. Well, surely if terrorists are anywhere, it's Lodi

I imagine they're drawn to all the targets, the convenient location, the diversity of the town allowing them to blend in...

:rofl: Sorry, I just couldn't keep a straight face. Nothing happens in Lodi. Nothing will ever happen in Lodi.

[Bobbieo]

16. 'Oh Lord! Stuck In Lodi, Again!'

[ninkasi]

42. CCR

Maybe we need to revive some of their other songs.

[kineneb]

43. bad moon a-risin'

another of their tunes that apply-

So what happens when my relatives, naturalized citizens born in Iran, go out of the country? Do they get "detained for questioning"?

Boy, will Step-father and Aunt be sorry they voted for the Little Emperor. I tried to warn them...but they were blinded by greed.

[ninkasi]

48. I think a lot of us tried to warn people

Too many people were blinded by greed, or by their own narrow minded fundie religious leaders to realize that voting for Bush was voting for an end to our liberties as set forth in the Constitution. I think it's absolutely appalling that American citizens are being denied entrance into their own country. The whole Bush administration is paranoid and trying to hold onto power by keeping the rest of us suspicious of anybody with dark skin or an accent.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Thank you for posting this alarming information

Does His Imperial Incompetency get to decide who is and who is not an American citizen?

[longship]

8. He *is* the decider.

and deciders get to decide... everything I imagine.

[Bobbieo]

19. Yes, He is the DECIDER and let's keep that in mind

Until we change administrations!!!

[saigon68]

41. NO He is the CHIMPANZEE --- He can't decide shit

His Mommy has to cut his food and feed him.

[TomInTib]

4. Making them up as we go along. This is just bizarre.

U S citizens..

Straight thru the Looking Glass.

[AZCat]

5. I guess it's time to ante up to the ACLU again.

I have a funny feeling the Bush Admin. is going to defend this to the finish.

[bleever]

6. Oh Lord, Kept Out of Lodi Again?

Deja vu, all freakin' over again.

Guilt by association, from a bloated bureaucracy that has to arrest somebody sometimes, to prove it's arresting people, without having any actual impact on national security.


Tabloid security. That's what you get with a tabloid quality presidency. Better to get ready (kinda) for the next war than to prevent it.

[Mojorabbit]

7. This is scary as hell

I am a naturalized citizen. My pop was in the air force and a good ole west virginia southern boy and married my mom overseas who is portuguese. I was born in Bermuda where they were stationed but had to go through the naturalization process when we returned to the states when I was in elementary school. This freaks me out. I can see some horrible ramifications if this is allowed.

[sweetheart]

17. US citizens abroad are now second class citizens

We are suspect as they've not been surveilling us with their domestic wiretaps, and
in order to re-enter the prison, we're suspect, all of our time spent training in
terrorist camps and hoarding household chemicals as every american abroad is inclined
to do in this late age of degeneration....

Soon, they'll be blood testing at the boarders as well to stop citizens from bringing
in unapproved blood.

[nosmokes]

9. Let's just march on the smithsonian and rip the constitution to pieces.

it ain't being used anyway.

[soothsayer]

30. Isn't it in the National Archives? Smithsonian is private, archives

belong to the gov (and thus, us)

[nosmokes]

49. oops. my bad. n/t

[Biernuts]

31. March on the Smithsonian all you want but you'll never find the

Constitution there. It's kept at the US Archives, along with the Declaration of Independence and other official documents.

At the Smithsonian, however, you could rip up Inaugural Ball Gowns from the First Ladies, or you could pummel their collection of bones and other artifacts.

[Jack Rabbit]

10. Let's prevent the Frat Boy from re-entering the country

His brother, Neil, has been known to do business with prositiutes in Thailand. That's a good way to get AIDS.

So, as a matter of public health, Neil's brothers (we'll include the Jebster while we're at it) should not be allowed in the country.

What? They're American citizens? They have rights? Not since they took over.

[Mika]

12. So, you're advocating banning citizens with AIDS from entering the US?

:puke:

[Jack Rabbit]

33. !!

:sarcasm:

[Kailassa]

11. You're not American, in the eyes of this Admin,

unless you're white and wealthy.

Poor Condi hasn't realized that yet.

[0007]

27. Dave Chappelle just declared Colin Powell and Condi Rice WHIT

[Kailassa]

34. If I was black and was called white as a "complement",

I'd verbally knee-cap whoever had the gall to say such a thing.

I once saw an old photograph of a bunch of aboriginal girls on
an outback mission in Australia. The were all looking hot and
unhappy, posing together in long white English dresses.

It was captioned: "at least their little hearts are white."

:mad:

[pinniped]

13. That Lodi case was BS and the .gov knows it.

.

[CoffeeCat]

14. If these two US citizens...

...are truly guilty, then BushCo must have reams of proof!

Like Junior says, "If yer talkin to Al Queda, we want to know what yer sayin."

If these guys are terrorists, or supporting a relative who is a terrorist--wouldn't
Junior have concrete evidence of that? That NSA wiretapping program is supposed to ferret
out stuff like this, right?

I assume that their international calls have been monitored. The crimes they have on these
people must be extraordinary!

/sarcasm off

[aquart]

15. This is an outrage. ANYONE can be declared a "terrorist."

What did Frost say, home is the place if you have to go there, they have to take you in?

We take in our citizens. What we do afterwards is something else, but our borders are not closed to AMERICANS.

[Hav]

18. .

"unless they agreed to FBI interrogations in Pakistan"

Why in Pakistan?? Same reason why there is Guantanamo?

[Thickasabrick]

39. I was wondering that too.....do they want to be able to torture them?

[Eugene]

20. The FBI is trying an end run past the Constitution.

From the article, Julia Mass says that the men want lawyers present
and they refuse to submit to "lie detector" tests. Two U.S. citizens
can't come home until they waive their Constitutional rights.

This is coercion pure and simple.

[w4rma]

21. I get the feeling that there is a schedule to these challenges. Each one

greater than the last. I wonder if you graphed out each challenge to the Bill of Rights if you could figure out what the next challenge will likely be and when.

It's obvious that this challenge is an attempt to create a precedent for treating U.S.Citizens as they are treating non-U.S. Citizens.

[Kailassa]

38. Yes, you've caught on.

"Know your enemy"

People are blinded by the obvious stupidity of chimpy,
mistaking the "decider", who still can't decide for himself
whether to go to the toilet, for the decision maker.

All of the chaos they have so far brought about has been
carefully planned, and is all just a practice run for
bringing chaos to mainstream America.

The "birth pangs", as they finally trash all pretense of
democracy, will not be pretty.

[treestar]

47. Absolutely.

They start with the aliens, and the concept of just having unfettered power over some people emboldens the power-mongers to want to have that absolute power over citizens.

Exactly what the founders knew about human nature.

That's why it ticks me off when people start on this concept that aliens have no rights under the Bill of Rights. We have to let them, or we give the government just a little bit of that all-powerful feeling over somebody, and then they can't resist the temptation to get it over everybody.

Power over other people appears to be more addictive than heroin.

[rodeodance]

22. and no way of finding out if you ARE on a list!

........Aviation watch lists were created in 1990 to keep terrorists off planes and track drug smugglers and other fugitives. But since al Qaeda's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government has expanded the lists significantly. Members of the public cannot find out if, or why, they are on a no-fly list.

Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety and security program at USC, said the Ismail case appears to be unusual in the realm of federal terrorism investigations.

"You become what is called a stateless person, and that would be very unprecedented," Barr said.

He said U.S. law enforcement agents have understandably been "overly cautious" in recent years. "If they're going to err, they're going to err on the side of caution," Barr said. "What's happened in a lot of these things is that you're guilty until proven innocent."

[leveymg]

24. US Citizens have an absolute, unfettered right to reenter.

The Feds can arrest them at the port of entry if they're charged with a crime, but this is a form of exile, which is directly in conflict with the U.S. Constitution.

This, I cannot believe.

[scarletlib]

26. Shades of Stalin

Under bushco this country is becoming the USSR. It is really ironic. Give me Lennon's "Back in the USSR"

[LynnTheDem]

28. Good fucking grief.

Yeah, America is no more.

[Dogmudgeon]

29. I must be hallucinating

I thought I just read an article that explained that two American citizens were being kept from returning to America, pending interrogation in a location of "Extraordinary Rendition" -- based on the actions of one of their relatives.

--p!

[HuffleClaw]

32. this is madness

only in bushamerica.

[acmavm]

40. Terra-ists are being barred from re-entry? Then how do bush** and

Cheney and Rice, etc...

keep getting back in????????

[treestar]

45. US citizens cannot be denied entry

Period.

Maybe they only have green cards - that does not mean citizenship, a person with a green card is still a citizen of the other country just legally allowed to be in the US. If a green card holder lives in the US for five years, then he/she can apply for citizenship and if granted, be naturalized.

But once naturalized, you are a US citizen, period.

[LeftyMom]

50. The son was born in the US

So he's definitely a citizen.

[niyad]

55. the son was born here, the father is naturalized.

[struggle4progress]

51. Pakistani caught in California terror probe released (Umer Hayat)

Saturday, August 26, 2006 (Sacramento)

A man originally from Pakistan who pleaded guilty earlier this year in a terrorism probe that focused on whether his son attended an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan has been released from federal custody.

Umer Haat pleaded guilty in May to lying to customs agent about trying to carry $28,000 into Pakistan three years ago after a federal jury deadlocked on two charges alleging that he lied to investigators about his son's attendance at the terrorist camp in 2003 ...

His son, Hamid Hayat, 23, was convicted on terrorism charges and faces at least 30 years in prison ...

http://www.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?slug=Pakistani+caught+in+terror+probe+released%0D&id=92159

[niyad]

54. please note that these are relatives of the two men in the OP, NOT the

two men. slight difference.

[struggle4progress]

56. This stinks from the beginning set-up of Hamid Hayat

This LA Times piece is worth a read. The FBI planted an informant Naseem Khan in the house Hayat house in 2002 who tape-recorded conversations with Hamid and tried to get him interested in Jihad. After his trip to Pakistan in 2003 he was arrested and interrogated unprofessionally, producing a videotaped "confession" consisting largely of "um-hms" in response to a large range of mutually contradictory questions:

The Agent Who Might Have Saved Hamid Hayat

For 35 years, James Wedick had been a star at the FBI. When his former colleagues prosecuted a suspected terrorist, he came to the side of the defense and was branded a traitor.

By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer
May 28, 2006

Before the wins and losses are tallied up and the war on terror goes down in the books as either wisdom or folly, it might be recalled what took place this spring on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Sacramento. There, in a perfectly dignified room, in front of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judge, a tall, gaunt man named James Wedick Jr. was fighting for a chance to testify, to tell jurors about the 35 years he spent in the FBI and how it came to be that he was standing before them not on the side of the U.S. government but next to two Pakistani Muslims, son and father, whose books and prayers and immigrant dreams were now being picked over in the first terrorism trial in California.

Wedick watched the prosecutor from Washington stand up and call him a hired gun for the defense and say that any criticisms he had about the investigation would only confuse the jury and waste the court's time. He wanted to answer back that he had been the most decorated FBI agent to ever work out of the state capital, and for years prosecutors, judges and juries had nothing but time to ponder the way he busted dirty state senators and mobsters and cracked open the biggest health scam in California history. Yet he could only sit and listen as the judge ruled that by the weight of legal precedence, he would have to be muzzled. In eight weeks of trial, 15 witnesses for the prosecution and seven witnesses for the defense took the stand, yet the one whose testimony might have changed everything never got to tell his story. He never got to trace his metamorphosis to a Sunday morning last June, when he woke up thinking he had seen all the absurdities that a life of crime fighting had to offer only to find the FBI videotape—the confession that would become the heart of the terrorism case—on his doorstep ...

Hayat shifted in his chair, and his voice grew submissive. One hour, two hours, yawns, cigarette break, yawns, candy break, exhaustion. The freefall never came. Instead, each new revelation, each dramatic turn in his story, was coming from the mouths of the agents first. Rather than ask Hayat to describe what happened, they were describing what happened for him and then taking his "uh-huhs" and "um-hmms" as solemn declarations. He was so open to suggestion that the camp itself went from being a village of mud huts to a building the size of Arco Arena. His fellow trainees numbered 35, 40, 50, 200. The camp was run by a political group, a religious school, his uncle, his grandfather, yes, it was Al Qaeda. The camp's location was all over the map—from Afghanistan to Kashmir to a village in Pakistan called Balakot. As for weapons training, the camp owned one pistol, two rifles and a knife to cut vegetables.

Wedick was troubled by the inability of the agents to pin down the contours of one believable story. They didn't seem to know the terrain of Pakistan or the month of Ramadan. They didn't seem to fully appreciate that they were dealing with an immigrant kid from a lowly Pashtun tribe whose sixth-grade education and poor command of the English language—"Martyred? What does that mean, sir?"—demanded a more skeptical approach. And then there was the matter of the father's confession. Umer Hayat described visiting his son's camp and finding 1,000 men wearing black Ninja Turtle masks and performing "pole vaulting" exercises in huge basement rooms—100 miles from Balakot. The agents going back and forth between the two interrogations that night never attempted to reconcile the vast differences in the confessions ...

http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-wedick22may28,0,4951185.story?coll=la-home-magazine

The "confessions" seem to be the only real "evidence," as suggested by this sterling bit of testimony:

U.S. expert sees terror camp in Pakistan
Wednesday, Aug 02, 2006

Washington: Eric Benn, an imagery expert with the Defence Intelligence Agency of the United States, has disputed Pakistan's claim that it does not have terrorist training camps in its territory ... The FBI rolled out Mr. Benn, who on the basis of satellite photos of areas, initially argued that there was perhaps a 50 per cent ``possibility'' of a ``militant training camp'' in northeast Pakistan. But after viewing Hamid's confession to the FBI, the analyst concluded that there was 70 per cent ``probability'' that the satellite images pointed to a militant training camp ... http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/02/stories/2006080220231400.htm

Two separate juries failed to convict Umer Hayat, so the Feds pled him out on an unrelated charge:

The Record
Published Friday, Aug 25, 2006
Umer Hayat walked out of a Sacramento federal courtroom this morning a free man ... Following June 2005’s allegations, Hayat spent 11 months in jail and the past 3 1/2 months under house arrest in Lodi ... But authorities couldn't convince a jury that Umer Hayat wasn't just making up his tale of touring paramilitary training camps run by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in 2003, when FBI agents interviewed him last summer. After a two-month trial, jurors in April deadlocked on two charges that Umer Hayat, a U.S. citizen, lied about his knowledge of terrorist camps and his son's attendance at one. Although prosecutors initially announced they would seek a new trial, they quickly accepted a guilty plea from Umer Hayat on a charge he lied to federal agents in 2003 about the amount of cash he was taking to his native Pakistan ... http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060825/NEWS01/60825002/1001

Hayat is free after sentence of time served
By Denny Walsh -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 11:23 am PDT Friday, August 25, 2006

Umer Hayat, the Lodi ice cream vendor who fought the government to no verdict on terrorist-related charges and then pleaded guilty in an unrelated matter, was sentenced Friday in Sacramento federal court to the 11 months he spent in jail awaiting trial ... He was previously tried on charges that he lied in 2005 to the FBI about his son's support of terrorism and his own firsthand knowledge of terrorist training camps in Pakistan. The jury split 7-5 for conviction on one count and 6-6 on a second count and a mistrial was declared. While he was happy to have his prosecution behind him, Hayat told reporters Friday, "My family’s still hurting about my son's situation" ... http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14307507p-15194103c.html

It looks right now to me like they've framed a kid, couldn't frame his father (despite having a "confession"), so they're illegally preventing the father's brother and the kid's cousin, who are USA citizens, from re-entering the country.

[lyonn]

52. Seems having them here in the U.S. for interrogation

might be a wise way to go, unless, torture works better in those other countries. Heck, if they are terrorist they may be full of valuable info. It might be a good idea to treat them like citizens and give them a chance for a hearing/trial. Talk about winning the hearts and minds of the world! More unbelievable stupidity being performed by our intel/admin.

[POAS]

53. is deportation of citizens next?