US citizen recalls 'humiliating' post-9/11 arrest

Handcuffed and marched through Washington's Dulles International Airport in his Muslim clothing, the man with the long, dark beard could only imagine what people were thinking.



That scene unfolded in March 2003, a year and a half after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. One of the four planes hijacked in 2001 took off from Dulles. "I could only assume that they thought I was a terrorist," Abdullah al-Kidd recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.



Al-Kidd called his airport arrest "one of the most, if not the most, humiliating experiences of my life."



The humiliation had only just begun.



Over the next 16 days he would be strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes. On a long trip between jails, a federal marshal refused to unlock al-Kidd's chains so he could use the bathroom.



In the midst of al-Kidd's detention, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress about recent major successes against terrorism. No. 1 on Mueller's list was the capture of professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.



No. 2 was the arrest of al-Kidd, a Kansas-born convert to Islam who was not charged with a crime — either then or later.



Eight years later, the Supreme Court is weighing whether al-Kidd's arrest and detention violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. The court, which will hear arguments Wednesday in the case, also is being asked to decide whether former Attorney General John Ashcroft can be held personally liable for his role in setting the policy that led to al-Kidd's arrest at a Dulles ticket counter as he prepared to board a flight to Saudi Arabia.



Al-Kidd, now 38, was one of about 70 men, almost all Muslims, who were arrested and held in the months and years after Sept. 11 under a federal law intended to compel reluctant witnesses to testify to grand juries and at criminal trials.



The material witness law has existed in some form since 1789. But after Sept. 11, al-Kidd argues in his lawsuit, federal authorities began using it to take someone suspected of ties to terrorism off the streets even when they had insufficient evidence to believe he had committed a crime.



Ashcroft and other high-ranking officials publicly described the importance of using the material witness law against suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens. Less than two months after Sept. 11, Ashcroft said that the "aggressive detention of lawbreakers and material witnesses is vital to preventing, disrupting or delaying new attacks."



Al-Kidd was among the roughly half of those detained who were never called to testify in any criminal proceeding. One measure of Ashcroft's policy is that the government apologized to or reached monetary settlements with at least 13 people, according to a report by civil liberties groups.



But al-Kidd received no apology. The Obama administration, representing Ashcroft for his actions as attorney general, continues to argue the arrest was constitutional.



No attorney general has ever been held personally liable for official actions, civil rights lawyers said.



Five former attorneys general have joined the administration in urging the high court not to end that tradition. But 31 former federal prosecutors have sided with al-Kidd and argue the law's only proper use is to make sure witnesses show up.



The Supreme Court has said high-ranking officials may be held personally liable if they can be tied directly to a violation of constitutional rights and understood the action crossed that line.



At the trial court in Idaho and the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, judges, who like Ashcroft were appointed by Republican presidents, have so far allowed the case against Ashcroft to go forward.



Al-Kidd said he has two main goals: personal vindication and "to insure this doesn't happen to other people." Now teaching English at a university in Saudi Arabia, al-Kidd sat for an interview shortly after returning to the United States this month to see his two children and other relatives.



The government's interest in al-Kidd appears to have stemmed from a trip he made to Yemen after Sept. 11 and his ties to a man the Justice Department prosecuted on computer terrorism charges. That defendant, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was a graduate student at the University of Idaho, where al-Kidd played running back for the college football team in the 1990s.



Al-Kidd said he met with FBI agents several times and answered all their questions. He said he was never told he might be called as a witness, never told not to travel or asked to voluntarily turn over his passport, as the FBI did with another potential witness in the same investigation.



Early in 2003, he was planning to go to Saudi Arabia on a scholarship to study Arabic and Islamic law. Days before he left — some six months after his last contact with federal authorities — the FBI persuaded a judge in Idaho to sign a material witness warrant authorizing his arrest. Agents picked him up at Dulles two days later.



But the sworn statement the FBI submitted to justify the warrant had important errors and omissions. The $5,000 one-way, first-class seat that the agents said al-Kidd purchased was, in reality, a coach-class, round-trip ticket. The statement neglected to mention that al-Kidd had been cooperative or that he was a U.S. citizen with a wife and children who also were American.



Claims against the FBI agents are on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case. Al-Kidd has separately reached settlements with Virginia, Oklahoma and Idaho jail officials over his treatment. A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled the strip searches al-Kidd endured at the federal jail in Oklahoma City "were objectively unreasonable and violated the Fourth Amendment."



When al-Kidd was brought before a federal judge in Idaho, more than two weeks after his arrest, he was released from custody, but under very strict conditions.



Recently married for a second time, he could only travel in four Western states and was required to live with his new in-laws in Las Vegas. "It was pretty stressful," he said. "In their defense, they probably want the best for their daughter, and even if this guy didn't do anything wrong, he's damaged goods at this point."



His marriage quickly deteriorated and relations were so tense at home that the court allowed him to find his own place.



Al-Kidd found a job delivering supplies to a store on Nellis Air Force Base, near Las Vegas, but was told after eight or nine months that security officials would no longer allow him on the base.



Even after al-Hussayen was acquitted on the most serious charges, the government took no action to end restrictions on al-Kidd. But he persuaded a judge to end them.



Nine months later, Al-Kidd filed his suit, which he hopes will finally to clear his name. "I haven't lost faith in the system," he said.

Shame of Britain's Muslim schools: Secret filming shows pupils being beaten and 'taught Hindus drink cow p***'

Undercover footage shows pupils being taught religious apartheid

 Muslims who adopt Western ways will be 'tortured in afterlife'

 Unprovoked beatings captured on camera in Yorkshire madrassa

 Boy threatened with bench by senior student left in charge of class



It is an assembly hall of the sort found in any ordinary school. Boys aged 11 and upwards sit cross-legged on the floor in straight rows. They face the front of the room and listen carefully. But this is no ordinary assembly. Holding the children’s attention is a man in Islamic dress wearing a skullcap and stroking his long dark beard as he talks.



‘You’re not like the non-Muslims out there,’ the teacher says, gesturing towards the window. ‘All that evil you see in the streets, people not wearing the hijab properly, people smoking . . . you should hate it, you should hate walking down that street.’



He refers to the ‘non-Muslims’ as the ‘Kuffar’, an often derogatory term that means disbeliever or infidel.



Welcome to one of Britain’s most influential Islamic faith schools, one of at least 2,000 such schools in Britain, some full-time, others part-time. They represent a growing, parallel education system.



The school is the Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham, an oversubscribed independent secondary school. Darul Ulooms are world-renowned Islamic institutions and their aim is to produce the next generation of Muslim leaders. In fact, these schools have been described as the ‘Etons of Islam’.



This school is required by its inspectors to teach tolerance and respect for other faiths. But the Channel 4 current affairs programme Dispatches filmed secretly inside it – and instead discovered that Muslim children are being taught religious apartheid and social segregation.



We recorded a number of speakers giving deeply disturbing talks about Jews, Christians and atheists.



We found children as young as 11 learning that Hindus have ‘no intellect’ and that they ‘drink cow p***’.



And we came across pupils being told that the ‘disbelievers’ are ‘the worst creatures’ and that Muslims who adopt supposedly non-Muslim ways, such as shaving, dancing, listening to music and – in the case of women – removing their headscarves, would be tortured with a forked iron rod in the afterlife.



In 2009 this school was praised by Government-approved inspection teams for its interfaith teachings. The report said that ‘pupils learn about the beliefs and practices of other faiths and are taught to show respect to other world religions’.



It seems that the inspectors were unaware of the teaching methods revealed by our undercover reporter, Osman. He was taken on as a volunteer at the Darul Uloom school in Birmingham in April 2009 and was allowed to sit in on some lessons – but not their Islamic classes.



So, in July last year, he went into one of the rooms where we’d heard they taught Islamic studies and left a secret camera to record the lessons.



Filming intermittently over a period of four months, the camera recorded children being taught a hardline, intolerant and highly anti-social version of Islam.



During the same period our reporter also attended the Markazi Jamia mosque in Keighley, West Yorkshire, after hearing of serious allegations that children were being hit at its madrassa.



Madrassas in the UK are part-time after-school or weekend classes, often held in mosques, where children are taught to read the Koran. In Keighley it is not what they are being taught that is the problem, but how.



Again, Osman went into the mosque and left the camera in the room where classes took place.



The film shows children as young as six sitting on the floor of a large room in the mosque, one of the biggest in the country. The boys are hunched over wooden benches, rocking backwards and forwards as they rote-learn the Koran in Arabic. A man with a long white beard dressed in a traditional shalwar kameez – tunic and trousers – sits at the head of the class.



Periodically he gets up and walks behind the boys. As he passes, the children appear to cower and watch him nervously. It soon becomes clear why.



He unexpectedly raises his hand and slaps a young boy hard on the head. Moments later he strikes another. And then he kicks a third child.



In just two days of filming in December 2010, the camera recorded the teacher hitting children as young as six or seven at least ten times, in less than three hours of lessons.



From what we could see, every ¬single blow was pretty much unprovoked. We soon realised that the beatings were routine. The behaviour of the boys, the way they flinched and backed away when he approached, indicated that they were long-accustomed to being hit and kicked as they studied.



In another incident an older boy, left in charge of a class while a teacher is out at prayer, picks up a bench and threatens to hit a younger boy with it.



During the making of this Dispatches film I have often counted my blessings. I received my Islamic education at home. My mum would read the Koran with me and most of my knowledge of Islam came from within the family. Others have not been so lucky.



Osman was subjected to beatings at four separate madrassas in the East Midlands as a child. He says that for the nine years he spent going to after-school Koran classes, he was hit regularly, at least a couple of timesa week.



‘It destroyed my confidence,’ he says, ‘and the worst bit was never knowing when it was going to happen. I had a horrible teacher who would use his fists, a stick, a shoe, anything he could find. He’d just get angry and lash out.’



Osman’s young cousins go to the same madrassas he attended and told him the beatings were still continuing. This persuaded Osman to try to reveal the truth behind the private world of faith schools. Over a period of two years he bravely placed cameras in both schools and collected highly sensitive material for us. His experience of madrassas is not uncommon. But persuading people to go on camera about this has been difficult. One family who were willing to talk were too frightened to do so openly.



‘Salma’ and ‘Ayesha’ are a mother and daughter whose identities we are protecting. Ayesha is now sitting her A-levels but when she was seven she was beaten at her Koran classes. She says: ‘The teacher would sit there, tell me what to read, pronounce it to me – then if I said it wrong he would hit me on the hands with a ruler.’



Her younger brother, only five at the time, would be hit on his feet with a stick. They dreaded going to those classes but did not tell their mother. Salma eventually withdrew her children from attending madrassas for a completely different reason: she learned that they were being taught an intolerant version of Islam. ‘They were using terms like “Kaffir” just because somebody isn’t of the same religion,’ she says, ‘and I’m teaching my children to integrate and not be racist so I pulled my children out.’



Academic and theologian Dr Taj Hargey invited me to visit his part-time Islamic school in Oxford where children are taught in mixed-gender classes.



Here I witnessed a modern and refreshing method of teaching. Pupils were told to respect other faiths, ask questions about their religion and recite from the Koran in English as well as Arabic.



Dr Hargey told me he set up this school because of claims that Muslim parents had made to him about beatings in other madrassas. ‘It’s an outdated, archaic concept,’ he says, ‘and if we inflict this violence we will sow the seeds of violence in them.’



Sir Roger Singleton, former Government chief adviser on the safety of children, and Ann Cryer, former MP for Keighley, want the law to change to ban physical punishment in supplementary classes, as it does in full-time schools. ‘It just isn’t acceptable,’ says Cryer. ‘We wouldn’t allow this to happen to white kids going to Sunday schools.’



We approached the Darul Uloom Islamic High School in Birmingham with the findings of our film. It claimed that the senior student who gave the speech about Hindus was later reported by other students, and has been expelled, and that no teachers were present ‘during the incident’.



The school said that a speaker who made comments about Jews was ‘visiting’ and his views did not represent school policy. It denied that its religious instruction was hardline or extremist and said it did not tolerate hatred towards any faith group.



In a statement, the school said: ‘Our ethos is for students to be full and active participants of British society.’ It also said that it would study our evidence and take ‘disciplinary measures’ if required.



Regarding the Keighley madrassa, we were told that the Jamia Mosque committee was firm in its resolve to take whatever action was necessary to protect children being taught at the mosque and that it would give its full co-operation to any enquiries resulting from our film.



If the law on physical punishment does change, that would be one way to protect the very young that attend these classes. But these part-time and full-time Muslim schools also need closer scrutiny – the regulatory system needs to be tightened up.



However, we have a Government that, on the one hand, gives grand speeches about tackling the causes of extremism, as David Cameron did last week, while, on the other, encouraging local communities to set up their own schools – including faith schools. It’s time to stop these mixed messages.



And Muslims can no longer sweep this under the carpet – they need to face up to what is happening behind closed doors. Many warn that if we don’t all tackle this toxic mix of hatred and violence head on, we will reap the whirlwind in years to come.