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| Exactly 23 minutes before suspected terrorist plot leader Mohamed Atta acquired a Florida driver's license, a 28-year-old Pakistani gas station attendant got his license renewed at the same motor vehicles' branch. For that reason, Mohammad Mubeen was standing in a tiny courtroom wearing an orange jumpsuit last Monday afternoon, one of more than 1,100 people ensnared in a nationwide hunt for terrorists. In urgent, rapid-fire Urdu, Mubeen pleaded to be released. True, he had entered the United States illegally, he told the judge through a translator. But he said he simply did not know any of the hijackers. Still, the government attorney in the Miami courtroom easily persuaded the judge to hold Mubeen without bond. The lawyer presented a striking legal document that offers insight into both the strategy behind the detentions and a novel legal argument to keep people in custody on the most slender suspicion. |
Signed by a top international terrorism official at FBI headquarters in Washington, the seven-page document, which has not been previously disclosed, is being used repeatedly by prosecutors in detention hearings across the country. The FBI affidavit explains that "the business of counterterrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic. "At this stage of the investigation, the FBI is gathering and processing thousands of bits and pieces of information that may seem innocuous at first glance. We must analyze all that information, however, to see if it can be fit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates. . . . What may seem trivial to some may appear of great moment to those within the FBI or the intelligence community who have a broader context." The document's language offers the clearest window so far into a campaign of detentions on a scale not seen since World War II. As investigators race to comprehend the ongoing terrorist threat, the government has adopted a deliberate strategy of disruption -- locking up large numbers of Middle Eastern men, using whatever legal tools they can. |
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