Blacklisted by the Bush government

Spying on Americans without warrants, charges based on secret evidence, a small town divided by fear. Welcome to the world of Bush's "specially designated global terrorists."

Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

By Tim Shorrock

Read more: Politics, News, Bush, Islam, CIA, Muslims, Saudi Arabia, National Security Agency, FISA, Tim Shorrock, Domestic Spying under President Bush

May 19, 2008 | RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, and ASHLAND, Ore. -- One day in March 2004, Soliman Hamd Al-Buthe, a former member of Saudi Arabia's national basketball team and a government official in the city of Riyadh, picked up his phone for an urgent call with two American lawyers in Washington, D.C. Most of the call concerned a growing confrontation between the U.S. government and the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Ashland, Ore., the U.S. branch of a global Saudi Arabian charity organization under investigation for possible links to terrorism. Al-Buthe had been an advisor to Al-Haramain from 1995 to 2002 and was a member of the Oregon foundation's board of directors. Just weeks prior to the call, the foundation -- a respected fixture in the Ashland community run for years by an Iranian-American Muslim named Pete Seda -- had been raided by U.S. law enforcement agents.

Because of their involvement with Al-Haramain, Al-Buthe and Seda were also entangled in a lawsuit filed against dozens of prominent Saudis by families of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. During the call, Al-Buthe and his attorneys talked about the funds needed for his legal defense. "We had a problem of transferring money," he says, "so we were thinking of new ways" of getting funds to Washington.

The phone call proved fateful. Unknown to its three participants, the conversation, and at least one other between them in April 2004, was monitored by officials from the National Security Agency at the behest of senior Bush administration officials. The surveillance that day -- apparently conducted without a warrant and later exposed when the government accidentally released a highly classified document to Al-Haramain's attorneys -- would become a key piece in the sprawling debate over extrajudicial spying inside the United States after 9/11. The surveillance would also have profound consequences for Al-Buthe -- who is considered a terrorist supporter by the Bush administration -- and others connected with the Al-Haramain Foundation in Oregon.

Ever since a New York Times report uncovered warrantless domestic spying by the Bush administration, the issue of NSA surveillance and the 1978 law governing it has been intensely scrutinized and debated. Until now, however, little attention has been paid to dubious activities directly connected with the domestic spying. The Bush administration has used expanded national security powers to undermine the legal rights of people in the United States who are identified as al-Qaida supporters, but who are not charged with terrorist-related crimes. The U.S. Treasury Department and other agencies investigating domestic organizations and U.S. persons rely on the NSA to spy and collect evidence for them -- a fundamental shift from the past, when the NSA's vast eavesdropping powers were used only for foreign intelligence gathering. And in the name of protecting national security, the Bush administration has regularly withheld what it claims is key evidence against those accused -- insisting, essentially, that the public accept without question its private conclusions about the suspects' guilt.

The Al-Haramain story, based on a two-month Salon investigation that included a series of interviews in Riyadh, Washington, D.C., and Oregon, sheds light on the consequences of these Bush policies. Ultimately it is a story of real people in real communities caught up in the global maelstrom unleashed by Islamic militancy, the horror of the 9/11 attacks and America's powerful -- and at times crude and undemocratic -- counterattack against an elusive enemy.

Six months after the NSA surveillance of Al-Buthe's call, based in part on information gleaned from it, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control branded Al-Buthe and another Saudi director of the Oregon foundation as "specially designated global terrorists." The foundation, its assets now frozen, was shut down, and Al-Buthe, Pete Seda and others were thrown into deep legal and financial jeopardy. Soon, some people in the Ashland community started looking at each other with worry and distrust -- were terrorist operatives living in their midst?

Bush officials maintain they know of direct links between the Oregon branch of Al-Haramain and Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization, but have handled the case in deep secrecy. In February of this year, in response to a lawsuit filed in 2007 by Al-Haramain's attorneys challenging the terrorist designation, the Treasury Department finally announced charges, alleging that the foundation had provided "financial, material, and other services and support to Al Qaeda." If the government had it right, a respected Islamic center that attracted an eclectic mix of hippies, rednecks, and African and Middle Eastern immigrants to the bucolic community of Ashland had been deeply connected to a web of terrorist groups reaching from Pakistan to North America.

The Oregon foundation strongly denies the charges. Lynne Bernabei, Al-Haramain's lead attorney in Washington, contends that the terrorist designation was based on the government's "misinterpretation" of what it heard in the warrantless surveillance, and on information compiled from dubious public sources or selectively culled in the government's favor. "All they gave us was junk and smoke and mirrors," Bernabei says of the documentation the Treasury Department used to buttress its case. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has refused to make any of the classified evidence it claims to have about Al-Haramain, or even summaries of it, available to the accused and their attorneys. And until Bernabei and her colleagues filed the lawsuit in 2007, she says, the Treasury Department never informed the organization about any specific reasons for its terrorist designation, or the provisions of U.S. law or presidential executive orders it may have violated.

The government's secretive, "trust us" approach to the case was made explicit as far back as the February 2004 raid that precipitated the shutdown of the Al-Haramain Foundation. David Berger, a close friend of Pete Seda's who served as the foundation's lawyer for many years, was present for the raid, which was led by Special Agent David Carroll from the FBI's Medford field office. According to Berger, as they were leaving the compound that day he remarked to Carroll that he would be surprised if the government found anything incriminating in the material it had seized. "If you only knew what I knew," Carroll shot back.

Berger was perplexed -- not least because Seda and his attorneys had voluntarily approached the FBI long before, in the days after 9/11, offering to help the FBI with any information it wanted. Moreover, the day before the raid, Berger, as Seda's attorney, had met with the FBI and turned over what he says were "eight feet of file boxes" to comply with an FBI subpoena. One purpose of the next day's raid, he believes now, was to find out if the foundation had withheld any documents. (Calls to Carroll at the FBI's Medford field office were not returned; an FBI spokesperson in Portland, citing the "ongoing investigation" of Al-Haramain, declined to comment.)

Critics say the entire process for identifying "specially designated global terrorists" -- a program originally conceived in the 1970s to penalize foreign governments targeted by the United States -- has been abused by the Bush administration. "When you have a tool of nation-to-nation diplomacy and turn that into the power to blacklist individuals and groups, it raises very serious questions about First Amendment and due process rights," says David Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, who has been working with Bernabei and other lawyers on the Al-Haramain Foundation's case. To this day, Cole says, there has not been a single hearing wherein the Oregon foundation could have been presented with the evidence that led to the 2004 raid, the freezing of its assets, and its designation as a supporter of terrorism. For four years, the Treasury Department, by freezing the charity's assets, blocked it from using its own funds to pay for its legal defense.

"You can be designated without an evidentiary finding that you ever actively engaged in or supported terrorism," says Cole. "This is a guilt-by-association process."

Next page: A collection of dubious materials used by Bush officials to target the charity group