By the late 1990s, a visiting American told Al-Buthe a compelling story about Pete Seda and the Islamic center in Oregon. After growing up in Iran, Seda had moved in the 1970s to Ashland, a beautiful town at the foot of the Cascade and Siskiyou Mountains where hippies and New Agers had long gravitated. After graduating from college in Ashland, Seda, an arborist, built a successful tree-care business. During the 1980s, he converted to Sunni Islam and eventually founded an Islamic center, called the Quran Foundation, where local Muslims could worship and interested outsiders could learn about the religion. By the 1990s, his foundation was sending hundreds of Korans a year to prisoners around the United States. When Al-Buthe heard about this, he says, "I thought it was a big opportunity for Al-Haramain to establish something in the U.S." In 1998, he traveled to Ashland and spent $187,000 in Al-Haramain funds to help Seda purchase a large plot of land and a two-story house in Ashland.
For the next few years, with the influx of funds from Saudi Arabia, the renamed Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation became a flourishing center that drew dozens of visitors from the surrounding region. Seda frequently participated in interfaith events promoting cultural awareness and religious tolerance in southern Oregon. He and his fellow Muslims had a float every year in Ashland's Fourth of July parade and staffed a booth at nearby Medford's annual Multicultural Fair. He spoke frequently at local synagogues and churches, stressing tolerance and his abhorrence of terrorism. "Every word I ever heard Pete say was about cooperation and coexistence," says Jim Bauermeister, the president of the Medford-based Multicultural Association of Southern Oregon, which sponsors the fair.
Like most Americans, Seda was deeply affected by the events of Sept. 11, 2001, according to those close to him. Four days after the attacks, Seda offered to meet with the FBI to discuss any questions it may have had about Al-Haramain and its local operations. At Seda's request his attorney, David Berger, sat in on the conversation. Two FBI agents from Medford, including David Carroll, the agent who led the raid in 2004, showed up. "Pete did most of the talking," Berger told me in early April when I met him in Ashland. "He sincerely wanted to help however he could." But his offer was never taken seriously by the government.
Instead, he soon realized he was under surveillance. One day in 2002 Seda brought Berger to his compound and showed him a video camera that had apparently been planted near the front gate by federal agents. "They could see everyone coming and going," says Berger. In 2003, Seda began complaining that his mail was being intercepted, according to Berger and others. And as word spread in southern Oregon about the presence of a potentially dangerous Islamic group, some people in the largely white working-class area began to harass Seda and other Muslims (as well as Latinos and other people they thought were Muslims).
Seda continued to seek ways to promote peace. In 2003, he asked David Zaslow, the rabbi, for help in contacting the Israeli consulate in San Francisco so he could carry out a project to bring humanitarian aid to Palestinians living in the West Bank. Although the Israeli government eventually refused to approve the project, the two men communicated with the Israelis at length. "We sat here with the counsel general of Israel," Zaslow said, pointing to a couch in his Ashland office. "A Muslim extremist would never do that."
Feeling depressed that his attempts at interfaith dialogue had failed, Seda temporarily left the country.
By the mid-1990s, U.S. officials began to believe that the Wahhabi organizations they once saw as a bulwark against the Soviet threat and Iranian radicalism were secretly funding anti-American terrorist groups. From the beginning, Al-Haramain, as Saudi Arabia's largest charity, was a prime suspect. In 1998, after al-Qaida operatives bombed the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the CIA and FBI uncovered evidence leading them to believe that Al-Haramain officials and employees in East Africa had been involved in the planning of the attacks, and the agencies shared that intelligence with the Saudi government. U.S. focus on the charities greatly intensified after the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by a gang of 19 al-Qaida operatives, 17 of whom were Saudi citizens.
The investigations into terrorist financing were managed by an interagency committee within the National Security Council that was chaired by the Treasury Department and included the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and three other law enforcement agencies. In 2003, the committee issued an important document that was, strangely, called a "nonpaper." It still remains classified. Based almost exclusively on U.S. intelligence on Bosnia and Somalia, the "nonpaper" laid out Al-Haramain's ties to terrorism and suggested that many charity field offices, as well as the headquarters in Saudi Arabia, "appeared to be providing important support to Al Qaeda," according to a government summary of the report. It was presented to the Saudis in 2003 by Cofer Black, a top U.S. counterterrorism official. (Black, who famously declared in congressional testimony that "after 9/11 the gloves come off," is now vice chairman of the notorious security and intelligence contractor Blackwater.)
In December 2003, the U.S. and Saudi governments jointly designated a Bosnian organization tied to Al-Haramain as a supporter of terrorism. Then, in January 2004, a month before the raid on the Ashland center, Washington and Riyadh took the unprecedented step of holding a joint press conference to announce that Al-Haramain branches in Indonesia, Kenya, Tanzania and Pakistan had been designated as terrorist financiers. The Saudi headquarters of Al-Haramain stayed off the list, but it was quietly closed by the Saudis in 2004.
Throughout these investigations, Al-Haramain officials argued that the charity had no control over how funds or supplies might be distributed in countries like Bosnia or Pakistan and that, with the exception of the well-funded Oregon branch, overseas affiliates operated independently from Riyadh. When the reports surfaced about the possible involvement of Al-Haramain's East African affiliates in the 1998 embassy bombings, "it was for us a shock," Al-Buthe said. "We had no idea about Kenya and Tanzania, and no connections to offices overseas except in the U.S." From his voluminous files, Al-Buthe also produced an affidavit from Kenya's Directorate of Security Intelligence stating that a Kenyan investigation had concluded that Al-Haramain "never supports or supported any Islamic terrorist group." (The document's authenticity could not be confirmed.)
The designation system that snared Al-Buthe and the Al-Haramain Foundation originated with the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Passed by Congress to set guidelines for economic sanctions and trade embargoes, the act gave the president wide powers to deal with any "unusual and extraordinary threat" from abroad by confiscating property and prohibiting financial transactions with specific countries contributing to that threat.
The powers were first used against individuals by President Clinton, when his National Security Council designated several Palestinian and Israeli opponents of the Camp David agreements as terrorist supporters. Later, use of the tactic expanded greatly under President George W. Bush.
Next page: A prescient warning against the growing secretive powers of the Bush administration
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