The War on Terror on the Lodi Front

At the center of the trials were two Pakistanis living in Lodi, a small town south of Sacramento. One, 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, a cherry picker, stood accused of being a terrorist who trained at an Al Qaeda camp and returned to the U.S.A. to wreak havoc. The other, his 48-year-old father, Umer Hayat, was charged with lying to the FBI about his son's activities. Found guilty, the son now faces up to 39 years in prison . The jury deciding the father's fate split down the middle, unable to reach a decision. He could face another trial. The cases have been followed with apprehension by all Muslims here.

Their ordeal began last summer, when Hamid Hayat, fresh back from a two-year trip to Pakistan where he has spent half his life, was called in by the FBI and interrogated three times.

The California-born Hamid is evidently a simple fellow. At his first interview in the FBI he betrayed no alarm at the prospect of interrogation by men who believed they were on the verge of breaking a major terror ring in Lodi. He complimented one of the agents on the style of his shoes and in general made every effort to be helpful. So did his father, Umer whose job is driving an ice-cream truck. The FBI also grilled him intensively last June.

When the indictments came down, the news headlines were that Hamid had attended a terror-training camp in Pakistan, that there was a terror ring centered on Lodi. Both father and son had made full confessions.

What actually emerged in the trial, where both men were fortunate to have good lawyers, was the usual saga of FBI chicanery. It became very clear from videotapes of the FBI's questioning that the men have very poor English. Their native tongue is Pashto. They understood little of what they were being asked and were mostly concerned with pleasing their interrogators. In the words of one courtroom reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, "they gave many answers that had been previously suggested by the agents--who did most of the talking."

The son, in his five-hour videotaped confession, described a camp located on a mountaintop outside Balakot in the Northwest Frontier province, where he said 35 to 200 Pakistani men fired guns and exercised. The young man gave five different answers when asked who ran the camp. He mentioned "big people ... taller than me, (more) educated than me"; a Pakistani group named Harakat-ul-Ansar that was first brought up by an FBI agent; al Qaeda); "maybe my uncle"; and "maybe my grandfather".

The father, who said he visited the camp later, in 2004, out of curiosity, said it was outside Rawalpindi in Punjab province.

The father delighted the agents at one point by identifying three other young men in Lodi as possible terrorists. The son named two different men--his cousins--as attending Pakistani camps.

According to the Chronicle reporter, "Other admissions didn't seem to make sense. He said he recognized that men had gone to the camp from around the world, and that some had come from his father-in-law's madrasa in Pakistan, even though they wore masks. 'I can recognize from the eyes, you know,' he said."

In contrast to his son's location of the camp on top of a mountain, the father said the one he visited was underground.

At this camp, said Hayat Sr, more than 1,000 men from around the world--including white Americans--fired high-powered rifles, swung curved swords, and learned to pole vault across bodies of water. "They got those stick, the long stick," Hayat said on the videotape. "You know ... when you want to jump something, they was trying to stick like here and jump maybe 16 feet over there."

"They used it like a vaulting pole," FBI Agent Timothy Harrison put in.

"Yes sir," Hayat said.

"There must have been very tall ceilings," Harrison said. "This is a very deep basement?"

"Very deep basement, yes," Hayat said. "Very, very deep basement, yes."

The reason that FBI had pulled in the Hayats was that the Bureau had established a tight professional relationship in Oregon with a sharp fellow of 32 called Naseem Khan. In Lodi he was a fast food worker, then traveled north a few hundred miles on the invitation of an Oregon woman who was impressed by him. He cooked for her family on weekends, and had a job in a fast food joint in Bend, central Oregon.

To his Oregon residence, in 2001, not long after the attacks of September 11, came FBI agents investigating a different case in which there was a suspect with the same name as Khan. The agents established to their satisfaction that this Khan wasn't the man they wanted. Fortune favors those who seize opportunity. Khan pointed to an image of Osama bin Laden's number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, that had come up on a newsclip on his TV and said he'd seen him in Lodi in 1999.

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