Books : After : Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

John Ashcroft wasn't waiting for anything to happen next week. He wanted results now. At about the same time that Romero of the ACLU was ordering his staff to cancel a direct mail solicitation planned to go out the next day -- focused on "the new anti-liberty era being unveiled by President George Bush" and on how Americans should be "ashamed" of the "new morality" being pushed by, among others, John Ashcroft -- the Attorney General had a morning meeting with the President and his national security team. When FBI Director Robert Mueller assured Bush that everything was being done to track down those who had been involved in the attacks, Bush upbraided him. "Our priorities have changed," he said. "We need to focus on preventing the next attack more than worrying about who did this one." Ashcroft was determined to enforce that focus, even if it meant living in the FBI's operations center.

"Focus" was not a good word to describe what the FBI had been doing since the attacks. Activity, yes. But not focus.

True, they had pulled the passenger lists of the four planes and figured out who the hijackers probably were. (This was due in part to phone calls the flight attendants and passengers on the planes had made before the crashes, in which they had identified the hijackers' seat numbers. Also, these were pretty much the only people with Middle Eastern names on the planes, and in several instances they had bought tickets together.) But beyond that, what the FBI had done was to begin running down the tens of thousands of names on those INS immigration lists, go after a handful of prior leads on Middle Eastern terrorists, and otherwise respond to calls.

Thousands of calls.

Just the Newark office of the FBI -- whose jurisdiction includes Middle Eastern immigrant enclaves like Paterson, New Jersey, where it was already known that several of the hijackers had lived -- received more than 5,000 citizen calls between the afternoon of September 11 and the end of the day on September 12. Whether the government should engage in racial or ethnic profiling would be hotly debated in the months ahead. But among Americans sitting in their homes or offices contemplating the horror of September 11 there was no such debate. One by one Americans did their own ad hoc racial profiling. It seemed that anyone who had ever seen a Muslim or suspected a neighbor of being a Muslim called in. Some reported suspicious-smelling food in a neighboring house or apartment; others reported seeing people in Muslim garb whispering. There were so many calls that the lines jammed and the phones had to be kicked over to FBI operators in the Atlanta office. One by one, Newark-based agents, working through the night and helped by local police, ran down each call, a process that would last through Thanksgiving and ultimately include 27,000 face-to-face interviews from September 12 through February.

The agents and their supervisors tried to prioritize. Obviously, a call about suspicious food smells should be attended to after a tip about three men with guns coming in and out of an apartment at all hours of the day. But mostly they went after everything. And for good reason. From his command post in the FBI operations center, Ashcroft told Mueller that any male from eighteen to forty years old from Middle Eastern or North African countries whom the FBI simply learned about was to be questioned and questioned hard. And anyone from these countries whose immigration papers were out of order -- anyone -- was to be turned over to the INS. Ashcroft then put Michael Chertoff, the head of his Justice Department Criminal Division, in de facto charge of these INS roundups, even though the INS process was supposed to be part of a civil law proceeding, not a criminal prosecution. The goal, Ashcroft and Chertoff told the FBI and INS agents, was to prevent more attacks, not prosecute anyone. And the best way to do that was to round up, question, and hold as many people as possible.

That was not a message, however, that made it to Lindemann, the INS Border Patrol agent in Detroit. It seemed as if it had been forever since the Border Patrol regarded itself as part of the INS, let alone the Justice Department. September 11 hadn't changed that. So now, while the FBI and INS in New Jersey began rounding up people with families who had worked for years at gas stations or pizza parlors, Lindemann and his fellow Border Patrol agents were instructed to keep to business as usual in the north. That meant that what Lindemann had bitterly come to call the Catch and Release Program, or CARP, would continue in the days and weeks after September 11. He and his partner, Mark Hall, would catch people sneaking over the border into Detroit from Canada and then be told by supervisors to release them because the Border Patrol unit only had a $1,000 a week to pay the local jail to hold people.

A significant portion of those Lindemann and Hall had caught and released in recent years -- perhaps 25 percent -- were Muslim, which was no surprise because the Detroit area has the country's largest Muslim community. And Canada, which had notoriously looser border controls than the United States (people coming in from twenty different countries, such as Saudi Arabia, who needed visas to get into the United States do not need visas to get into Canada), was known as a hotbed of terrorist activity. Everyone Lindemann caught was, by definition, breaking the law and, unlike many of those being rounded up and held in New Jersey, had no roots in the community. But they continued to be released after filling out a form and promising to come back for a deportation hearing, which, of course, they never did. Lindemann's and Hall's repeated protests to the bosses, which now became more vehement than ever, were ignored. "I was getting to the point where I couldn't stand it anymore," Lindemann recalls. "I felt like I had to do something."