part of a 7 page article from SFGate.com
When The War on Terrorism Hits Home
How the U.S. Department of Justice forced a man to leave the country, his wife and his two young children without proving he had any connection to terrorism
Seth Rosenfeld
Sunday, January 12, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/01/12/CM200774.DTL
It was supposed to be a romantic road trip to revitalize their marriage. But the car Ali and Stephanie Mubarak bought in Texas had broken down and, as they were about to board an American Airlines flight home to Northern California from Dallas Fort Worth Airport, a clerk told them the computer had flagged Ali's name.
At first the couple made light of it - just another bureaucratic inconvenience in the post-9/11 world. " 'Honey, she's only doing her job,' " Stephanie Mubarak told her husband, a Pakistani native and small-plane pilot who'd lived in Northern California 10 years. "It's nothing."
But the clerk called the police, the police called the FBI, and within hours Ali Mubarak's life in America began to crash as he found himself caught in the government's anti-terror sweep.
Many citizens of Corning, a rural community at the northern tip of the Sacramento Valley, knew Mubarak as a hard-working family man who had come to the United States to learn to fly commercial airliners and fell in love with the country's freedoms, a charming wheeler-dealer who cut a few corners in his pursuit of the American dream.
But FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents took a more sinister view as they searched his home and his shop and pored over his business operations, religious practices and marital life. Along the way, they claimed he had engaged in marriage fraud, accused his wife of infidelity and allegedly asserted that his San Francisco lawyer worked for terrorists. They suspected he "might" have helped select the World Trade Center for a 1993 bombing and more recently been planning a small-plane attack on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Mubarak - who has denied any connection to terrorism - is one of at least 1, 200 people to be detained since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of those cases remain secret, but Mubarak's was open. His case - and internal FBI reports obtained by The Chronicle - provide a rare view of the man under suspicion, the government's tactics in the domestic war on terrorism, and the impact on his wife, his children and his small-town community.
"It -didn't just screw up his life," said Jack Alexander, a Corning native and building inspector who knew Mubarak. "It screwed up quite a few lives around him."
When The War on Terrorism Hits Home
How the U.S. Department of Justice forced a man to leave the country, his wife and his two young children without proving he had any connection to terrorism
Seth Rosenfeld
Sunday, January 12, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/01/12/CM200774.DTL
It was supposed to be a romantic road trip to revitalize their marriage. But the car Ali and Stephanie Mubarak bought in Texas had broken down and, as they were about to board an American Airlines flight home to Northern California from Dallas Fort Worth Airport, a clerk told them the computer had flagged Ali's name.
At first the couple made light of it - just another bureaucratic inconvenience in the post-9/11 world. " 'Honey, she's only doing her job,' " Stephanie Mubarak told her husband, a Pakistani native and small-plane pilot who'd lived in Northern California 10 years. "It's nothing."
But the clerk called the police, the police called the FBI, and within hours Ali Mubarak's life in America began to crash as he found himself caught in the government's anti-terror sweep.
Many citizens of Corning, a rural community at the northern tip of the Sacramento Valley, knew Mubarak as a hard-working family man who had come to the United States to learn to fly commercial airliners and fell in love with the country's freedoms, a charming wheeler-dealer who cut a few corners in his pursuit of the American dream.
But FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents took a more sinister view as they searched his home and his shop and pored over his business operations, religious practices and marital life. Along the way, they claimed he had engaged in marriage fraud, accused his wife of infidelity and allegedly asserted that his San Francisco lawyer worked for terrorists. They suspected he "might" have helped select the World Trade Center for a 1993 bombing and more recently been planning a small-plane attack on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Mubarak - who has denied any connection to terrorism - is one of at least 1, 200 people to be detained since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Most of those cases remain secret, but Mubarak's was open. His case - and internal FBI reports obtained by The Chronicle - provide a rare view of the man under suspicion, the government's tactics in the domestic war on terrorism, and the impact on his wife, his children and his small-town community.
"It -didn't just screw up his life," said Jack Alexander, a Corning native and building inspector who knew Mubarak. "It screwed up quite a few lives around him."
