PBS Frontline has launched an impressive print/TV/web project. Produced in Berkeley, CA, in “The Enemy Within” FRONTLINE and New York Times correspondent Lowell Bergman and producer Oriana Zill de Granados interview top FBI and Homeland Security officials to assess U.S. anti-terror efforts 5 years after 9/11. The web site is a project of the Investigative Journalism for Print and Television Seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, taught by Reva and David Logan Professor Lowell Bergman.
PBS Frontline has launched an impressive print/TV/web project. Produced in Berkeley, CA, in “The Enemy Within” FRONTLINE and New York Times correspondent Lowell Bergman and producer Oriana Zill de Granados interview top FBI and Homeland Security officials to assess U.S. anti-terror efforts 5 years after 9/11. The web site is a project of the Investigative Journalism for Print and Television Seminar at the University of California at Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, taught by Reva and David Logan Professor Lowell Bergman.
Marlena Telvick writes in to highlight some key news that didn’t make the film but appears on the web site:
1. LEGAL ARGUMENT BEHIND THE LODI TERRORISM INVESTIGATION FEATURED IN THE DOCUMENTARY
Web site features a never before published chart FOIA’d from the Executive Office for Immigration Review that diagrams the government’s argument that the two Lodi, Calif. imams, Shabbir Ahmed and Mohammed Adil Khan, along with Umer and Hamid Hayat were connected to Al Qaeda and the Taliban; and that Hamid Hayat had been recruited by the two imams to attend a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and then return to the U.S. to wage jihad.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/lodi/terrorchart.pdf
2. USE OF DEPORTATION
“The Man Turned Away”, by Charlotte Buchen.
Raed al-Banna was turned away by authorities at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on a routine visa violation. A year and a half later he was identified as the suicide bomber that drove a car full of explosives into a crowded bazaar outside a health clinic killing 166 people and wounded 146 in Hilla, Iraq. It remains the deadliest suicide-attack in the country since the U.S. invasion, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Defense press office in Baghdad. Inside the charred vehicle, an Iraqi fireman found the driver’s hand chained to the steering wheel. To his family in Jordan, al-Banna was a beloved son who wanted to make it in America. To his American friends, he was a sweet guy with a charming smile who loved to party. To the families of the people he killed in Hilla, Iraq, he was a murderer.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/reality/al-banna.html
3. PRISONS AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM
“Kevin James and the JIS Conspiracy,” by Rob Harris.
The only “operational” homegrown terror plot since 9/11 involving a string of gas station robberies in California that the FBI alleges were perpetrated to finance terrorist attacks on military recruitment centers, synagogues and the Israeli consulate led investigators inside the California prison system. In August 2005, four men were indicted in Orange County, Calif. for a terror plot that both FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte have highlighted. “Of all of the terrorist plots since 9/11, it is probably the one that operationally was closest to actually occurring,” said FBI Assistant Director of Public Affairs John Miller. The group’s alleged ringleader Kevin James makes his first public response to the charges.
For the past decade, terrorists linked to violent jihadi activities have been routinely placed under Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, that severely restrict visitation and communication with the outside world. However, FRONTLINE and The New York Times have been allowed, on numerous occasions, to walk into the Santa Ana City Jail where James is being held and interview this alleged terrorist ringleader.
4. POLICE AND TERRORISM INTELLIGENCE
“Policing the Front Lines,” by Cathy Bussewitz.
Police are often called the “front line” in the fight against terrorism. There are 800,000 police officers in the United States compared to 12,000 FBI agents, making it far more likely that a police officer would be the first to encounter a terrorist. Three of the 9/11 hijackers had encounters with police before they carried out the attacks; two of them, in fact, were already suspected by the CIA to be involved with terrorism. But the CIA never shared that information with other federal agencies, and there was no central terrorist watch list within the federal government being shared with local police. Today, there is such a list, administered by the new Terrorist Screening Center (TSC). While most police departments have access to this watch list, many are not aware of it. FRONTLINE called 10 police departments; none initially believed that the terrorist watch list was now available from the computers in their squad cars; most believed the technology was a work in progress. Even New York Police Chief Ray Kelly said in an interview with FRONTLINE that if an officer ran a name in a routine traffic stop, it wouldn’t be checked against a terrorist database. Article looks at new efforts to get data from the federal government’s terrorist watch list to local police on the street. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/reality/stockton.html
5. THE FALL-OUT IN COMMUNITY RELATIONS
“Engaging the Muslim Community” by Jeff Kearns
The Lodi case strained relations with the local Muslim community. What are the challenges the government faces in gaining the trust of Muslim Americans, while fighting terror? At the time of the arrests in 2005, several members of the community say they were questioned, intimidated and even followed by FBI agents. More than a year later, few in the community are willing to talk to the media because the FBI has said it has not ended its investigation. Some even suspected that reporters covering the trial were government agents. “You can’t exaggerate the damage done by the FBI’s investigation here,” says Taj Khan, a leader in Lodi’s Muslim community who has worked to strengthen ties between Pakistanis and local police.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/reality/muslim.html
6. Lodi Muslims: Under the “Eye of Suspicion”
Over the past year, reporter Jeff Kearns made numerous visits to Lodi, Calif., while covering the Hayat case for FRONTLINE and The New York Times. In this audio slideshow, he describes the history of Lodi’s Pakistani community and the impact of the Hayat trial. All photos by Jeff Kearns. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/lodi/
7. Hamid Hayat: A “jihadi heart and a jihadi mind”?
How did this American-born son of a Pakistani ice cream truck driver become one of the most touted convictions in federal prosecutors’ new war on terror? View some of the evidence presented against him and family photos provided exclusively to FRONTLINE.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywithin/lodi/
