VO: The American government set out to search for the Al Qaeda organisation inside its own country. Thousands were detained as all branches of the law and the military were told to look for terrorists.
[ CUT TO VIEW OF GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE , SAN FRANCISCO ]
CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL OFFICER : You don’t really know what a terrorist looks like, what kind of car they drive, or anything else, so it’s just basically everything and everybody and anything out here.
[ CUT TO NEWS TITLE : “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK” ]
[ CUT TO SCENES OF EMERGENCY RESPONSE VEHICLES ]
VO: And, bit by bit, the government found the network: a series of hidden cells in cities around the country from Buffalo to Portland.
[ CUT TO PRESIDENTIAL PODIUM ]
GEORGE W BUSH : We’ve thwarted terrorists in Buffalo and Seattle, Portland, Detroit, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida. We’re determined to stop the enemy before he can strike our people.
VO: The Americans called them “sleeper cells,” and decided that they had just been waiting to strike. But in reality there is very little evidence that any of those arrested had anything at all to do with terrorist plots. From Portland to the suburb of Buffalo called Lackawanna, yet again the Americans were chasing a phantom enemy.
DAVID COLE , PROFESSOR OF LAW , GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY : They say “terrorist sleeper cell.” That’s what—they—they call the Lackawanna people a terrorist sleeper cell, the Detroit people a terrorist cell, the Portland people a terrorist cell. But when you look at the details, the facts just don’t support that, and they have not proved that any group within the United States has plotted to engage in any terrorist—uh—activity within the United States in all of the cases that they’ve brought since 9/11.
[ CUT TO HOME VIDEO OF YOUTHS AT DISNEYLAND, CALIFORNIA ]
VO: The evidence behind all of the sleeper cell cases is flimsy and often bizarre. This tape was one of the central pieces of evidence in the first of the cases. It was found in a raid on this house…
[ CUT TO EXTERIOR VIEW OF HOUSE ]
VO ... in Detroit. Four Arab men were arrested on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
[ VIEWS OF ARREST PHOTOGRAPHS OF SUSPECTS . TITLE : DETROIT ACCUSED ]
VO: They had been accused by another immigrant called Mr Hmimssa. But Mr Hmimssa was, in reality, an international con man with 12 aliases and wanted for fraud across America.
[ CUT TO PHOTOGRAPH ; TITLE : YOUSSEF HMIMSSA , US GOVERNMENT WITNESS ]
VO: Despite this, the FBI offered to reduce his sentence for fraud if he testified against the men. And to back up Mr Hmimssa’s allegations, the FBI turned to the videotape. On the surface it was the innocent record of a trip to Disneyland by a group of teenagers who had nothing to do with the accused, but the government had discovered a hidden and sinister purpose to the tape.
RON HANSEN , REPORTER - THE DETROIT NEWS : The government expert who has looked into surveillance tapes—“casing tapes,” as he referred to them—said that one of the objectives of making these kinds of tapes is to disguise the nature, the real purpose, of the tape, and he explained it that the tape is made to look benign, made to look like a tourist tape to obscure its real purpose as a tape to case Disneyland, and that the very appearance of it as being just a tourist tape is actually evidence that it’s not a tourist tape.
[ CUT TO DISNEYLAND VIDEO ; YOUTH IS SPEAKING TO CAMERA ]
YOUTH [ HOLDING IMAGINARY MICROPHONE ]: Al-Jazeera, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Hello?
[ CUT TO DISNEYLAND VIDEO ; INTERIOR OF INDIANA JONES RIDE ]
RON HANSEN : I could never get past the fact that the tape just looked like a tourist tape. The Disneyland ride, for example, was a lengthy queue, people just making their way to the ride. The camera occasionally pans to look at the rocks on the wall, made to look like an Indiana Jones movie, and after several minutes the camera pans across and shows a trash can momentarily, and then continues off to look into the crowd. The expert basically said that, by flashing on that trash can for a moment, the people who are part of this conspiracy to conduct these kinds of terrorist operations, they would understand what this is all about: how to locate a bomb in Disneyland in California.
[ CUT TO VIEW OF YOUTHS IN RESTAURANT ]
YOUTH , WAVING : Hello!
RON HANSEN : All the talking and bantering were intended to disguise the hidden message contained within the tape.
[ CUT TO VIEW OF YOUTHS DANCING ON VIDEOTAPE ]
VO: The government was convinced that the tape was full of hidden messages. A brief shot of a tree outside the group’s hotel room was there, they said, to show where to place a sniper to attack the cars on the freeway.
[ CUT TO SHAKY VIEW OF SHADOW ALONG SIDEWALK AS INDIVIDUAL CARRIES CAMERA ]
VO: And what looked like a camera which had accidentally been left running was in reality a terrorist secretly counting out distances to show others where to place a bomb.
[ CUT TO VIEW OF US AIR FORCE JET LANDING ]
VO: And the government also said that the Detroit cell was planning to attack US military bases around the world. Yet again, they found hidden evidence of this in a day planner they discovered under the sofa in the house in Detroit. What looked like doodles were in reality, they said, a plan to attack a US base in Turkey.
WILLIAM SWOR , DEFENCE LAWYER , DETROIT SLEEPER CELL TRIAL , INDICATING COPY OF DRAWINGS FROM DAY PLANNER :
The government brought in its security officer from the base to testify that she interpreted this as being the main runways. She identified these as being AWACS airplanes and these as being fighter jets. She said that these solid lines were lines of fire and she also said that this down here was a hardened bunker.
VO: But the drawings in the day planner were discovered to have actually been the work of a madman. They were the fantasies of a Yemeni who believed that he was the minister of defence for the whole of the Middle East. He had committed suicide a year before any of the accused had arrived in Detroit, leaving the day planner lying under the sofa in the house. Despite this, two of the accused were found guilty. But then, the government’s only witness, Mr Hmimssa, told two of his cellmates that he had made the whole thing up to get his fraud charges reduced. The terrorism convictions have now been overturned by the judge in the case, but it was acclaimed by the President as the first success in the war on terror at home.
[ INTERIOR , HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES , SPEAKER’S DAIS ]
GEORGE W BUSH : We have the terrorists on the run. We’re keeping them on the run. One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.
[ CUT TO VIDEOTAPE , YOUTHS HAVING A PILLOW FIGHT ]
[ CUT TO BUFFALO , NEW YORK , SKYLINE ]
VO: Another case, in the city of Buffalo, New York, seemed on the surface to be more substantial. Six young Yemeni-Americans had gone to an Islamist training camp in Afghanistan.
[ CUT TO AFGHANISTAN , TRAINING CAMP ]
VO: They travelled there in early 2001 and spent between 2 and 6 weeks training and being taught Islamist revolutionary theory. Two of them even met bin Laden on one of his tours of the camp. They then returned to the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, where they lived, but they did nothing. The FBI heard about their trip and they watched the six men around the clock for nearly a year, but there was no suspicious behavior.
[ CUT TO LACKAWANNA , SUBURBAN STREET ]
VO: But then, one of the men, Mr al-Bakri, went to Bahrain and sent his friends an E-mail. It said he was going to get married and that he wouldn’t be seeing them for awhile. The CIA, who had been monitoring their E-mails, understood this to be a coded message: the cell was about to launch a suicide attack on the US Fifth Fleet.
JOHN MOLLOY , DEFENCE LAWYER , LACKAWANNA TRIAL : The FBI, the government, took that phrase to mean something sinister. They believed that the word “wedding” was a code. They believed that the phrase “not seeing you anymore” indicated that Muktar al-Bakri was a suicide bomber. The reality is that Mr al-Bakri was in Bahrain to get married and the reality of him getting married was that he wouldn’t be around his friends anymore. |
