As the US ramps up efforts to root out home-grown terrorism, hundreds of people who have fallen under suspicion are in a state of limbo: Many say they have been singled out unfairly for scrutiny but have been neither charged nor cleared.
Some of them, mostly Muslims, have spent weeks in jail; others find it impossible to travel freely. Some say they have had their reputations destroyed by the news coverage. Many were questioned or tracked, and say they felt violated and fearful.
Lawsuits filed by suspects since 2006 have pried millions of dollars in settlements from the government. The US Supreme Court this month heard one of the most serious challenges yet, the case of a Kansas man who claims his detention as a ``material witness' destroyed his marriage and his career.
Many plaintiffs say they recognise the security challenges the government faces after September 11; but in many cases, they complain, the government refuses to reveal why someone has attracted attention. Without that information, they argue, it is impossible to clear their names.
"It's a runaround,' said Ayman Latif, an American who was stranded in Egypt for six months and questioned by US agents last year after his name appeared on a no-fly list. ``Maybe they had a hunch about something and my name came up and they were investigating it. But they wouldn't tell me what that hunch was.'
The FBI says it needs secrecy to protect sensitive investigations and to avoid giving terrorists clues for avoiding detection. The government does not disclose how many people it investigates, but an Associated Press analysis gives a glimpse of how the number has grown. Federal terrorism referrals cases in which investigators have contacted prosecutors for guidance have risen 44 percent since 2002, from 864 to 1,249 in 2010, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research program at Syracuse University.
At the same time, the number of people on the FBI's consolidated terrorist watch list stands at 450,000, despite efforts since 2006 to winnow it down. Of those, 18,000 have been flagged for extra screening at airports. About 10,000 people are on the no-fly list, 500 to 1,000 of them US citizens.
Some law enforcement experts say agents are simply doing their jobs by investigating leads, some of which pan out and some of which don't. Moreover, police work is full of instances in which investigators know someone is up to no good, but they don't have enough evidence to make an arrest. Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the nature of counterterrorism work means investigators must monitor people for long periods even though they have committed no crime.
People who say they're caught in limbo include: Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old college student in Santa Monica, California, who found a tracking device on his car when he went for an oil change in October. He said he believes he attracted attention because his father was a Muslim cleric, he sends money to Egypt to support his two younger brothers, and he travels to see them about once a year. The FBI would not comment on his case.
Pascal Abidor, an Islamic studies Ph.D. student at McGill University in Montreal, who said he was frisked, taken off a train in handcuffs, put in a holding cell, fingerprinted and questioned after a border agent found on his laptop a picture of a militant rally he had downloaded for schoolwork. He has sued the Department of Homeland Security, saying the agent had no right to go through his computer without a warrant. In court papers, the government said agents do, in fact, have such a right. The government did not say what raised its suspicions.
Abe Mashal, a 30-year-old dog trainer and former Marine from St. Charles, Illinois, who was not allowed on a Chicago-to-Spokane flight in April because he had sent what he described as innocent e-mails to a Muslim cleric agents were watching. He said he refused to feed authorities information about fellow Muslims, and in June he joined 16 other people in a lawsuit challenging the way the FBI and Transportation Security Administration manage the terrorism watch list and no-fly list.