the snow globe of liberty

Fighting tears, she fell silent, staring at the shelf of souvenirs her family had sent back over the years: a big apple, a snow globe of the twin towers, a Statue of Liberty.

That's the last line of Nina Bernstein's follow-up piece on Tashnuba Hayder, one of the two girls I first wrote about in April, when I first learned they'd been detained on suspicion of being suicide bombers. She's since been deported to Bangladesh, where her mother begged to bring her for a "voluntary departure," rather than suffer her daughter's continued detention in a juvenile facility:

With no money for a home, Tashnuba and her mother, baby brother and little sister, Tamana, were to share an aunt's bed at her grandmother's apartment, now occupied by nine people.

For Tashnuba and Tamana, an American citizen who speaks only English, more education may be unaffordable, her mother said. Even Tashnuba's piety was challenged. Veiling is taboo among her relatives, and few Dhaka mosques allow women.

While ending with this heartbreaking portrait of a girl whose anger at the U.S. doesn't prevent her from wanting desperately to see her beloved New York again, Bernstein first, finally, lays out the story of how the FBI actually came to focus on her -- and it's not so terribly far from what I speculated back then.

I wrote: Teenage girls talking suicide. Hm. Some FBI hack (apologies to those bureau employees who aren't) haunting Muslim chat rooms praying for something, anything, that will win him Terror Hunter of the Week. When he saw these girls' chatter pop up on his ThinkPad, he likely stood up in his chair. What could possibly be sexier than rounding up some girls? When they conveniently turn out to be immigrants, whose rights are even hazier than that of "enemy combatants," the field office must have been ready to  pop the champagne.

That hyperbole was wrong in many details - including the gender of the agent in question. But do we want this?

At 9, an age when Tashnuba was turning to prayer, Foria Younis was beating boys at soccer in a Pakistani neighborhood in east London. Now 37, this former prosecutor is a 5-foot-2, "gun-toting, door-kicking member of the F.B.I.'s counterterrorist squad" who has hunted terrorists on three continents, according to a long profile last year in The Daily Telegraph of London.

Though Ms. Younis would not agree to an interview for this article, she did not quarrel with The Telegraph's depiction.

But on March 4, when she knocked at the Hayder family's door, Ms. Younis and her partner did not reveal that they were F.B.I. agents, said Tashnuba's mother, Ishrat Jahan Hayder. They claimed to be from a youth center, following up on the police report filed five months earlier when the girl tried to elope. Mrs. Hayder readily sent the woman upstairs to her daughter's bedroom. "I trusted her," she said.

From the moment she walked in, as Tashnuba tells it, Ms. Younis started paging through her papers. "She was like, 'Can I look at this?' Not waiting for an answer."

What mainly drew the agent's eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word "suicide" - her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said.

Soon, she said, Ms. Younis was dropping comments like "So, I see you're interested in suicide," and "So, you like staying all by yourself in your room. Are you a loner?"

Tashnuba, who had many friends, was immediately nervous and defensive. "No, I'm just in my room," she said she protested. "I saw where they were going."

Three weeks later - two days after Ms. Younis wrote a secret declaration about Tashnuba, court documents show - immigration agents raided the house. As an immigration matter, that was highly unusual; there was no active proceeding against her mother or father, whose separate, long-pending applications for political asylum had lapsed without action in the late 1990's.

Now there's a point Ms. Bernstein, or someone, should chase down next. Who let those applications lapse? What were the parents' reasons? The cruel irony of the sentence knocks one nearly senseless, and nearly distracts you from the gruesome spectacle of the "terrorist hunter" practicing her interrogation skills on a 16-year-old girl.  Of course.....

By then agents had seized Tashnuba's diary, schoolwork and phone book - and the computer she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed. From her account of the agents' questions, and comments by a government official who reviewed a report about the F.B.I.'s grounds for suspicion, it appears that Tashnuba's interest in the speeches became the lens that colored everything else about her life.

But in a telephone interview, the sheik denied recruiting anyone. "Nobody said to women that they should become a suicide bomber," he said.

Tashnuba said the topic never came up while she listened. What she recalled was talk of a utopian Islamic state that would follow God's will, not human desires. "You don't pay for water in an Islamic state, you don't pay for transport," she said. "There are certain rights that can't be taken away."

Rebellious piety, idealism about something better: yeah, all that's grounds to keep someone in detention for six weeks and expel them from the country. Bernstein places all this firmly in a context of an FBI going about as amok as I had charged.

Two former F.B.I. agents, presented with the known details of the case, declined to discuss it specifically, but spoke of the pressures and practices that shape such investigations today.

Pasquale J. D'Amuro, who headed the New York F.B.I. office until April, said that since 9/11, agents have had to err on the side of suspicion. More potential threats are being reported, he said, and every one must be thoroughly investigated through whatever avenues are legally available, including enlisting immigration authorities as soon as a noncitizen is under scrutiny.

"The alarm bells are going off," said Mr. D'Amuro, now the chief executive of Giuliani Security and Safety, a consulting company. "And we have each and every time to run those threats to the ground, whether it ends up to be a bogus threat or proceeds to some type of prosecutorial action."

Some cases are never resolved, he added. Even when suspicions prove unfounded, he said, any visa violations are already in the hands of immigration authorities, who have to bring them "to some type of closure."

But Mike German, who left the bureau a year ago after a long career chasing homegrown terror suspects, said that the agency's new emphasis on collecting intelligence rather than criminal evidence has opened the door to more investigations that go "in the wrong direction."

"If all these chat rooms are being monitored, and we're running down all these people because of what they're saying in chat rooms, then these are resources we're not using on real threats," said Mr. German, who has publicly complained that F.B.I. management problems impeded terror investigations after 9/11.

And here I am wanting to quote Ronald Reagan, in one of his corny canned lines: "There you go again." Not only is an illegal war standing in for intelligent response to terror attacks, but the FBI is responding by becoming a mini-CIA, one that masks itself as social worker/mother/judge and jury. And guess what: it's going to get worse. Our Man in Honduras is about to ensure it.

Yesterday, upon learning that John Negroponte would help choose the next FBI director, I'd both wailed, in that "Oh, GOD!" kind of way, and shrugged sadly: Of course.  But I hadn't expected to see those fears reified, so directly and so quickly.

Meanwhile, Tashmuna looks out the window and cries, as I did last month., at the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea.

Or frozen, senseless, like those snow-covered towers..

Comments

[John Pandit]

She got what she deserved. You are in a country illegally and you should have kept your trap shut and respected the local culture instead of worrying about your Islamic utopian rule! The officers were right in sending her off to Bangladesh...You want utopia under Islam? Go to an Islamic country, Bangladesh and first work for Utopia there!! Now she longs for the utopia back in the US!! Serves her totally right!