Twelve-hour days at the Newark Penn Station newsstand, selling newspapers to commuters heading into Manhattan, many of them bound for the World Trade Center. Fast food at lunch, cold beers at the end of the shift, then home to a shabby apartment in Jersey City, dinner cooked on an ancient stove, action movies rented from the local video store. Like many other immigrants, they sent money home to India.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan flew out of Newark Airport for San Antonio. Their flight was grounded in St. Louis shortly after the attacks, so they bought seats on an Amtrak train heading for Texas. They were carrying two box cutters, black hair dye and about $5,600 in cash. They told the authorities they were going to open a fruit stand. On September 12, police pulled them off the train in Fort Worth.
The first suspicion was not terrorism. They had been profiled as possible drug smugglers, because they had paid cash for their tickets just before departure and seemed nervous when questioned. They were detained for possible immigration violations, and their Jersey City apartment was searched that weekend.
Then the list of their belongings began to read differently. The arrest report released by Fort Worth police described both men as extremely nervous when officers approached them. Investigators found they had received money transfers. The FBI also noted their closely cut hair and shaved bodies, and read this as a possible sign that they had prepared to die in an attack like the one that had just happened.
Box cutters were said to be the weapons used by the hijackers, and within a week The Washington Post was reporting the two names, the cash, the hair dye, the knives. On September 29, an article by Dan Eggen and Bob Woodward, part of a package that would win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, mentioned their detention and quoted an anonymous source saying that both men had flight training.
Neither man was charged with anything to do with September 11. Instead they were held on sealed material witness warrants in a federal detention center in Manhattan, and the FBI said almost nothing publicly about why it was focusing so closely on them. A former roommate, Rashed Mazhar, went on the record that weekend to say that the two had lost their newsstand jobs in Newark and were travelling to San Antonio to find work in a convenience store, and that they were not terrorists.
Six weeks after the arrest, on October 26, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, officials went on to use the new powers in scores of cases to hold mostly Arab and Muslim men indefinitely, many of them arrested only as witnesses and never actually brought before a court to testify. Azmath and Khan, whose real name was later established as Syed Gul Mohammed Shah, were two of them. Their ordeal would last fourteen months.
In late October 2001, six weeks into their detention, they still had not explained their travels to the satisfaction of investigators. The FBI was testing documents taken from their apartment for signs of anthrax. Their Jersey City roommate, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, was also being detained: he had once worked in Trenton and lived near the postal facility where the anthrax letters were processed.
According to an account of the investigation, Azmath and Khan, along with Zacarias Moussaoui and Nabil al-Marabh, were offered reduced sentences, money, jobs and new identities in the United States if they helped the inquiry into the attacks. They were also threatened with being injected with a truth serum, identified as sodium pentothal, or with transfer.
What the two men were actually hiding was smaller and more ordinary. They had obtained passports through a corrupt passport agent. Khan’s real name was Gul Mohammed Shah. Azmath had overstated his age to get a visa, and his wife, Tasleem Murad, being Pakistani, did not hold Indian citizenship. Murad told The New York Times that her husband was hardly the first person to lie about his age for a visa, and that he had no evil intentions and had paid for it already.
The criminal case that finally emerged looked nothing like the one the country had been reading about. In the Southern District of New York, before Judge Lawrence M. McKenna, a complaint charged Mohammed Azmath and Syed Gul Shah with conspiracy to commit credit card fraud. Shah’s lawyer, Lawrence K. Feitell, asked the court to exclude every statement his client had given to federal or state agents and everything seized from him and from his apartment. The outcome, when it came, was twelve months and one day in prison and three years of supervised release, on a single count of attempting to commit an offense: conspiracy to commit credit card fraud.
Azmath reached Hyderabad at two in the morning on a Friday in January 2003, cleared of the terrorism allegations and convicted of the fraud. He was thirty-two. He had added a couple of years to his age on the passport to get the American visa, he said, and the agent who arranged it was himself now in the United States. He described the interrogations. The FBI showed him a flying licence and told him he was a pilot and a navigator. “They told me I was one of those who attacked the WTC, that I was from Egypt. They said they could do anything and also get my photographs and passport from that country,” he said. They told him he would never see his family again. “They said my punishment for attacking the WTC would be death penalty. The prison lights used to be switched on 24 hours, I was not allowed to sleep and for a number of days I was kept in freezing temperatures.” Asked what he would do next, he said he would rest for a few days and begin all over again.
Five months later, in June 2003, the Senate Judiciary Committee met to consider the Justice Department Inspector General’s report on the 9/11 detainees. The two men from the train appeared in the transcript as an example of how reasonable it had all seemed at the time: two people down in Texas taken off a train, with box cutters and shoe polish and an inordinate amount of money, a thing that just looked suspicious on the front end. Senator Patrick Leahy noted that the report had not covered people held under the material witness statute at all, and asked Glenn Fine whether he planned to examine the treatment of those detainees. Fine replied that no such review had been opened, because many of the criminal investigations were continuing and many of the cases were subject to oversight by courts. Leahy also read out a columnist’s judgment that the Attorney General owed apologies to several hundred people for holding them far longer than necessary, and to almost all 762 detainees for implying they deserved to be treated like terrorists. The Attorney General was not at the hearing.