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In a statement, the FBI responded: "If the Terrorism Screening Center publicly revealed each person who was on the terrorist watch list, terrorist organizations would be able to circumvent the purpose of the terrorist watch list by determining in advance which of their members are likely to be questioned or detained." Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Abdullah Al-Kidd, a Kansas man arrested in 2003 as he tried to board a flight to Saudi Arabia to study Arabic and Islamic law. Al-Kidd was never charged with a crime, but prosecutors wanted him to testify against Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a man charged with providing material support to terrorists. Like Al-Kidd, Al-Hussayen had attended the University of Idaho. Al-Kidd was strip-searched repeatedly and held for 16 days in high-security cells, court documents show. For the next 15 months he was barred from traveling outside a four-state area and had to make weekly calls to a court officer and submit to a monthly search of his home. Al-Kidd said the stress destroyed his marriage and cost him his job delivering supplies to a store on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. In the end, Al-Hussayen was acquitted of the terrorism charges but agreed to be deported for visa fraud. Al-Kidd was never called to testify in any trial. He has sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft, alleging he was deprived of his freedom. The Justice Department says it uses its detention powers carefully and mainly in cases where it fears people will flee the country. Sometimes the government simply gets the wrong suspect. Mistaken-arrest cases are becoming increasingly costly to taxpayers in the form of out-of-court settlements. Since 2006, the government has paid $2 million to an Oregon man jailed after the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, $250,000 to a man detained after an aviation radio was found in his hotel room near New York's ground zero, and $1.8 million to seven men detained shortly after Sept. 11. Another lawsuit moving through a New York court represents 1,200 men rounded up after Sept. 11. Law enforcement experts say such cases are a natural byproduct of aggressive detective work. "Show me any kind of criminal or national security activity where you have no false positives or no false negatives," said James Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. "If your metric of success is that no one's ever going to be inconvenienced, ever, then the system is never going to be good enough." Other people have suffered from the publicity surrounding their arrests. Pakistani immigrant Pir Khan spent 76 days in solitary confinement last year after investigators detained him in the wake of the Times Square bombing attempt. Khan's nephew, who was living with him, had once sent money home to Pakistan using a money-transfer system common among Middle Eastern immigrants, in which payments are passed along until they reach an immigrant's family back home, according to investigators and Khan's own lawyer. Attempted bomber Faisal Shahzad was one link in the chain. In jail, other inmates yelled, "Terrorist!" at him, Khan said. His American-born wife received death threats. Reporters interviewed his neighbors, scoured his wife's Facebook page for information and speculated on whether his marriage was a sham. Khan said his credit rating was ruined after bills and other mail started disappearing, and he lost his taxi. No terrorism charges were ever brought against him. But now he is fighting deportation as an illegal immigrant. He is living in a Boston suburb and working as a mechanic. "I lost a lot of things," Khan said. "I have to put it behind my back and just get on with my life." Though Khan said he was questioned repeatedly about the bombings, the Justice Department said he was jailed solely because of immigration violations. Homeland Security said the decision to keep him in solitary was made by the sheriff's department in Plymouth County, Mass., which runs the jail. A sheriff's spokesman, John Birtwell, said only that detainees who have been in the news are sometimes separated to protect them from other prisoners. Many suspects say they fear their names will forever carry a black mark. Afifi, the California college student who found the tracking device on his car, said agents questioned him in front of his neighbors, hinted they knew about his new job and where he went on dates, and left him feeling frightened. In November, Afifi went to Egypt to visit relatives. When he returned to the U.S., two federal agents were waiting for him at the airport. He was detained and questioned for four hours about his trip, he said. Last week he filed a lawsuit challenging FBI rules allowing agents to track suspects electronically without a warrant. "I understand that maybe they have the right to do that to any American citizen as long as they think they have something against them," Afifi said. "But I don't know what they have against me, and that's the problem."
[Associated
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