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 27 Bureaucratic Sloth From the beginning, attorney Mahir Sherif had argued that FBI and federal immigration officers, in essence, had taken a backward approach in charging Nuradin Abdi. First, they arrested the Somali without probable cause. Then they gathered information during three days of questioning. Finally, using what Abdi told them, they obtained an arrest warrant that they served on November 30, alleging an immigration violation. From a legal perspective, they had reached back in time to justify taking Abdi into custody. When the government agents arrested Abdi, Sherif maintained, they had no evidence that he had committed an immigration violation or that he was likely to abscond before they got a warrant. When Abdi was formally detained, “the only basis for the arrest was from defendant’s own statements he made after his arrest,” Sherif argued. Thus, nothing Abdi said during his initial interrogations should be used as evidence.1 The agents, Sherif’s argument went on, were guilty of official misconduct and had violated both Abdi’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure and his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. They had kept Abdi in isolation, then cajoled and tricked him into talking by convincing him his only hope of seeing his family was to cooperate. Through Sherif, Abdi also argued that he was poorly represented by Doug Weigle because the Cincinnati attorney previously had represented Mehmet Aydinbelge—Iyman Faris’s roommate and onetime FBI informant— who had given an interview alleging Abdi’s terrorist ties. Sherif was a passionate advocate for Abdi from the beginning and used strong language to make his case. (At one point he suggested that the U.S. invasion of Iraq itself was a form of jihad.2 ) In Abdi’s case, he said, “it is fundamentally unfair to the defendant to allow the Government to make an unlawful warrantless civil arrest and then ‘torture’ Bureaucratic Sloth  the defendant with interrogations and isolations until he provides something the officers can use to make an immigration charge.”3 Prosecutors turned the timing argument upside down. Dana Peters , the assistant U.S. attorney who also had worked on the Faris case, maintained that even if the arrest were problematic, it didn’t justify the kind of sweeping suppression of evidence Sherif was demanding. As Peters put it, “even if the arrest, in hindsight, is found to be technically flawed, the defendant’s statements should not be suppressed.” Immigration officials made a good-faith arrest on national security grounds, and any taint of an illegal arrest was quickly overcome by statements Abdi made after signing numerous Miranda waivers. In essence, the government added, the only thing backward about the arrest came as a result of Abdi’s actions, not those of the interrogating agents. ICE and the FBI were just doing what they were supposed to when they came across a situation that potentially affected national security. The argument boiled down to this: ICE had sufficient reason to arrest Abdi and deport him on national security grounds. Once Abdi was arrested, he informed them that he’d falsified his asylum papers. The admission, unknown to ICE at the time, allowed new charges. Abdi then acknowledged statements that affected national security, which gave the FBI another approach to follow. It was Abdi, in other words, who triggered the sequence of events that led to his postcustody arrest, not the government. “Defendant Abdi’s confession ,” Peters said, “was simply an unintended consequence of what ICE and FBI believed was a national security immigration arrest.”4 Peters laid out the facts of the case known to the government the morning of November 28, 2003. There were the phone calls Abdi had placed to more than forty numbers associated with ongoing terrorism investigations. Abdi also behaved like a man up to no good as he drove suspiciously to avoid being followed. Abdi had had contact with Iyman Faris, who had been receiving instructions for a possible attack from none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Abdi had sent Faris an e-mail containing a list of websites for acquiring spyware . Faris had detailed the substance of a coffee shop conversation in which Abdi expressed a desire to carry out a deadly act of vengeance . You could not ignore the context either of the times or of the people Abdi had consorted with, Peters said. “Abdi’s threat was made during a volatile political situation when our troops were hunting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and war was [3.139...

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