5 July 1998
Date: Sun, 5 Jul 1998 07:16:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Other Side of Secrecy To: jy@jya.com From: nobody@shinobi.alias.net (Anonymous) The Washington Post, Friday, 26 June 1998; Page A03 Other Side of the Secrecy Coin Ex-CIA Chief Fights Confidentiality of Data on His Iraqi Clients By Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writer In the confines of a federal lockup outside Los Angeles, six Iraqis charged by the U.S. government as national security threats thought their luck was about to turn when they got a new lawyer whose old job was running the Central Intelligence Agency. But in the weeks since R. James Woolsey joined the men's legal team, the spy master turned power lawyer has become entangled in a somewhat ironic crusade, decrying state secrecy that has concealed from him and his clients the nature of the charges against them. Woolsey's appellate briefs have yet to persuade the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to let him review classified evidence against the six men. But his campaign in the news media and pressure on officials may have convinced the CIA and the FBI to start declassifying at least some of the information this week. He calls the case a "stain" on America's honor. The six defendants, who face deportation, were airlifted out of northern Iraq almost two years ago along with hundreds of other members of two CIA-financed groups opposed to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, only to begin an embittering odyssey through the U.S. justice system. Not only is evidence in the case classified but key government witnesses have also given secret testimony. Even the judge's deportation ruling has been classified in large measure and kept from their view. Woolsey, whose top-secret clearance remains in effect, has been denied permission to review the evidence by the INS. "There is much secrecy that I certainly support, have and still do," Woolsey said last week in an interview. "I'm not against classification, espionage. I'm not opposed to properly authorized covert action by the CIA abroad. This is completely different. This is using classified information as a tool of repression. It's a perversion of the use of classified information." The case strikes the six defendants, their attorneys and some Iraq analysts as a parable of the confused U.S. attempts to fashion a policy toward Iraq since the end of the Persian Gulf War, beginning with the CIA's disastrous attempts at toppling Saddam Hussein through a pair of failed covert actions. "This is something very, very shameful to be happening in the United States of America," Ali Yassin Mohammed-Karim, 36, one of the six men, said last week in a telephone interview after 15 months in prison. "What I experienced from the representatives of the U.S. government is identical to [the ways of] Saddam Hussein and Hitler." He is, nonetheless, hopeful about the impending release of at least some of the government's classified intelligence. "If they have anything against us, they would never hesitate to use that in federal court," he said. "But there is no case whatsoever." Senior U.S. officials said shortly after the six were charged as national security threats last year that they might be terrorists or intelligence agents working for Saddam Hussein, who has infiltrated the Iraqi opposition. "If that is the case here," said Judith Kipper, co-director of the Middle East studies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "we don't want them in this country." Woolsey finds that a remote possibility, given the backgrounds of the six Iraqis. He also said that a CIA official has informed a congressional oversight committee that the agency has no evidence that they are spies for Iraq. Besides Mohammed-Karim, a physician, the five others are all Iraqi military defectors. They include another physician, Adil Awadh, a member of the opposition Iraqi National Accord (INA) who says in his asylum application that he refused to cut the ears off military deserters, and Safadin Batat, a member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC) who was poisoned with thallium by Saddam's agents and treated in Britain. "To put it mildly, if these six are agents of the Iraqi government, they have gone to substantial lengths to establish their cover stories," Woolsey said. Mohammed-Karim said he grew up a Kurd in northern Iraq, studied medicine and ended up treating casualties on the battlefield, joining a CIA-backed insurgency run by the Iraqi National Congress to topple Saddam Hussein. He said that during his years of resistance he developed a medical specialty peculiar to Iraq: treating victims of thallium poisoning. Whatever information against the six was apparently gathered by FBI agents who interviewed several hundred members of both opposition groups when they were first airlifted by the United States to in the fall of 1996, following Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Kurdish north in August of that year and his capture of Irbil, Woolsey said. Hundreds of those evacuated have settled in the United States. The charges may be the result of jealousy and rivalries among opposition members, Woolsey said. Or they may be "blithering incompetence" by the INS, Woolsey said. Niels W. Frenzen, a lawyer at Public Counsel in Los Angeles serving as lead attorney in the case, notes the case of a seventh Iraqi held previously on national security charges after a U.S. government interpreter mistakenly wrote in his file that he was a member of the KLM, a group no one in the government had heard of. The CIA is known to have been deeply divided between those backing the INC's insurgency aimed at winning Iraqi military defectors, and those who believed the INA, made up of former Iraqi military officers, could orchestrate a coup to topple Saddam Hussein. Gradually, the CIA shifted most of its support to the coup plotters, only to watch Saddam Hussein devastate the movement by arresting scores of sympathetic officers. Woolsey suggested that the charges against his clients may be an attempt by some in the U.S. gov "to settle scores at these men's expense." Russell A. Bergeron Jr., an INS spokesman here, dismissed Woolsey's criticism and said the INS has executed its responsibilities to the letter of the law. "The U.S. made two commitments to [the Iraqi opposition members]: that we would get them out of harm's way and, number two, that they would be allowed to apply for refugee status. And that's exactly what we did," Bergeron said. "In fact, the only reason they were brought to the United States [from Guam] was to give them access to the legal process they now have." Frank G. Scafidi, a spokesman for the FBI, declined to comment on the evidence soon to be declassified and released. Warren Marik, a retired CIA case officer who oversaw covert aid to the Iraqi National Congress in northern Iraq, thinks the case against the six is nonsense. The entire episode, he said, "is a little microcosm of what's going on with Iraq policy. We get caught up in our own axle, the INS gets wound up in things. No one knows what's happening. No one has a plan." In his application for political asylum, Mohammed-Karim makes a simple case: "I seek asylum in the United States because I have no other place to go. If I am sent back to Iraq, Saddam Hussein will kill me. He will tear me into a billion pieces." To support his case, the doctor supplemented his application with a copy of an Iraqi death warrant in Arabic, a notarized English translation and documents showing how his wife and two children have already been granted asylum based on persecution he had suffered. His wife, a gynecologist, and his children are living on food stamps and welfare, he said. But at least they're only a couple of hours away in Los Angeles. The families of the five others are stranded and on welfare in Lincoln, Neb., and Salt Lake City. Back in Guam, Mohammed-Karim recalled, he and his family were loaded onto an airplane and told they were going to California in order to apply for political asylum. But when they arrived, he said, armed guards escorted them from the tarmac and herded them onto "caged" INS buses. "I wish you were there, to see these terrible views we were forced to see," he said. "They terrified us. They terrified our kids. I was shocked. I can't believe the United States of America of George Washington is the same country I'm in now. I was evacuated from my country, to Guam, to here, to the jail -- for no reason." Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company